The Long Way Around

I didn’t plan to become a writer or an artist. When I was in the 5th Grade, I wanted to be an attorney. No one on either side of my family had ever been one. I didn’t really know what it meant to be an attorney. I just knew attorneys were "important and powerful."
I wanted to be important and powerful because I grew up poor and powerless. I was a mixed- race child raised by a single mother who struggled mightily to keep a roof over our heads—even if the roof was just a canvas tent one summer when I was 9 years old. My mom was born in Tanzania, and was the oldest of 8 children. She was never given the opportunity to go to college even though she had good grades. It just wasn’t something girls got to do when she was growing up in that part of the world. Years later she found herself divorced in the United States with three kids and only a high school education. She taught me from an early age that education was the key to success and independence.
I was already a voracious reader when I started first grade. We did not have a television growing up, so I often read several books a week. I loved adventure fantasy books that united animals and humans, like the Wizard of Oz books and the Tales of Narnia. Books written about the thoughts and feelings of animals, such as Yellow Eyes, by Rutherford George Montgomery, The Black Stallion, Justin Morgan Had a Horse and Where the Red Fern Grows were some of my favorites. These stories took me into new worlds and fed my imagination endlessly. They were a comforting place to be. My other favorite books were about Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver, and other powerful leaders. Their lives were admirable and taught great lessons about courage, leadership, and resilience.
Besides reading, I loved art. My mom took us to free art classes in Denver, where they gave me paints and the freedom to create whatever I wanted. My painting phase did not last long because we had to move after my parents divorced. Art lessons were not a luxury we could afford. The first time I saw an original work of art was at a traveling art exhibition. The paintings depicting faraway lands and exotic places fed perfectly into my imagination of the scenes created in my favorite books.
As a university student, I took part in a three-month foreign exchange program in London. It was on a 10-day trip through some of Western Europe’s most iconic cultural cities: Paris, Bruges, and Amsterdam, that inspired me to be a world traveler and visitor of art museums. The art of Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and other Dutch and Flemish artists fascinated me in particular.
I became an attorney when I was 24 and practiced for nearly 25 years. I focused on protecting the elderly and other vulnerable adults from financial, mental, and physical abuse. It was a meaningful and rewarding career. Along the way, though, I stopped reading for fun. I spent so many hours reading cases and legal documents that reading became a chore, an obligation. To entertain myself after a long day of work, I turned on the television instead of opening a book. Ugh.