Look and Listen

Biography

THE BEGINNING: I was seventeen and in junior high when Leo and I met in Hawaii. A year later, we were married. I was eighteen; he was twenty-two. It wasn’t a planned marriage. All I could remember during our dating years was sneaking out of the house to meet him for a few minutes at a local mini store behind our house. Apparently having a boyfriend without your family knowing it was a big thing back then. Leo was caught in a sometimes controversial belief of an old-fashioned family. When he insisted to drop me home from a date on Christmas night in 1978, he didn’t know what life had in store for him. Everything was a blur and he didn’t know what hit him. All he remembered that night was sitting in the back room, smoking countless cigarettes, looking up the ceiling and thought “what the heck is going on?” He was not allowed to leave that night. He was taken to my brother’s house to wait for my dad to come home from work. To him it was a “shotgun” wedding. For me, I was pushed to marry him. That was thirty-three years ago. And here we are still married with two children and three grandchildren. Sometimes life is not what we expect it to be. And even when our marriage was more hell than heaven, we managed to defy the odds and keep from strangling. Pressured to marry early and immediately working to support a family after that, took us longer to realize how we really felt about each other. We encountered many blessings and challenges in our lives over the years but were too often unrecognized because we refused to see it or were simply not paying attention. It's the simple, little things in life we forget and take for granted. Simple things like calling each other every morning to make sure we get to work safely and calling to make sure that we didn't forget to eat lunch. Saturday is our date night and is still our favorite night of the week. We buy groceries and do the laundry together. And we love spending quality time with our children and grandchildren. Let's face it. After doing this for thirty-three years, we are stuck together forever! When did I know that Leo was my one and only? The day he told me that if he didn't truly love me, that night at my brother's house, he was thinking of running out to the front door faster than a speeding bullet and never to come back. But he was so worried what my family would do to me that he decided to stay, trust his heart, and let faith decide. He told me that a few years ago and that day I knew I fell in love with him all over again.

Inspiration

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I would end up a writer. Sure, I grew up reading fables and fairy tales especially Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales and Stories, but me as an author? That’s impossible! All I knew was that in 2002 I kept dreaming about my deceased father who died in 1982. I woke up one morning full of ideas and motivation to write. Our family story that was growing in my heart and characters that can’t keep out of my head like it was speaking to me. I never stopped writing even when at times I wondered why I was doing it. Then the impossible thing happened. I published my autobiography, A Marriage Made in Heaven and Hell in 2003. After I released the book, I was invited by my publisher to attend the Book Expo in Los Angeles, CA. It was very exciting and even though I was very shy, I managed to meet a lot of people. When I returned back to Las Vegas after the event, I thought I was on top of the world like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. I thought everything was perfect. UNTIL, I learned that my nephew passed away. It took me a long time to recover from that UNTIL another tragedy happened. My sister, my nephew’s mother, passed away exactly one year after him. My family and I believed that she died of a broken heart. I was devastated and the motivation to write was gone. If it wasn’t for my grandson, Ray, who made me so happy with each passing day, after so many years I didn't think I would be able to recover and back writing again. I learned with all the things that happened to me that we just need that ‘someone’ special to inspire us to get back on our feet again and face the world with a smile. I am so lucky to have my grandson, Ray, in my life.