Since I was in fourth grade, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I knew it for two reasons. First, writing was easy for me. Second, my mom, Joan Trulio, told me I was going to be one. She told me over and over and over again.
No matter where the road took him, the author always knew he had at least one loyal fan at home. Photo by Jay Nichols/Naples Image.
And when the first story I was paid to write—a satire on restaurant trends—got published in a long gone magazine called L.A. West in the mid 1980s, no one was more proud than my mom. No matter where my career took me, from newspapers to trade publications to Powerboat magazine, she was my most loyal reader. She loved to see my byline, and every time she received an issue of Powerboat she’d call me and tell she had read whatever I’d written that month.
“I just like to see your name on the stories,” she’d say. “I never get tired of it.”
Last Saturday, Joan Trulio died. She was an 89-year-old firecracker from Queens, N.Y., a divorcee who raised my brother, sister and me on her own.
and then