It was around the time my mother purchased my first bra, that she suddenly started insisting on my taking piano lessons, at home. We did not own a piano but that posed no problem, because we were getting one! I was already hormonally stupefied enough to notice any correlation or smell her conspiracy. But even if I did, experience has thought me that when my mother was determined like that, resistance was futile, so I resisted not.

While her whole life, my young mother had this irrational, senseless fear of driving a car, and she never learned how to drive, in her personal life, the way she handled major growth spurs of life, she was “the black stig” of yanking the wheel out of destiny’s hands, giving it a finger and masterfully making the unexpected, sharp right, just in a nick of time to escape and claim temporary gain. My unavoidable…