"URBAN IMPROVISATIONS"

Bailey - Lindsay - Smith

		My oldest brother died during child birth under circumstances never spoken by my parents. I am the oldest brother of two younger sisters. I was born on the cusp between Pisces and Aries in 1952 to teenage parents who were themselves making a life on the cusp between the Jim Crow South and the somewhat more subtle Jim Crow North. My life has been a searching for a meaning in the nebulous steaming mist between fire and water, between fear and devastating loss.

My parents and my sheltered West Philadelphia community implored me to be safe and finding security in, "I don't care what you do, just be good at it." But the boiling cauldron of the middle world is ever changing, undulating between creation and destruction, abhorring permanence - perspectives ever shifting. My life has been a succession of half efforts, fleeting successes, confusion and failure until I sat at the keyboard and surrendered to the perpetual eruptions of my temperament. It is from the cusp I write.