ABOUT THE AUTHOR
At five years of age, I had no interest in interest rates, stock options, money markets, health benefits, and neither did my mother. Her main goal was to keep my siblings and me fed, clothed, and sheltered. My father excused himself from my life early on. I was born in Dawson, Texas, but know life in Odessa, Texas, where I grew up. I skipped kindergarten, went straight to first grade. Kindergarten was an option I did not have; nonetheless, I learned how to play well with others, despite this missed step in my educational life. I graduated from Ector High School, took some courses at Odessa College and Southwestern Christian College, received a Bachelor’s of Music Education from Texas Tech University in Lubbock, and received a Master’s of Elementary Education from The University of Texas of the Permian Basin in Odessa. The thing I loved most about college was that I could be unemployed, or work less than twenty hours a week, and remain respectable because I was attending the university. Graduation, of course, changed that. The wonderland of college became reality. I graduated in 1983 from Texas Tech and began my teaching career at Reagan Magnet School in Odessa, where after twenty-two years I am still employed as an elementary music teacher. Somewhere in between the years from first grade to now, I managed to hold various positions in different organizations: make the Dean’s List at Texas Tech University, become a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., be enlisted in Who’s Who Among American Women, Who’s Who Among Teachers, The Texas Music Education Association, and the Permian Basin Poetry Society. I am a former member of The Junior League of Odessa and the Odessa Cultural Council. My life does not look the way I expected it to. As a child growing up, I had certain dreams and expectations which included marriage and children. However, I do not have a husband, 2.3 children, pets, house with a fence, etc. Absent all of those dreams, I have managed to keep dreaming, hoping one day I would pen words that would change, encourage, enlighten, help, entertain, amuse, anyone, everyone who reads them. Also, at age forty-six, I have decided to stop punishing my body for not being perfect, “should-ing” on myself, grieving over what might have been and is not; and I hold tightly to the philosophies that “no one owes me anything,” and “children do not know what they can and cannot do until someone tells them.” - Loretta Diane Walker Forthcoming in In This House |