The Lives I've Lived: A Memoir

Some lives follow a straight road. David J. Masters' never did. He grew up in a little white house in the foothills of Virginia - no running water, an outhouse in the yard, and a grandmother who could make Sunday dinner look like a feast out of almost nothing. One Christmas she gave him a box of pastels. He drew her portrait that night, and she hung it where company would see it first. Decades later, he opened an art studio and gallery of his own. In between came Key West in the seventies, and Washington, and more than twenty years in law offices and courtrooms about as far from that Virginia hillside as a man could travel. Then back to Virginia, and Master Pieces - a studio in Leesburg that grew from a dusty, empty building into the largest of its kind on the East Coast. Today he works nights as a concierge in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida. This book was written at that desk, in the hours after midnight, when the building goes quiet and the memories come back without being asked.