Once upon a time a princess was born to an American family.  Royalty isn’t always about bloodlines, sometimes it is about the big plans you have made for yourself and sometimes it is about the plans your family made for you.  Alas not all dreams are realized. Sometimes it is fate and sometimes it is destiny, sometimes it is just chance, and sometimes just luck, but sometimes it seems that raw determination can overcome all these factors and we somehow shape our own lives.  When do circumstances determine the outcome of our lives, and when if ever are we really the captains of our own destiny.

What is this thing called will power, is it mere circumstances that determines if we will have a good or a bad day. In America sometimes it is said that is doesn’t matter what you know as much as it matters who you know.  Good looks are important too.  What you look like can either help you or hurt you get ahead in life.

And so it was, I was going to become the person that Connecticut was good at producing, a winner.  Sure on the surface those early years might have seemed golden, but they were not my life was not built on a good foundation, in fact there was no foundation at all.
Infants and young children are quite resourceful and resilient and I did the best with the cards I was dealt and those cards included parents who were both addicted to alcohol.

In the beginning, what does that mean, are we talking about the day my parents met or when my relavatives arrived from England and Ireland. My own beginning started on December 17, 1946 at 6:54 PM in Harkness Pavilion Hospital in New York City, from there I was taken home somewhere in New York or Connecticut and from there to Santa Fe, New Mexico. My my father's mother died in 1945, leaving my father Howard L. Burling some money some of which he used to move himself and his family of four to the southwest.

I lived in New Mexico until we moved back east, I was around two years old at the time. I am told I learn Spanish before i learned English, but that is hearsay. My early years are a little vague, I don't remeber a lot of the details. Some of my earliest memories involve a place called the Compo Inn in westport Connecticut.