So I taught myself to play piano “my way,” my fingers criss-crossing over the keys rather ungracefully. I even wrote some simple piano pieces of my own. I kept up the violin all the while.

In 9th grade, I began writing little poems. The first one was about the incredible night sky, and the “firmament high.” I had brought my mother’s heavy Roget’s Thesaurus to Cleveland with me, along with a heavy, old-fashioned pencil-sharpener that suctioned onto the table. My poems developed into short meditations on the nature of eternity and longer rhymes expressing my disdain for tree-choppers.

My father and stepmother weren’t enthusiastic about my environmentalist tendencies. Neither was my mother. Sure, I was little moralistic, and sure, the moralism was a misguided cry for love and attention…so I was ecstatic when my older half-sister, Jessica, understood me! How wonderful to have her in my life again, after ten years! About the time I moved away from her and Cleveland, when I was three and she was ten, she and I had this great game we loved to play: we pretended to be seeds, and we’d water each other, and then turn into flowers.

Little Jessica herself had long ago grown up to mystify our father and stepmother— she was now a writer, performer, and artist; a New Yorker; a monster makeup professional on Broadway; a confounder of convention. Now we shared our poetry, our songs, our fears, our possibilities, and the vast assortment of troublesomeness caused by living with parents. Today, Jessica and I often sing together in a dear duet of sisterly brotherhood.

At this time, even though I had just moved away from Cincinnati, I began getting closer and closer to my Grandpa Lou, my mother’s father, who remained back in Cincinnati. Lou had made his living as an artist for his whole life. His whole backyard was his vegetable garden and bird santuary, and he and I spent hours on the phone talking about his out-of-body experiences, the ghosts that liked visiting him, and dream interpretation. (This is the magic-trick grandpa in my song, “Purple Maple Tree.”)

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