When we have children we hope for the best for them, but truly, even with a crystal ball, we don’t know what lies ahead for them.
Once they leave the nest, they are on their own to chart their own path. We, as parents, just hope their journey is smooth without too many downdrafts and that their flight will lead them to a fulfilling life.
In this blog I am sharing with you a recent conversation I had with my singer/ songwriter son, Emerson Hart, lead singer of the 2x nominated and Platinum awarded alternative rock band, Tonic.
His first album, LEMON PARADE, had 5 top ten BILLBOARD HITS, one of which stayed on the top of the charts and became the most played song on rock radio that year, “If You Could Only See The Way She Loves Me.”
We talk about his beginnings and what it is like to be a a songwriter/singer and musician. I can’t use his music in my videos because of publishing and record company rights shared with him. I have posted below the video he speak’s about and that he filmed in London when Princess Diana died.
Join my conversation with a singer and songwriter on his creative process, his solo career vs Tonic and what is in store for 2019.
I never thought about age differences thirty-three years ago when I married Arthur. Somehow when you are really young age difference matters, then it disappears in adulthood, and suddenly the awareness reawakens as you get older. It really is a strange dicothemy.
My husband is thirteen years older than I am and when we got married, I didn’t even think about our age differences. My parents were ten years apart and it worked out just fine for them.
It was only when we celebrated Arthur’s ninety-first birthday, that I realized how lucky I am. All of his friends are gone and he is standing alone and quite healthy in his nineties. The odds are that it could be a quite different story for both of us. Sometimes I think he has more energy than I do!
To celebrate his milestone I recently interviewed my husband about how it feels to be in his nineties.
I recently had to go in the hospital for a cryoablation for heart palpitations I’ve had since my twenties. I had a procedure done twenty years ago to ablate the pathways that were causing my heart to fire those extra impulses. Well, through the years they grew back and I have had to have another procedure to ablate them again.
It just so happens that my cardiology surgeon is a big Tonic fan. Although we have had many phone conversations about the new cryoablation procedure, I hadn’t seen Dr. Todd Florin since my radiofrequency ablation in January, but he remembered all about Tonic when we met again pre-op.
This time Dr. Florin spent at least a half hour with me just going over my procedure and generally chatting about life before l went into surgery. When I was finally prepped and wheeled into the operating room, he came over and said he wanted me to meet someone. He gestured to a handsome young doctor that was a part of his team to come closer.
Dance. Oh, how I have always loved dancing, don’t you? By myself as a child, or in the arms of a lover nothing is closer to heaven than lightly swirling around to music that makes my heart sing. Waltz, foxtrot, jitterbug, the monkey or rumba, it doesn’t matter to me.
Song and dance have been with us far back in recorded human history and has been an important part of celebratory rituals. It’s so true that dance is a way to find yourself and loose yourself at the same time.
Unless, that is, your heart is dancing a clumsy two step in your chest. Dancing with your feet is one thing, but a dancing heart is another.
Unfortunately, I was born with extra electrical pathways that under certain circumstances cause my heart to palpitate and loose sinus rhythm. These unwelcome ‘dances’ began in my twenties, but since my heart was otherwise basically healthy, I just had to tolerate this non-synchronized orchestra that lived in my chest.
It became a way of life for me until in the 90’s a new procedure called radio frequency ablation was developed to eliminate extra pathways in the heart. Tiny cathodes are run through the groin veins to ablate the dancing pathways. At the time it sounded scary to me, but each 12 hour episode of rhumba were scarier, so I opted to have the ablation.
Now, one thing they didn’t realize, or take into consideration then is that those electrical nerve pathways can grow back. So here I am once again saying goodbye to my heart’s unruly dance, one week into recovery from updated modern medical advances in electrophysiology and radio frequency ablation.
My procedure lasted about three hours and I was released the next day. My doctor showed me a photograph of my heart with the ablation points and it looked like a pearl necklace all around my heart. He said when they thought they were through, adrenaline administered would show other electrically charged pathways. I was a dancing fool inside my chest!
So far, I am following the doctor’s orders and not lifting anything over 10 pounds or bending over and just taking things easy for a few weeks. He told me I might have increased dances in my chest, perhaps for as long as three months while my heart is healing, but already they are short little tap dances that do encourage me everything is healing just fine.
The pinpoint scarred areas created by the cauterization, once healed, will block and interrupt those crazy dancing impulses by taking off their tap shoes and sending them into retirement.
Trust me, the next dance I do I hope it will be with only my feet and with someone I love.
Selling a house is combined with the good and the bad. The good would be all of the memories that are stored where you live and the bad is going through everything and sorting out what to keep and what not keep.
Somehow keeping all of this stuff also helps to keep everyone alive, especially my parents who have passed on, getting rid of their birth certificates and old love letters is very difficult. Even though I know I can’t keep carrying them around in boxes up in the attic – letters that I, sadly, have never made enough time to sit in the corner and read throughly.
I guess, like most mothers, including my own, I probably have kept every kindergarten handprint and handmade clothespin Christmas ornament everyone of my children has ever made.
I just now had quite a chuckle when I looked at the Mother’s Day card my young son Lee made for me. It must’ve been during the PAC man craze because he says he loves me and I’m the best Pac Mom there is.
Inside there was a sweet little poem the future Grammy winning songwriter composed.
Mom you’re great
Mom your true
Mom I will always love you
Your son
Lee
That probably was one of his first compositions that necessarily was not meant to be a song. Plenty others about truck drivers moving down the road and elementary school crushes started when he was around seven, but this might be his very first and last serious attempt at rhyme for his mother.
I have to say though I was a little mystified when I noticed the drawing of a space ship at the bottom of his card.
My son was born in 1969 on the morning the USA landed on the moon, so I am hoping the reference to the rocket ship blasting through space is just that and not a subliminal message that he wanted to send me to the moon!
Our children are the best reasons to live a long life. Don’t you just love them in spite of rockets sending you into space. I think this card is a keeper.
Sandra's Hart My Over 60 Lifestyle Journey 