Life with My Parrots

Besides the scratching, scurrying critters living inside the walls of my house and the little bugs flying up my nose and crawling around on the ceilings, I live with two other critters. It is my sole responsibility to keep them alive, and I do this by feeding and giving them water daily, buying food at the grocery store weekly and at the pet store monthly, and watching them for signs that they're getting sick or bleeding to death. Most days, we all talk and sing to each other; we dance together, usually, but not always, to music; and periodically I video them and take photographs of them.

Yes, they're parrots. Carmen, my female African Gray will be 19 years old in November this year--somewhat young for an African Grey that could live 60 years, and Pookie, my male cockatiel, will be 18 years old--very very old for a cockatiel!

My boyfriend Lew bought Carmen when I lived with him. She was 7 weeks old, half-grown. For several years I walked around with her standing on my shoulder drinking apple juice from a paper cup. After I moved away from Lew, he would sometimes let me take care of her when he went out of town on business trips. Lew never wanted me to teach her anything. Once while I had her, I taught her to howl like Wolf Man Jack ("OUWOOOOO Wolf Man Jack!"). A month after he returned and retrieved Carmen he said to me at work one day, "Oh by the way, what did you do to my bird?"
"What's the matter with her?" I asked.
"Nothing, but she howls like Wolf Man Jack!"

Pookie

 After I moved into my own apartment, I bought Pookie. My friend who raised birds went with me. We stood outside the pet store looking at the hanging cage full of baby cockatiels. "One of them will choose you," my friend said. None of them chose me. I had to grab a screaming Pookie and pull him out.

In 1996 Lew was preparing for his assignment in Malaysia and I was hired as a technical writer in a company up near Milwaukee and preparing to move. He couldn't take Carmen with him, but didn't want to give her to me, either, probably because I told him that once he gave her to me, I wasn't giving her back.

Pookie and I went on to Milwaukee, then to Ohio. Lew put Carmen into a bird-sitting home where she spent 1-1/2 years standing on the man's shoulder throughout the day. Lew and I both ended up back in the same Florida town at the same time. Lew had to leave town again and asked me to take care of Carmen, but he wasn't ready to let me have her for good. I hadn't seen her since leaving for Wisconsin. For me, it was a joyful reunion. For her--well, she sat in her cage burping loud rolling belches all the way home. That bird-sitting man she loved so much must have had a serious digestion problem. How many times since then I've had to explain to someone that Carmen must have indigestion, knowing full well birds don't burp, they imitate people burping! I didn't want anyone to think I burped like that.

Lew never came to pick Carmen up when he came back to town, and eventually he gave her to me for good, in exchange for my keyboard and the promise that I would teach him to play it. I had no hope for him--he couldn't even carry a tune with his voice, but he knew something about himself that I didn't know. Today he plays keyboard like a musician! The exchange was beneficial for all of us.

African Grays are supposed to have the intelligence of a 5-year-old child. I'm convinced Carmen wants me to believe she's retarded. When I first brought her home with me after her year in the bird-sitting home, she spoke in full sentences in the mornings, before she knew I was awake. She used to say, "You are sooo beeeyooteeeful," when I would hold her against my body and stroke the feathers on her head backwards. She used to help me call the dog in from the backyard with a man's whistle and a loud gutteral "HEY!" in a man's voice. And she used to say, "OH MY GOD!" Now she sings and says "WOW" and a few token words and phrases to let me know she knows what's going on. 

Parrots don't smile or have any facial expressions, and when they talk, you have to look closely to see their beaks move. 

Carmen in Ohio, 200

One night around midnight I went outside to see where the far-away crows were. I didn't know crows called at night. All was quiet. Turns out the far-away crows were inside, namely Carmen. Another night I heard a loud repeated runny-nose sniffing, like someone with a bad cold, and ran from window to window to see who might be breaking into my apartment. It was Carmen. That was the first I realized I was constantly snuffling from allergies. 

Life with Carmen has not been easy for either of us. She's tried to kill me a few times when I had the telephone in my hand. Once I screamed a werewolf movie scream into the phone when I answered the call of a man who wanted to hire me as a writer for his company. I had to hang up and clean up the blood from eight bites on both hands and down my neck and back before I called the man back and got the job. Guess he felt sorry for me, or for himself, as he had to have lost his hearing over that episode. Now I never answer the phone when she's out of the cage. She's bitten me hard enough a few times to make me seriously consider popping her in the microwave and eating her for dinner.

She's had two major surgeries on the end of her back, which nearly put all four of us (both birds, my rottie and me) out on the street. I thought she would die both times and required long hospitalizations. 

Carmen After First Surgery

Before both surgeries, she looked ready for the stewpot, having pulled out most of her feathers. She was fully feathered again until February of this year when my rottie Savannah died and she started pulling out feathers again. I think she misses Savannah always sitting in front of her cage staring at her, waiting for her to throw out bird pellets to her. Lew says Carmen needs therapy. I call her a "lyric soprano bare-chested feather-picker." 

Bare-chested feather-picker

Even though Pookie is the cutest, smartest bird I've ever known, I'm the only one who knows it. He won't sing any of his songs if someone else besides me is in the room. He and I are in a segment on "Planet's Funniest Animals." It took me three months to video it by myself. While he sits on my shoulder, I say, "Pookie, how does the rooster go?" He looks at me, then bows his head down low, raises it up high and goes, "er  er-er  er-errrr." So cute! 

Pookie taught Carmen to play peek-a-boo, and they used to play it together with each other when I wasn't in the room. Pookie isn't safe around Carmen. Once when he landed on her cage, she bloodied his feet, and another time she tried to kill Pookie when they were both sitting on different levels of a perch.

Life with birds doesn't give the same return of affection that a dog gives. Still, my parrots give me the opportunity to take care of lives besides my own, and the illusion that another human is in the house speaking in what sounds like my voice coming through a megaphone: "Wanna take a bath?" "Apple." "Carmeeena!---What!" "WOW!" And Pookie's "Eye-Eye. Eee ooo waiter" when I'm leaving the house. He can't pronounce syllables.

As I write this just before 1 a.m., an owl calls in its deep-throated voice outside my window in the live oak tree. If Carmen were in this room, she'd wake me up with owl calls in the morning. 

I found this accurate description online of the struggle to give a bird medicine through a syringe--been there, done that!

HOW TO MEDICATE A BIRD: (author unknown)

Occasionally, we find it necessary to medicate our feathered friends. Here are some pointers to help you with this task.

FIRST APPLICATION:
Retrieve the bird from the cage.
Set the bird on a table and hold its head by carefully grasping the neck where it joins the lower jaw, or mandible.
With your other hand, grasp the medicine syringe and place the tip into the left side of the bird’s mouth.
Depress the plunger and squirt the medicine toward the back of the bird’s throat.
Wipe excess medicine from the bird’s beak.
Place the bird back in the cage.

SUBSEQUENT APPLICATIONS:
Attempt to retrieve the bird from the cage.
Apply bandages as necessary to wounds on your hands and arms.
Retrieve the bird from its new hiding place under the coffee table.
Carefully immobilize the bird’s head to prevent further tissue damage to your body.
Attempt to break the “Vulcan Death Grip” and remove the bird’s feet from your hand.
Apply more bandages and a strong analgesic cream to the new wounds on your hands and arms.
Immobilize the bird by carefully wrapping it in a bath towel.
Watch in amazement as the bird “morphs.” Its head and tail will probably swap position,
putting your tender flesh in mortal danger again.
Hold the bird snugly in its terrycloth prison.
Grasp the medicine syringe.
Try to stop trembling in fear and pain.
Place the tip of the syringe into the left side of the bird’s mouth.
Ignore the crushed tip.
Depress the plunger and squirt the medicine toward the back of the bird’s throat.
Wipe excess medicine out of your eyes.
Release the bird and squirt medicine in the general vicinity of its face.
 Some medicine may actually go into the mouth.
The rest will be absorbed by osmosis.
 
Shoo the bird back to the cage.

 Spend the rest of the day attempting to regain the bird’s affection with yummy snacks and new toys.

When the Bough Broke

My mother didn't know that when she sang "Rock-a-bye Baby" to help me settle down at bedtime every night she was terrifying me:

Rock-a-bye baby in the treetops
When the wind blows the cradle will rock
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall
And down will come baby, cradle and all.

All I could picture was the baby in the cradle falling, and I knew first-hand the painful consequences of falling.

Last Sunday morning I awoke and realized that sometime during that night of restless sleep, the bough had broken and my cradle was falling. In this very dark place, I wrote,

"Walking into this dark tunnel of disease is taking more courage than I have. I've grown skittish over the past few years. I wear the arched, standing-up furred back of a cat that knows it's in danger. Even getting ready for a music gig feels dangerous now.

In a few days I'll bleed into a needle in preparation for my 6-month appointment with the oncologist. I expect him to tell me coldly that my lymphocyte count has multiplied, but I'm still in the "wait and watch" Stage 0 of CLL (leukemia). Night sweats, the thrush (yeast infection in my mouth), and extreme fatigue are the only symptoms right now, and still I'm peering into the unknown darkness wondering what's next. It can't be good.

Even as I go alone into the unknown of this disease, I know I'm in lockstep with a billion others on this planet who have begun their own descent, with no choice of turning back to a younger, healthier life." 

This was the Sunday I was scheduled to provide the music for Rev. Ron Fox's Center for Spiritual Living (CSL) 10 a.m. service. Trying to decide on which music to play to fit Rev. Ron's "Remaking Ourselves" topic had given me a week-long angst. I'd made the selections and practiced them through the week, but on Saturday night, I was certain the songs were the wrong choices. I spent hours going through each piece of music in four file drawers, finally deciding on a new set, and then feeling the panic that happens when I know I might not have time to adequately prepare.

On this Sunday morning, I knew that I was broken, falling helplessly like the baby in the cradle beneath blankets of issues. I had to leave my house at 8:20 a.m. to arrive at the church by 9 a.m. My mind/body doesn't obey my commands at that early hour, and singing with a tired voice is always a struggle, if not a disaster. And who wants to hear the performance of an inspirational singer who lacks inspiration? Another blanket covered the rest: the strange dilemma of ministering to a congregation through music in a church, when I can no longer, in my truth, subscribe to a belief of the existence of an invisible deity "God," and certainly not to the concept of God healing me. And now I was smothering in the thickest of all blankets--the fear for my unknown future. My integrity cradle was on the way down, with a cowardly me buried under the blankets.

I thought about calling Rev. Ron and telling him I was sick and couldn't make it. Then I thought about the disaster for a minister of having to conduct a church service without music. I arrived on time, dressed and fronting a belying smile. Rev. Ron's talk was about living life and our ability to focus and change direction. I sang the songs I'd prepared about living life. One was David Beede's song titled "Trite Secrets," the story of an old woman in the park who always sang this:

"Play like a child in the park,
Sing like no one can hear,
Sleep like you're never afraid of the dark,
Wake like there's nothing to fear
Dance like no one is lookin'
Love like you never cried,
Eat like it's always home cookin'
Work like your dreams never died"

Rev. Ron's talk was lush with encouragement for focusing and making changes in ourselves, along with quoted passages from many of my favorite authors. Afterwards (thanks to the freedom of song selections in New-Thought churches), I sang a medley of Broadway show songs in which two women make commitments to change their lives: "I Ain't Down Yet" from The Unsinkable Molly Brown and "Before the Parade Passes By" from Hello Dolly. I had a new understanding of the words as I sang them: "When the whistle blows and the cymbals crash and the sparklers light the sky, I'm gonna raise the roof! I'm gonna carry on! Give me an old trombone, give me and old baton, before the parade passes by."

The combination of Rev. Fox's talk, the music I'd chosen to sing, and the loving reception of the people there restored me to a new awareness of that balance of living the life I have while preparing for the eventuality of what is ahead.

Sunday afternoon was wonderful. I went online to the CLL support groups my sister had bookmarked for me, to try to find out what's next for this disease and found out that what's next is, as one patient expressed it, "accepting CLL and sleeping at night and not being sad, angry, afraid. Stress makes the WBC go up." Another one wrote, "I appreciate everything and everyone around me." Another one wrote, "I thank God for each day and all that it brings, good or bad." They wrote about the importance of getting exercise, eating healthy foods, having fun, and keeping up immunizations for pneumonia and flu. My doctor gave me those shots last week. Yes! Yes! Wait for me! I'm getting there! 

I was up all Sunday night, pulling out and packing up everything I don't need from all the closets, drawers, and storage areas in my house while the song played over and over in my mind "To everything (turn, turn, turn). . . .There is a season (turn, turn, turn) And a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. . . ."  On Monday morning, by 9 a.m., my driveway was stacked four rows thick with piles of stuff that had been oppressing me, and at 1 p.m., the AMVETS truck arrived to carry it all away, minus some items the neighbors had already taken.

My storage area in the shed is neatly stacked with empty plastic file boxes and bins with lids for the day when someone will come in and pack up everything valuable. I have a new Will and Living Will, and every other important document resides in a thick black 3-ring binder with instructions and the address and phone number of the great paralegal firm here in town who can make everything happen for fraction of the cost of an attorney.

The baby is warm in the gently rocking cradle. The landing was soft. The lullaby has an ongoing happy ending: when the bough breaks, the cradle catches on a lower, stronger branch. I have plenty of time left to live a happy life in the comfort of truth and balance.  

Another One Walks Free

Casey Anthony's trial has kept many otherwise productive Americans catatonic in front of their TV screens, hoping to learn in the proceedings how Casey's little girl died and who was responsible for her death.

This whole saga reminds me of my conversations with my father after he raped my retarded, autistic stepsister Denise (in her early twenties) five nights in a row. He was home alone with her while my stepmother was in the hospital undergoing tests for spots on her lungs. 

After several months of bizarre behavior, including an attempt to choke another student in the vocational school she was attending, Denise, who could not speak coherently, finally acted out the ugly scenes for her mother. The evidence was in underwear on the floor of Denise's closet and in her erratic, violent behavior, and in the sentences in my father's daily journal on those days, in his handwriting.

I carry the blame for what happened to her. My husband Whitey and I, musicians on the road with our Vegas-style showband, happened to have that week off in between bookings and had come back to Canton to see our families. I knew my stepmother was in the hospital. I knew my brain-injured father, lacking impulse control, was alone in his house with Denise. A strong inner voice told me that Whitey and I should be staying there with them. Instead, we stayed in a nearby motel. 

Every day my father drove Denise, Whitey and me to the hospital to visit my stepmother. I noticed Denise walking in a way she'd never walked before: bent over from the waist with her hands hanging an inch above the sidewalk in front of her feet. I kept nagging at her to stand up straight. She laughed an embarrassed laugh and stood upright for a few seconds before bending over again.

One day on the drive to the hospital, with Denise in the front seat and Whitey and me in the backseat, my father told us that Denise was "coming on" to him, and he was taking advantage of it. Whitey stiffened up, tightened his mouth, looked straight ahead. I knew his strong convictions against interfering in others' lives. My own years of abuse and incest from my father were still locked away in my own closet of demons. Neither Whitey nor I responded to my father's admission.

My stepmother finally told me about her daughter's rapes a year later, after Denise was already fortressing herself in her upstairs room with everything she could drag and carry from everywhere in the house. My father was still living in the house as though nothing had happened. Denise was already hitting and punching her mother and flying over the dinner table on top of my father toppling him backward onto the floor, screaming, "Why you do that, Daddy Bill?" 

I begged my stepmother to press charges and prosecute my father. I promised I'd help her send him to prison. The only action she took was to move him to the upstairs bedroom opposite Denise's bedroom.

During later visits, I asked my father questions. "Did you rape Denise?"

"Only God and I know that," he replied.

"Are you going to rape her again?"

"I don't know that. You don't know that. No one knows that."

I can still see his blank face and his wide eyes staring at me.

Donahue changed my life one early morning in Minneapolis. His cable show was aired on TV at 1 a.m.  Our band members were gathered in Whitey's and my Holiday Inn room after a night's performance in the nightclub, as we prepared to go out for our routine early-morning "breakfast." 

I was sitting at the end of the bed half-watching Donahue's show on TV. Donahue was interviewing a woman sitting alone in the spotlight. Her parents were up above in the shadows to protect their identities. The woman talked about the impact of incest on her throughout her life, about standing against the closet door full of her anger to hold it shut while the anger seeped out through the cracks around the door. 

I started paying attention. Her story was my story! Every detail she described was my experience, my acting out, my secret pain. Yes! I was an incest victim, too, and I thought I'd escaped it unharmed. In the end, the woman had written a book, and in a final dramatic moment when she revealed that she was a lesbian, the audience gasped. 

Donahue's show was over, but my show had begun, and I was alone in the spotlight of sudden, sickening awareness of the ways I'd acted out my anger and outrage for so many years. When I stood up to leave with the others, I felt dizzy and sick at my stomach. I told Whitey and the other band members to go to breakfast without me, but Whitey sent the others on and stayed with me. I cried loud, angry tears. I had wanted my stepmother to send my father to prison, not for Denise, but for me. A light had turned on in me that would alter the course of my life.

Whitey and I returned to Canton together a few times after we knew about Denise. On one of the visits, Whitey teased me afterwards about getting the "Nasty Child Award for the Day" when I calmly asked my father to move out of that home. He had already fathered a baby daughter with his girlfriend in another relationship. A week later he moved in with them.

I needed counseling. Whitey and I dissolved our band and settled in Colorado Springs. We performed as a duo act for a year. He was already a professional pilot and instructor, so he got a job with a small flight operation. I started seeing a psychologist. Several years later, he and I separated, and I went back on the road as a single act.

After five years, in the final days before the deadline when criminal prosecution would no longer be permitted, my stepmother retained an attorney and pressed charges against my father.

A Grand Jury judge decided that the criminal case would not go to trial. The judge was "corrupt," according to the attorney who handled the civil case several years later. My father wrote to me, "Thank goodness for our justice system!" 

Over my years performing alone on the road, I returned to Canton to visit my stepmother. One day the neighbor answered the door when I knocked. I could hear my stepmother wailing in the living room. Her leg was elevated on a footstool, her ankle was swollen, and her cheek was ripped open. Denise had attacked her and had been taken in a straight jacket to the hospital's mental unit. My stepmother's other daughters were urging her to put Denise in a home, but my mother would not even consider that. Denise was hers.

On one of my Canton visits, I met my father in a restaurant.

"You raped Denise, didn't you?" I said.

 "That's between me and God," he answered, his face blank, his eyes wide and staring. 

I pictured myself standing up and turning the table upside down, crashing the chairs against the floor until they broke into small pieces, racing over to the windows and jerking down the curtains. Instead, I quietly told him that I would never see him again. His dishonesty was too upsetting. He said, "That's okay. I understand. I can get along fine without you."

I saw him again six years later, when I returned to Canton to testify against him in a civil court case on Denise's behalf. My father represented himself and cross-examined me. A few weeks later, we received notice that the jury found him guilty. He was bankrupt. My father would never pay for his crime. 

He wouldn't allow his wife to be present at the trial. I was on good terms with her, and on this day, I wanted her to know that my father was guilty, that he was a predator and a pedofile, and if she didn't protect her ten-year-old daughter, my father would harm her, too. After the trial, I went to their home. They sat across the table from me, and for two hours, we had it out. To write what happened would take several books, but in the end, she told me she believed me and would protect her daughter.

In the months that followed my father's trial, I noticed that I was calmer and my anger had subsided. My visits back to Canton revealed healing of the relationship between Denise and my stepmother. What helped us was to know that others agreed that what my father had done was wrong.

I've averaged an hour a day watching Casey Anthony's blank face and large staring eyes and listening to the testimony. I've watched the trial re-runs and commentary on the news. The public doesn't know what happened to her little girl. The jury doesn't know. Casey knows. Now she walks free-- like O.J. Simpson walked free. 

Not knowing the truth about what happened when the person sitting there knows sends us all into a collective boil. This trial has taken us back to other times when others inside blank faces and large eyes lied to us. 

Ultimately, it takes us back into our own everyday lies to ourselves and others. We make up excuses for not doing things we don't really want to do. We withhold information. We blame others for our shortcomings. We make up justifications for our actions and hide our true feelings from ourselves. This trial and its abrupt ending forces us to ask ourselves the question: Who am I really mad at?

Before You Think You're Ready, Write and Publish!

If you're a writer with a lifetime of written works, published or unpublished, readers with those cute little electronic tablets are waiting for you--all over the world! Don't be like me and wait until the eleventh hour of your life to round up your writing and get your stuff published into e-books, audiobooks, and even hard copies of books for book signing events.
 
If you're a writer with a brain full of ideas for novels, short stories, and true-life stories, start writing! For a small outlay, you can get them published in e-books and get them online to all the places where readers look for books.
 
Even this blog that you're reading right now will one day be an e-book, an autobiography of sorts!  I plan to call it Search for Myself. I think that's what our entire life's journey is all about.

Tips for Getting Ready to Publish

When you've finished writing a book, get it ready to publish by taking these steps:

• Find an editor--not just a friend, but a person with a formal education and a strong background in English who can read for logical content, sentence mechanics, grammar, and punctuation. Even the best writers need editors! Readers don't like to find spelling and grammar errors when they're reading a book.
• Ask your editor to help you find a proofreader to give your book a final read-through. The editor who has already spent hours working with your book may not be the best proofreader. 
• Decide if you're going to target your how-to book or story for the enhanced electronic readers or just for the standard electronic reader. If you haven't already, go to Barnes & Noble and ask for a demonstration of their electronic reader, the Nook. They have a standard reader that shows just B&W text, and they have a new enhanced model out, the NookColor. An author can add music, videos, color photos and even animations to the e-book for the enhanced version. The NookColor is hard to pass up! You might want to add in music and pictures for future readers with fancy gadgets! 
• Decide how you want your book cover to look and gather photos for it, if you decide to have them. Look up the standards for a professional book cover. How should it look in order to sell well? Then you can judge whether the graphic artist creates a cover that meets those standards.

E-Book Formatting/Publishing/Distributing Companies

Decide whether you will format your e-book yourself or send it off to a company for formatting. BookBaby's ads (see more below) say that they will help you format your own book if you go with their company. That might imply that they will not do the job for you, but give you the directions for doing it yourself. Listed below are some options for formatting and distributing your e-book: 

Amazon

  
Amazon.com has guidelines for formatting an e-book for their Kindle reader. My new Facebook friend, Allen Applen, has written e-books, formatted for Kindle and sold on the Amazon site. 

Allen Applen's Books on Amazon 

He wrote that his understanding is that readers with the Barnes and Noble's "Nook" can also access and read a book formatted for Kindle.

For more information,  go to this site:

Publishing E-books for Amazon's Reader, Kindle 

Then click on "Community" and then go down to "Voice of Author/Publisher" Allen writes, 'Whenever I have a question I ask and someone answers."

The Cadence Group 

 The Cadence Group   

This is a professional design, editorial, sales, marketing, and project management provider for the book and publishing industry. They select only projects that have strong market potential. Check out this web site for what is involved in publishing and marketing a book.

Smashwords   

Smashwords 

This is a free service that will format your e-book, give it an ISBN number, and distribute it in the required format to each of the major retailers online. You submit your book in Microsoft Word. You will earn 60% from major retailers; 85% for each download from the Smashwords site.

BookBaby   

BookBaby 

They will format your e-book, and they'll distribute it in the required format to each of the major retailers online. (On their ads, they say they will "help you" format your book.) You submit your book in Microsoft Word. You will pay up front for their services, including the cover and ISBN number, but you will earn 100% of the sales. Charge for formatting and distribution is $99. BookBaby will not show you your book formatting, because they say it looks different depending on what device it’s being displayed.

Publishgreen 

Publishgreen 

They will format your e-book and distribute it in the required format to each of more than 28 major e-book retailers online. You submit your book in Microsoft Word. You will pay up front for their services—$400-$1000.  You will keep “up to 100%” of the sales.

Evergreen says they will format your book by hand, and not “smash” the words together like the other ebook companies. They say “smashed” books are "ugly books." You can download sample e-books on their site to see.

CD Duplication Companies (for audiobooks & music) 

If you're going to write a book and you have a budget that allows for it, why not also record your story? You can record in your own home if you have recording software, or a Mac. You can also buy studio time, or trade services with a recording studio owner. You can duplicate your tracks into CDs (Short run! No one needs 1,000 copies piled up in the basement!) for selling at events, and CDBaby will distribute your audiobook online to all of the places where readers can download it. Here are the links:

Discmakers for cover design and duplication services

CDBaby for duplication and online distribution services

Marketing

You will also need a marketing plan in place. Facebook is not the only answer. You'll have to accumulate a great e-mail list and write on all of the social networking sites. There is a lot of marketing how-to information online.

It's Time!

Robert Fritz, in his book Creating writes that the time to begin creating is before you think you're ready.

Get busy and write the Great American Novel. Dash off a self-help book if you have information about a subject or a skill to teach. Write your life. You know it's a good story! I'll read it--as soon as I publish my stuff. 

My first priority: e-book and audiobook titled Life with a Buckskinner--my memoir and published stories about my husband Whitey and me in the 1970's-80's. My sister giggled through all of the stories while I recorded them last week. Maybe other listeners and readers will, too.

Mountain Man Whitey on his horse King

Sister Knows Best

I wish I could report that my sister Margo is still here in Florida with me, but yesterday morning when I woke up, I knew it would be the sad day when I would drive her to the Orlando airport for her flight back to Maryland, back to her husband who has missed her terribly and who adores her and needs her as much as I do. I appreciate his support for her visit with me, and for accepting her eight-day visit, which included a three-day extension. 

When she arrived here, my life was a mess. My walls were covered with outdated pages and notes about my projects, and the surfaces of desks and tables were covered with stacks of papers--pieces of paper with cartoons and notes, how-to information, pamphlets, advertisements for services, stories from my past, and spiral notebooks I've crammed full of random notes.

My projects I'm struggling to get into forms for release to the world include four books to become e-books and soft cover books (one in the form of a life writer's workbook), an audiobook, a mountain of cartoons, and a dozen songs I've written that need to be recorded and released both for online download and as CDs. 

Every step in each of these projects is like quicksand--there's so much to learn and figure out, and the learning curves for each decision and mastery of each skill are steep. At first, Margo was diving into the various project tasks like I've been doing--"Let's do this now." "Now let's do that." "Oh here's this to do!" 

First we were at the computer looking up information for one project, which led us to the coffee table and a stack of papers where we searched for something needed for another project, and then to the bookshelf to find a book needed for another project. 

I could hear her Geiger-counter mind ticking faster as the confusion built up into toxic stress and she saw me hyperventilating, moving into the panic/overwhelm mode I go into when I'm too tired to make the smallest decision. 

Nearly 3-1/2 years younger than I and in good health, in other words, still able to adapt, Margo changed her approach, something I haven't been able to do for myself. Here is what she did for me:

• She helped me get all of my projects organized, with steps lined up for each, wrote them down on structural tension charts, and taped them on the walls in place of the outdated pages. 

• She designated shelves and drawers and labeled folders where I can place each piece of paper so I'm not spending all of my time searching for it. 

• She helped me record 6 of my 9 stories for the audiobook, clicking the software on and off and writing notes while I recorded. Her notes allowed me to quickly edited out the mistakes in the track for each story. 

• She went to the doctor with me and listened when he diagnosed me with thrush, linking it to leukemia.

• She went online and found the CLL support groups. 

• She listened non-judgmentally while I told her my political and religious beliefs, and then she shared her thoughts that were in common with mine.

• At her insistence, we went to the bookstore and looked for cartoon markets.

• She stayed patient, cheerful and energetic throughout the long days, and continued to nudge me forward, past 2 a.m. on some nights.

Margo thinks and creates like I do. During her work on her Ph.D. in music, she introduced me to the work of Robert Fritz who has studied the process of creating and teaches others how to create using his concept of "structural tension." Fritz has written a number of books, which she and I both have read, including Creating, Your Life as Art, and his international best-seller, Path of Least Resistance. 

In August 2001, after attending one of Fritz's week-long seminars, she came alone to Florida to visit me, for the first time ever, to share what she had learned. As she described the events that took place at the seminar and what Fritz taught, I understood that I didn't need to drown in my bipolar disease. We all have shouting, mean-spirited voices, permanent residents in our heads, calling us names and making up lies. I could shake hands with them and step over them to create a new life for myself. I was 56 years old, living alone on Social Security Disability, with a history of several hospitalizations and multiple suicide attempts. Her gift to me changed my life.

A few years later, we both attended Fritz's workshop where he taught an international group of attendees to teach his course, "Creating Your Life."

On this June visit, Margo is probably the only one who could have asked me the right questions, identify what has been blocking me, and help me finish some of the tasks and line up others to move me forward to completing my projects. I trust her and accept her as an authority and a mentor. Last October when Margo and her husband gave me their car, I did what our mother often did--I accidentally called Margo "Mother." That says it all!

Margo Ready for Lunch, June 2011

I tried to make Margo's visit enjoyable and memorable, too. I cooked nutritious meals for her (or we ate out) three times a day. I gave her a Starbuck's gift card and the car keys so she could go down the street for good coffee. I took her to my English country dancing group for a night of dancing with 20+ other men and women. She was very good at it!  (I'm not! I can't remember the routines for each dance.) She facilitated a dulcimer group workshop one night, and they shared their music and ideas with her. I also arranged for my massage therapist voice student to give Margo the first professional massage she's ever had. She loved that experience.

We shared our music, sang together, and worked on arrangements. There wasn't time for recording them. I hope when she comes back next year I'll still be able to sing. One challenge with singing when tired is those little part-muscle vocal chords won't cooperate.

One big surprise to me is that Margo is the gifted artist of the two of us! That shouldn't have been a surprise. She had the artist talent when we were children. I've worked hard to draw my cartoons. For her, with a few quick pen strokes, the picture materializes. She left this drawing propped up on the pillow yesterday. She's on the left.

She and I both agreed that so far we've avoided falling into the family dementia disease. Our judgment is based on our belief that we're not yet repeating statements and questions. I call it our "belief" because we could both be so far into dementia, we don't remember that the other has repeated something. Still, I find the belief comforting.

In spite of increasing fatigue and other developing problems, I'm optimistic that my descent into CLL (chronic lymphocytic leukemia) will be gradual enough that I'll have the time necessary to complete my projects. 

Today, I'm much calmer as I look at the structural tension charts listing the tasks and due dates taped to the walls and the materials lying neatly on shelves. I know the priorities and logistics for all of the projects. I also know the established place to put each piece of paper when I get to it in the piles of papers still heaped on tables and desks. Life is good!

My sister knows that what's best for me is steady, confident guidance. I'm sure I'll get along on my own until she returns for next summer's visit to rescue me from some other life drama.