Picture Perfect Blue and Gray, hey them fightin colors lol

Missed yesterdays Picture Perfect, so I am doing two pages,

My wife is raising her hand, she obviously has question. "I know this is totally off the topic, but..."

My step daughter Natasha standing next to her new car Herby Potter. Her car is a very light gray.

Wordless Wednesday... Something wrong here...

We were running errands two Saturdays ago, and we stopped at a place that offers payday loans or at least that's their main sign said, but something doesn''t quite add up.

Makes you wonder???

picture perfect kaleidoscope

Pink.

My grand daughter Izabella has the softest pink skin any baby has ever had. She is adorable and spoiled rotten. This is her at Captain D's where we had lunch a week or so ago, my wife I and our grand daughter.

A Slight Departure... I remember...

Today's post is different, usually each Friday I post a person who represents a creative aspect in my life; whether they be a friend, family member or personality.

Today, I am departing in part, because although this person was not a great thinker, they are a person I will never forget. 

When I was a junior in High School, I had the opportunity to meet Muhammad Ali This was in 1978 and I remember this to this day,  Muhammad Ali was at Manual High School to give a pep rally, and I had seen him standing at a doorway of one of the classrooms before the rally.  I stopped in amazement, for here before me was a man I had seen on television both as a boxer and from interviews by the legendary Howard Cosell.

What struck most was two things.  One that Muhammad Ali was so tall, he had to be at least eight feet tall, or so he appeared to me, a kid who was only five feet four inches tall, and still am,  The other thing I remember was how much he was a big teddy bare, he would make jokes and throw fake punches and let you get in a few then say "Oh you got me, I am going down."

He was a remarkable man, and someone I will always remember.

Wordless Wednesday.

Cool car in the parking lot of where I work.  I want to build a model, with this paint scheme.

Taken with my Polaroid digital camera.

In memory of my mother

My mother and I were not on the best of terms the year she died, if anything we were in total opposition to each other, I was at a point of change that had been delay nearly 20 years and I was finally standing up for myself and not allowing guilt or a false sense of responsibility to keep me from expressing myself and finally at 38 beginning to discover who I was.

However, my mother was not always my adversary, she had also been someone who had helped me learn to read, and write and she had given me a lot of freedom, as long as I remained at home, took care of her and did not have a life of my own.

She had been born in a small community known as Frederick, Colorado, which until about twenty years ago had a one room school house because it had remained so small.  You could literally walk from one end of the main street to the other.

In 1942 she met my father who was a musician in the 515th Army Air Corps Band at Lowery Field, in Denver, Colorado.  My mother and dad dated and were married in a year.  She moved to Denver and in 1944 gave birth o my brother Geoffrey.

My mom was a stay at home mom, most of her life and she felt trapped by this, many times she told me as  I was growing up, I was an accident and unwanted, and yer she worked hard with me, so I could read and write and succeed in school.

She was at my graduation at Manual High School in 1980.

In 1974, my father died and my mother never recovered. 

On the day that my mother died in 1998, she told me how nice I looked and how proud she was of me, two things I  had not heard my entire life.  My mother never had the opportunity to meet the woman I married or her family.  I think though she approves of my beloved.

This is for you mom.  I hope you have finally found the peace and harmony you didn't on Earth.  Love your son.

Mom on Graduation day 1941, Frederick, Colorado

My mom, me, and my aunt Karen in the living room of our home in Denver July 1960.

Mom and Dad, they loved fishing together.  I took this in 1970 .

Left to right, Me, my mom, My Aunt Karen, and her son David Akana Espinda the IVth, Christmas Eve, Kauai Hawaii 1975.

Mom in Hawaii 1975, wearing a moo moo.

Ashes to ashes, my mom's remains scattered on top of Loveland Pass 1998.

A Person whom forever changed me, A Creative Mind Profile.

This is a profile of a young woman who died far too young and who forever changed my life. To tell her story, I have to tell you about me when I met her, it is not a part of my life I am proud of, but it is the reason I met this young woman, and how I was transformed by her.

The year was 1987, and I had just come back from Las Vegas, and was frustrated by the fact that I had failed living independently there, yet I had no one to blame but myself; I had spent money like water,not just on food,and rent but on ladies of the night,

I was addicted to sex and didn't think about the women in the trade I just fed the addiction.

In many ways I was a typical male in this regard, someone who put his own need for pleasure above all else. Then on October 31st 1987 I met someone who eventually would change my life, she was a prostitute who went by the name Bambi. She was a woman of two Native American Nations, although at the tme I had no way of knowing this. She was just someone I paid for sex; like many who had come before her.

Over the next six years there would be many others, nameless and to a degree faceless. Then in 1993 while working at a home security company in Westminster, Colorado I met this woman again, she was older but I recognized her . At first I didn't remember her entirely, yet I felt I knew her from my past. She on the other hand did remember me.

Suddenly I was confused, because I had never met any of the prostitutes after my encounters with them. Here I was not in a bar, or prowling East Colfax Avenue, but at a job, with a woman who six years before I had paid money to have sex with her. I began to talk with her and become friends. She told me about her life, how she had been raped by her father and step brothers from the time she was eleven years old and how her mother sat on the sideline and did nothing. She said that as far as her mother were concerned, she didn't care because she didn't have to worry about being the one whom may get pregnant.

I began to feel outraged, I could not believe what I was hearing and yet I could, for in high school many times I had met young women who had been sexually and emotionally abused by members of their family, yet now I had met someone who because of this abuse had seen herself with only one thing she was good for, and she had used that one thing to stay alive, since she had been 16 years old and had run away from home.

I sat in silence, enraged and feeling guilty. I had been just one more man who had taken advantage of this woman, no better than anyone who came before her. I began to change, not entirely, but I began to see this woman as just that, a woman who had been a victim and who was trying to turn her life around.

I will be honest, until I began to know Taunia, I had wanted only to seduce her, yet I became aware of part of myself I had forgotten, a part of me that could love and want to share my life with someone else, I was falling in love, a deep love for the first time since I had been in high school, all those years before.

Taunia was bringing out qualities I didn't know were part of me, for the first time I wrote poetry, a full two books worth, one of which I copied and gave to her along with a portrait I had made of her, from a set of sketches I had done of her. I was willing to risk my job for her, my sense of security so we could have a life together, No longer was she Bambi, a prostitute from East Colfax Avenue, she was Taunia a woman I loved.

In some fairy tale you would see us walking into the sun set happy in love and having children, that would have been what I wanted too. No matter how many times Taunia offered me chances to go to bed with her, I said no I loved her and wanted her to know that love didn't always equal sex.

I was fired and had to find a new job, which I did. I stayed in touch and Taunia and I kept planning to get together, but things never worked out. We went our separate ways for six years, then at the end of September of 1999 she found me on campus, I had gone back to college and was working on improving my life. Issues had come between us over time and I was so angry at her, I didn't really hear what she was trying to tell me that cold snowy day in September.

Five months went by, I was at home and reading the Rocky Mountain News, there before me was a short piece about a call girl who had died violently. It was Taunia. Suddenly my world was shattered, yes we had been apart and we had not talked since that day in September, but her death impacted me. I realized how I had allowed fears and anger to keep me from a woman I had loved.

What had lead to the fear and anger ? Issues that now seem unimportant, at the time they were enough to have pushed me away from Taunia. I was self destructive immediately after her death and I fell into a cycle of not caring if I survived at all, I allowed the anger to rise at inappropriate times and I could not hold a job past eighteen months to save my life.

It took time for me to recover, in 2008 I met a woman who I married that December and who I am proud to say, I am married to nearly three years later, we have a wonderful family and I am able to share the love that I once had for Taunia with my wife.

For me, I am a person who has changed because of knowing Taunia, I look at women who end up as Prostitutes as women with great potential that has not been awakened as yet, these women have been abused or victimized and fallen into a trap that in the end can be deadly. I think of how if just one person had stepped up before me, how Taunia’s life may have been better, she may have lived and raised a family. But instead she lost her life a few days before Valentines day in 2000.

I have overcome my addiction to prostitutes and am now on the road to recovery in a few other areas that I need to confront. I survived and at times that still haunts me, yet I am here today, married with step children and a grand daughter who we love as if she were own child.

I will never come to judgment or loathing like I did in the past. Because of Taunia I have come to realize that every person has value and deserves an opportunity to live outside the trap that many fall into. I would like to be able to do more to help these women, because as I said they are of value and deserve every opportunity to turn their lives around. Perhaps in a few years, when I have a nest egg established I can establish a center to offer counseling and retraining for these women, women who are daughters and mothers in many cases, who just need someone to help them see the value they have.