365 Days of Impacts

The first major death in my life was my maternal Grandmother, Wilna Poteete. This was the first time I dealt with the emotion of grief. Nana literally was my world when I was a little girl. Our lives revolved around her coming to visit or us going to visit her. When she fell ill, I was a Junior in High School. The reason I remember this is that she was able to come to Christy's high school graduation, but she was not alive for mine. This was devastating to me. When Nana got sick, Mom had to leave us with Dad and go to Alabama to take care of her for a few months. She had heart disease and had had a heart attack. While Mom was gone, Christy was in her first year of College at Wayne State University in Detroit, so she was gone all day. Dad worked from 5am to 6pm down at Highland Park for Chrysler. Needless to say, I had a lot of time on my hands to think. Sure I had a lot of after school activities, but I was by myself a lot. One of my "chores" was to cook dinne...

Many of you know that I love to sing. On my wedding day, I thought there would be nothing more special than to sing a song to Dennis. I wanted it to be a bluegrass song. I wanted it to be a song that most people knew the words to the chorus so they could sing along. I settled upon You are my Sunshine - an old bluegrass staple written in 1939 by Jimmie Davis and Charlie Mitchell. It is one of the state songs of Louisiana. Despite its happy melody and chorus, it is quite a sad song if you look up the real lyrics. So, I decided to rewrite the lyrics of the song to fit the man I was going to sing it to... The other night dear as I lay sleeping I dreamed you held me in your arms And when I woke dear, my heart was taken Stolen by your ever loving charm (Chorus) You are my sunshine, my only sunshine You make me happy when skies are gray You'll never know dear, how much I love you please don't take my sunshine away. When I am down dear, your spirit lifts me Yo...

Christy Suzanne White, My Sister. As you grow up, your parents and siblings usually impact you the most because they are the closest to you in so many ways. Since I can remember, Christy has been an inspiration to me. When I was little, I emulated her as a toddler- all the way up through high school, to the point where I did most of the same things she did. As a young girl, I idolized my sister - and wanted so much to be like her. Christy was good at sports. Put it this way, Christy got all of the physical genes in our family. She was a natural athlete. I however, had a super hard time with anything that required hand/eye coordination, or physicality of any kind. She was awesome at Volley Ball, Golf, Swimming, Track, Cheerleading, you name it. Most of those things I tried out for, but got cut. I just didn't have those genes. Christy was also an incredible leader. She was class president, led student government, organized most events in high school. I wanted to be just ...

I believe that I got the love of funk from my dad. Back in his day it was Ray Charles. One of the best memories I have of my dad is a trip we took in Christy's convertible from Atlanta to Albuquerque New Mexico. We were delivering Christy's car to her after she had accepted a position during the dot com boom at a startup called Super Groups. She had gone out early to take the job, had her stuff shipped from Atlanta out there, and then we drove her car out so she could have it out there. I had taken road trips with my family before and short ones with my Dad in Michigan, but this was the longest road trip we had taken together up to that point. We rode with the top down listening to all kinds of music. A little known fact of my dad is that he LOVED Prince. Mainly because my dad couldn't escape a good beat. But the funniest thing was we were listening to Prince's song Sexy M%&F$@. If you don't know, that song has a killer beat, and one that drummers love...

My family is probably the hugest impact on my life. My friends are probably the second biggest impact, many I also consider family. Both my family and friends have been my support, my teachers, my inspiration, my rocks, my shoulders to cry on, my causes for celebration. I have many family members that I will try to do justice to explain the impacts they have had on my life. The first ones being my mother, father and sister. While one passage cannot do them justice, I will try to sum it up, but they will pop up in many more funny and inspirational stories over the coming days and months in this blog account of my life. In addition to them, I have family members in New York, Ohio and Alabama that I'll also tell stories about. So many good stories of lessons learned, fellowship and camaraderie over the years. Most recently, I will try to account for the impacts of the newst members of my family - those being my husband, bonus children and St. Louis family. And to my friends ...