Maybe I should have stuck with tap. My regrets don't quite reach monumental in scale. Now I dig in my heels and hold the clock hands, not quite able to achieve denial. I wait for loss. Heartbreak.
Friends went to law school. They learned to "do something" so that when they went to cocktail parties and were asked, "What do you do?" they had a response.
I'm Ronny Elliott.
I don't do anything.
Maybe I was drawn to rock'n'roll because that's where the joy is. Funny, I've mined the dark seams for most of the last fifty five years. I seem to have specialized in broken hearts. The very idea had to be pointed out to me. It's all about the light and I've obsessed over the darkness.
I'm lucky. The work is holy. I'm lucky because I know it. All work is holy but some folks don't know it. Share truth and love hard. Don't take advice from anybody who can't tell you what he does.
I was a former art college drop-out who then majored in Literature and minored in art (credited for the time at art college) and creative writing. When I got out, I went to work in a low paying bookstore where a regular customer asked me what I'd majored in. "Well, " she said with a glow on her face. "You've found work in your field!" I saw my future slide into the pond backwards right then and there. Never earned spit my chosen field of college-related employment for the next 35 years, but I enjoyed it just the same. Just the amount of memories you have stashed away, the songs you've sung and written, and the fact that your mom put that love of music into your heart sounds like a good basis for a good life. My mother's concern for me was limited to not messing up the rugs. But we did share a love of music. Which I didn't figure out until late in her life. You're a an awful damned lucky man to be Ronny Elliott.
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