As you may remember the entire contents of my house was packed into boxes and taken away to be cleaned after we had a small but smokey furnace fire in January. Well it is July and I hate to admit it but I am still unpacking boxes.
Last night, as I was trying to sort the contents of one of the unpacked boxes, I discovered the journal I kept while I was in prison. I had not seen it since 2005, I almost forgot that it existed. I am sorry to say I was not very diligent about keeping a journal, sometimes there are weeks between entries. I wrote so many letters to family and friends that I did not feel the need to write to myself. Yet still there are many entries that take me back to the very day they were scribed. My mom sent the journal book to me for Christmas while I was in Pekin Federal Prison.
There are a few little notes and pictures stuck in the pages of the thin hard back fabric covered book. These little scrapes and clippings bring back a flood of memories - some foggy and some crystal clear.
One of the notes tucked in my journal is the complete lyrics to the Beatles song, Rocky Raccoon. Another inmate, Lucy, wrote them down and gave it to me. I cannot remember why exactly. Just a piece of notebook paper with her bubbly college girl hand writing. At the end she fills up 7 lines with Do, Do Do Do Do Do, Do, Do Do Do - etc.
She was a funny girl. She was probably just bored and had that song in her head, you try writing the lyrics to a song you love without hearing the song. It is harder than you think...I am sure that we talked about it as I am a big Beatles fan too. The lyric sheet was probably a gift to me to make me smile.
Her "room" was just across the "alley" from mine. We called the walkway between the half walls that made up "rooms" the alley. Each housing unit had four alleys. So the ladies who lived on your alley were the ones you saw the most.
Lucy is epileptic. I saw her have several seizures while I was there. Waiting for a nurse to come from the FCI next door was intense during a seizure. She is a dynamite softball player. She comes from a good family, her dad was the fire chief in Bloomington, Il (or somewhere like that). Lucy is a super bright girl, a total math whiz. She had gotten through a couple years of college before she acquired a horrible heroin addiction. She ended up robbing a bank to support her habit which landed her in federal prison.
(Little bit of useless info...all bank robberies are Federal crimes because they are FDIC ...let me tell you that there were more than a few bank tellers in that prison, guess it's too tempting for some)
Lucy could tell some crazy stories about her life as a heroin addict. She robbed her own money bag when she was manager of a sub shop and said she got mugged...she made the report in the police station while holding onto a bag with a sandwich and the missing money.
I hope she is doing ok. I occasionally look for her on Face Book, but so far I have not found her. I pray that she got to go back to college and that her parents gave her another chance.
Last night, as I was trying to sort the contents of one of the unpacked boxes, I discovered the journal I kept while I was in prison. I had not seen it since 2005, I almost forgot that it existed. I am sorry to say I was not very diligent about keeping a journal, sometimes there are weeks between entries. I wrote so many letters to family and friends that I did not feel the need to write to myself. Yet still there are many entries that take me back to the very day they were scribed. My mom sent the journal book to me for Christmas while I was in Pekin Federal Prison.
There are a few little notes and pictures stuck in the pages of the thin hard back fabric covered book. These little scrapes and clippings bring back a flood of memories - some foggy and some crystal clear.
One of the notes tucked in my journal is the complete lyrics to the Beatles song, Rocky Raccoon. Another inmate, Lucy, wrote them down and gave it to me. I cannot remember why exactly. Just a piece of notebook paper with her bubbly college girl hand writing. At the end she fills up 7 lines with Do, Do Do Do Do Do, Do, Do Do Do - etc.
She was a funny girl. She was probably just bored and had that song in her head, you try writing the lyrics to a song you love without hearing the song. It is harder than you think...I am sure that we talked about it as I am a big Beatles fan too. The lyric sheet was probably a gift to me to make me smile.
Her "room" was just across the "alley" from mine. We called the walkway between the half walls that made up "rooms" the alley. Each housing unit had four alleys. So the ladies who lived on your alley were the ones you saw the most.
Lucy is epileptic. I saw her have several seizures while I was there. Waiting for a nurse to come from the FCI next door was intense during a seizure. She is a dynamite softball player. She comes from a good family, her dad was the fire chief in Bloomington, Il (or somewhere like that). Lucy is a super bright girl, a total math whiz. She had gotten through a couple years of college before she acquired a horrible heroin addiction. She ended up robbing a bank to support her habit which landed her in federal prison.
(Little bit of useless info...all bank robberies are Federal crimes because they are FDIC ...let me tell you that there were more than a few bank tellers in that prison, guess it's too tempting for some)
Lucy could tell some crazy stories about her life as a heroin addict. She robbed her own money bag when she was manager of a sub shop and said she got mugged...she made the report in the police station while holding onto a bag with a sandwich and the missing money.
I hope she is doing ok. I occasionally look for her on Face Book, but so far I have not found her. I pray that she got to go back to college and that her parents gave her another chance.
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