The Beginning

Beginnings are tricky, they are uncertain mostly and hard to pin down. Where is the beginning? Of what you may ask next? I want to start at the beginning of this story so badly, however mine is one that must be told out of order. Like most things I'll start in the middle, as it turns out I was born in the middle of three girls of five children, in the middle of the year, in the middle of nowhere. Chelsea, Alabama to be more precise...fast forward twenty years, eight months and 22 days. I live just outside the city of Birmingham, on the southside with my best friend and band mate Joshua Chandler in a place we have come to call bunker junction. A bottom level apartment on the corner of a three story building not more than a hundred yards away from a railroad track which runs endlessly through the day and night. On this particular day nothing seemed out of the ordinary save one chance incounter. I was sitting in the car at a gas station waiting for Josh to get bills changed so we could do laundry, a very normal setting indeed. I watched a woman park her blue mustang next to me and get out in a huff, cussing someone out on her phone. Moments later I hear crying and turn my head to see a little boy maybe a little past 1 year old bawling for his mother. His arms were reaching and flailing to get out while his shrieks reached my ears. Bothered by the scene and the possible lack of love this child got from his mother, I could think of nothing better to do than to get him to see me and crank the music playing in the car which just so happened to be Chicago, my favorite band. I'm always trying to get people on Chicago now that I've become such a fan of them. I usually know that people are just entertaining my enthusiasm and will not look into the sound I rave about but somehow I knew this baby would understand and hear. The song playing was the last track on Chicago Greatest Hits, its called The Beginning. As soon as I turned the volume knob way up I saw the kid immediately stop crying and looking over saw a silly girl in a bomber pilot hat snapping her fingers and singing her lungs out trying to get him to stop crying and hear something beautiful. I would like to say this was the beginning of the story because it was one of those moments in my life I was completely certain about what was happening in that moment and because of that I became certain of the following moments (for very drawn out and personal reasons). Rewind to the previous year in March I experience a similar moment. I am still in school at UAB for creative writing, started a three piece band called Bec and the Frets at the beginning of the year, and am questioning more and more my position in life. On a forgotten afternoon I was sitting on the porch of a house on 11th place in south side. From inside the house the sound of the Alice Gillee Project practicing drifts out through the front door. It was on this afternoon I decided who I was: a musician, a singer, a writer. And from there lived my life in order to walk a path aimed toward devotion to music and writing. I accepted my new task of learning with open arms and became a full time student to life, society, and best of all: music. Surely this is a better beginning yet there is so much that has happened before and since that point. I decide now, having layed a setting of the smallest proportions, to tell this story from the now because out of all the things I have learned over the past two and half years it has been that all we have is the moment and in every moment there is never nothing happening. So with these eyes I now see the now and cannot escape it to the familar past or dreamy future. I face particular trouble when trying to tell a story this way though, the now got that way because of everything leading up to that moment so it shall be a tale of back tracking and reference shall it? I suppose it may be but we will have to wait and see. I suppose I want to get it right because there's no way to write your own ending and the most I leave behind are my written words, offered for any reader drawn here by music.