The Parrot Detective

Friends of ours have said over the years, "Why don't you write a book about George?" 

"We might one day..." our usual answer.

But we had no real intention of doing it.  Why?  Because George is a pain in the butt.  He's also a family member and we've lived with him and taken care of him for more than thirty years.  We took care of his brother too, but he died.

George has been through many life adventures with us.  I don't know what we'd do without him.  I don't know what we do with him either.  He's just there -- for weddings, funerals, parties, economic and tropical depressions -- he actually rode out Hurricane Charley in our kitchen without one single comment.  But the other day when Lorry was wondering what to make for dinner and was saying something about it, George looked at her, cocked his head, said, "Need some help?"

For a Blue-fronted Amazonian parrot, George is a talker who sometimes beats the vocabulary of an African Grey, and they are often considered the most reliably talkative parrots around.

George has had many near death experiences and he has noted them verbally.  When he was lost in the Florida woods for a dark dismal summer day in which hawks tried to kill him (he hid under palmettos and walked like a dog trying to find his way home), we finally met up with him on the shell road in front of our house, and he glared at me and said, "What took you so long?"

Our new book The Parrot Detective is for anyone who likes animals, reptiles, people, parrots, lizards, turtles, FLORIDA (and that includes crackers, the real kind not the made up variety) and funny stories about boys who grow up with odd family members.  The narrator is Miccosukee and he lives on this crazy little barrier island where we live -- Pine Island.  This is the first in a series of mysteries about our island.  The next one will have more unaccountable mischief in it and more GEORGE, because that's what you asked for... literally.  Kids and old timers and just about everybody else, including George himself -- he just now walked into our office! -- said, "Stop writing other stuff!"  So there he is right now sitting on the Great Dane's bed.  I think that's a smile on his beak.

ALL IS BEAUTIFUL ALL AROUND ME

All Is Beautiful All Around Me:
Navajo Ways and Ceremonial Stories

When Tony Hillerman in his foreword to this book said that the Navajos were "engulfed by a dominant materialistic society hostile to their ways, and how they maintained a culture that values human relationships above material possessions..." he was not only honoring this one tribe, but in a way, all tribes, all people, all civilizations that simply refuse to go away when told to leave.  In 1965, while camping with some of my Navajo friends, I asked how they had done it.  How they had managed to survive when, in the 19th century, they were nearly eradicated by Kit Carson and the "bluecoats" who served him.  A genocide had taken place, the Navajos had survived it and had become over time the largest indigenous tribe in North America and maybe even the world.  How had they done it?  One of my best friends said, "By not dying."  All Is Beautiful All Around Me explains how to live in harmony with all things.  It teaches how to live in peace in a world at war.  It shows how one can "go in beauty" as Tony Hillerman says.  Frank Waters, author of Book of the Hopi, said: "This oral equivalent of the Christian Bible loses none of its power and significance in its easy readability."  I wanted it to be open and clear, as accessible as the storytellers who helped me to see how the tribe had managed to be what it was, is, and always will be.  As a map to the human heart, this book is my favorite above all others.

The Jacob Ladder

I first heard the story of The Jacob Ladder as it was told in the streets of Oracabessa where the story actually happened.  The storyteller was Uton Hinds, a cab-driver, oil painter and family man.  I loved the story so much that I asked Uton "Tall T" Hinds if I could record it and help him to make it into a book.  He agreed.  Four years later the book was published by Orchard Books, a division of Scholastic.  It became a classroom text in many schools in America and the Caribbean.  Life in Jamaica is rough economically.  But, culturally, there's a lot of love in those St Ann hills where this story unfolds.  Uton's message about forgiveness and love, about how his father -- no matter how badly he treated everyone -- was still his father and respect was due for the one "who gave me life" is worth remembering.  The Christian Science Monitor commented on how carefully written this book was, and how "... native words enhance the educational value and multicultural appeal of this inspiring autobiographical story."  (Courtney Williamson, The Christian Science Monitor, 2001.) Uton has traveled about the U.S. selling his book door-to-door, he is its best salesman.  I heard not too long ago that some students in Miami were sad when they saw Uton's picture.  "He's older than we thought."  Well, that happens.  The story took place in the Fifties and Sixties and Jamaica was a different time and place then and Uton was a little boy.  But the story holds.  It is one of my favorite books on the subject of "love your family whoever they might be" -- and I thank Uton for being tough enough to tell it the way it really happened.

The Amelia Island Book Festival

From front to back this was a great festival in a town of old southern grace and gentility.  Ma'am and Sir is spoken here and people hold doors for other people.  The love of books as well as manners follows you everywhere you go. 

I'd wanted to visit this northern province of our state, and when we were invited to tell stories, we were delighted.  It never occurred to us however that little Amelia Island had been occupied by eight different nations and/or peoples.  French, Spanish, British are the easy ones to figure.  But then there were also Georgian patriots in 1812 who tried to establish "The Territory of East Florida." 

Five years later another group took over and raised their Green Cross Flag; these were American citizens whose occupation lasted only four months.  Then came the Mexican Rebel Flag, inspired mostly by a pirate named Luis Aury, who said he was holding the island "in trust for Spain."  This was followed by the seven-starred flag of the Confederacy which stayed flapping until the end of the Civil War.  After which came the final flag of the United States.  There should now be a Flag of Tourism, but we'll let that slide for the moment.

Places of historical interest, especially when they're nestled by the sea inspire poems.  But I didn't write about flags on my first night in Fernandina.  It was a full moon night and I wrote about moons.  

Full round cricket moon
fog moon, moss moon
peeper cheep, paper moon
Fernandina sea moon.
Haven't seen
so many moons
in many moons . . .

Three New Books

Speaking Volumes of Santa Fe just re-published three of my favorite books -- Tunkashila, Turtle Dream and Ghost Walk.   These are collections of stories about Native America that I wrote in the 1980s mostly.  Though it took me most of my life to collect them.  I say they are new because they are newly published in fresh formats.  You can buy them in ebook, paperback or audio.  (We are still working on the audio versions of Turtle Dream and Tunkashila...soon come!)

I wrote Tunkashila in 1992 and it was published by St. Martin's Press in 1993.  Turtle Dream was published by Mariposa in 1989 and Ghost Walk followed with the same publisher in 1991.  I won't bore you with how many printings there were of the three books, but I will say they did very well.  Tunkashila was a Quality Paperback Book of the Month.  Then, one day after being available for years, these favorites of mine went out of print.

Weren't readers interested in shapeshifters, monsters, demons?  Weren't they curious about how Mother Earth began on Turtle's back?  Didn't they care about werewolves of the Navajo and medicine men who healed with Gila Monster's gift of power?  And what about Zahgotah, the Apache who changed into a bear?  And Owl Boy who decided he couldn't be human any more and took to the woods?

I got many letters and emails from American Indians who praised these books because of their storytelling and their faithfulness to the original stories of The People.  I grew up with one of the stories, Turtle Dream about the woman who rides into the next world on great turtle's back, a story told to me when I was five by my mother.  I was honored when a Cherokee woman wrote to me and said she was naming her daughter Turtle Woman and she wanted me to know it was because of the title story of the book.  

Once two Lakota brothers wrote to me.  They were having an argument, they said, about the beginning of the world.  "We come from the earth, like the corn, just as you say in your book Tunkashila," one brother said.  But the other brother said, "You should not say that we came across the Bering Straight Land Bridge -- that is not true.  Still, I like the stories."

I wrote to each brother and said, "I present many variations on the beginning of the world.  All of them are true to the people who believe them.  But, as for me, and what I believe, I favor coming out of the earth like the new green corn."  

All three of these books are about change and changes; the earth is moving and the people are moving around.  As the Navajo story says, "There is a mountain called, The Mountain Around Which Moving Is Done."  We are moving all over the place today just like in the beginning.  And, like in the beginning, we seem not to know where we are going.  The first people, First Man and First Woman, Locust, Ant, Horned Toad, Wolf, Coyote, Nuthatch, Great Snake and all the others -- they could see themselves changing as the world changed from darkness to light, and as they moved ever upward.  They came from the womb of Mother Earth and rose not on wings of light but using fingers and claws and arrows to effect their emergence.

They made it to the fourth, and some say, the fifth world that we live in now.  Yes, it is all one world, with many parts, and many changes. You can look down and say, We came from there.  You can look up and say, We came from there too.  There are stories about many emergences; people who fell from the sky like shooting stars; people who turned into turtles crossing the great river of life.  People, just like you and me, who say, as in the old Navajo story about a man meeting a star person.  They eat corn together and the star person says, "This is my food too."

  

 

A Feather at the Miami Book Fair International

We have a Blue-fronted Amazonian parrot named George who's been a part of our family for thirty years.  George sheds his feathers, one at at a time, and we save them and give them away. 

I give them to children at my storytelling events.  At the Book Fair -- in the schools and at the storytelling tent -- George's feathers were a hit.  I asked a question, and for a good answer, the listener got a good luck feather.  

One small boy got a feather for dancing.  I asked him to come up on stage and make some SSzzounds with me and he declined, so I drummed and he started dancing a nice little rhythmic dance.  He was rocking, softly shuffling his feet to the drumbeat.  For a while, he just hung, floating like a bee.  I don't think he knew the entire audience was cheering him on.  He got a nice feather for that!  

My grandson and grand-daughter came up on stage, too -- that's Taj you see in the snapshot.  He would've been on stage the whole time if I'd let him.  Anais has never come up with me before and she surprised me by making a great growl into the mic.  I asked her if she'd do another one.  Her eyes drifted upward to the top of the tent.  Then her eyes met mine and she said, "No!" 

That's kids -- you always get the truth.  Like the boy who gave me the hug and said, "Thanks for the stories" and the other boy who scowled at me and said, "Get away old man."  But he got a feather too.  Why not, George wouldn't want it any other way.   

Just Magic

We have been on the road for ten days.  Sacramento, San Francisco and Sonoma.  First, the writing workshop in Sacramento where we met some fine writers, enjoyed the company of Alice and Jim Carney and the whole Carney family -- wonders all! -- and saw, on Halloween night a small white angel toddle up the walkway while her mother, a large woman with a booming voice chanted, "C'mon Mama, C'mon Mama" and the barely bobbling youngster teeters up the walk with hands scribbling in the air, grasping for candy.  Of all the costumes and pranksters, this is the best.  But, then, it's no costume, it's just magic.

Next morning, an email from my old and dear friend Fred Burstein, reading coach extraordinaire, poet, woodsman, carver, builder, man of big shoulders and wide interests, well, this fabulous Fred sends us a poem from one of his students, Jennifer, and it goes like this:

Over Halloween we were walking back
to Grandpa's, and a cat started following us.
We walked up to a different person.
We asked if this was her cat.
She said, No, but she does know that cat.
His name is Heath.  The cat stayed out
on my grandpa's porch, and Grandma Lill
brang the cat inside, and fed it.
And now Grandpa is angry cause
he don't want to be responsible
for the cat, that's why.

____

The whistler is one of those gifts you sometimes encounter when you wake up at 3 AM.  We were in San Francisco on Nob Hill in Jim and Alice's guest suite which was the kind of place Jack London might've written a story in, and I was lying in bed thinking that life is sometimes so magical you can't put it into words, and right then, this whistler comes along and I try to get it down --

A solitary whistler, part swallow, part sparrow
toodling between the tides of traffic
and suddenly the traffic quits, disappears
the whistler wanders on, whistling
a person with no name, no face, no listener
in the whole sleeping city but me.

___

And then, this morning, a daft raccoon staring into the sunlight with whiskers long as broom straws.  Sitting there, staring out of dark eyes, winking in the sun, saying: "I have every right to be here, the people feed me and I waddle around and look at things and take my time as I please."  The dog next door ignores the raccoon, and when we pass by again, a half hour later, the masked fellow is sitting in a flower pot, as if he's a furry flower planted there.   So life goes -- magic!