Follow the Senior Hummingbird

I know that optimists aren’t supposed to whine.  Actually, I’ve been more of an optimist-in-training for the last 6 months.  After years of faking being an optimist (because I knew that pessimists don’t have much fun), I read the old, but good story of Pollyanna – the girl who knew how to play the “glad game.”  With her as my mentor, I did make some progress toward turning into a “real” optimist.  I was genuinely sunnier and happier, and it felt good.

But I’ve begun to slip.  Although I secretly suspected that optimists are born rather than made, I latched onto the hope that acting like you believed something could make it real.  And I do know some genuine optimists whose sunny dispositions don’t waver.  I like having them in my life as a counterweight to a lot of less optimistic people I know who are coping with serious, sad problems.  My mother,  like the character in that famous cartoon strip that always had a raincloud above his head, was a pessimist by nature.  One’s own nature is difficult to overcome, but I don’t want to believe impossible to change – at least readjust a little.

One complication of  becoming an optimist at my age is that I’ve also spent 67 of my 68 years being very naive.   My rose-colored glasses have now broken, and life, especially the politics of the day, look both clearer and a lot dirtier.  I’ve gone from believing just about everyone to believing no one.  It’s lonely as a conscientious doubter.  Although my daily life is presently very good, the “what if’s” could rise to daunting proportions if I don’t do battle with them.

When I feel my optimism slipping, I keep reminding myself that I really am in control of many things in life that drag down the spirit.  There are off switches to many “downers” that can tug on me and pull me toward the pits of pessimism.  But it’s tiring.  I laughed heartily at a cartoon I saw recently that had an optimist going on and on about how wonderful everything was and the two who were listening commented to each other, “Optimists are so exhausting to be around.”  My mother’s words echoed, “I can’t be like that.”

I’m sure that being an optimist is harder for people like me who have a short supply of optimism genes.  Yet, when I dip, there’s often some reminder to pick me up again.  Today it was the words on a paper cup of coffee I was drinking.  It had a line at the halfway mark that said  “half full – Seattle’s Best has been seeing it that way since 1970.”

Comments?? E-mail Suellen at ZimaTravels.com

When I first went to China in 1988, the streets were quite empty of cars.  Large overcrowded buses, bikes, and some taxis were the usual modes of local transportation.  The rickshaw was already a thing of the past, but a delightful invention called a pedicab was a tricycle which small, but well-muscled drivers pedaled up front with one or two passengers in a double seat behind.  That was my favorite form of transportation because it had the quiet and close feeling of walking down the streets, but didn’t require any effort.  And the price was right.

None of my students ever thought they would own a car.  A personal car was something they envied about America and more developed countries.  When my students finished school and got jobs, their work units sometimes had a car or two with drivers.  Being able to get a car and driver to take you around was a sign that you were moving up the ladder.  But taxis were plentiful and much cheaper than in the U.S., so getting around by taxi or pedicab was still easy and cheap when I didn’t have a bike.

On my visits in the 1990s, more streets and even highways were being built in China.  It was obvious that more cars equaled more traffic jams, and bigger cities started filling up sometimes to gridlock even though cars were small.  One of the first things a Chinese friend of mine exclaimed when he came to the U.S. was how much of America was dedicated to roads and drivers.  Cars were plentiful, very big, and served as an extension of one’s home filled with food, gadgets, and trunks of whatnot.  His first major purchase in the U.S. was, of course,  a used car.

Changes intensified in China along with a rising economy.  There was a range of buses from overcrowded and smokey, to luxury buses where everyone had a seat, there were curtains on the windows, a movie played during the travels, and there was (thankfully) no smoking.  Some long distance buses even had a type of bed more akin to sleeping cars on trains.  Transportation was booming while at the same time becoming more and more bogged down in traffic jams.  Roads and highways couldn’t be built big enough or fast enough to keep up with the huge population on the move.

And then my friends started telling me that they were learning to drive.  Some bought cars and took great pleasure in using them.  Buses and taxis didn’t disappear, but in most large cities, the trusty pedicab was forced off the streets.  It was a pity, but also too dangerous to be on the same roads with so many cars in a hurry going this way and that way.  To the American driver, the Chinese seem to obey no rules of the roads – if there are indeed any.  It can be downright scary to ride in a car that weaves and bobs, goes when and where it wants to, double parks, and obeys traffic rules only when police are in the area.

Now just about all my friends in China own cars – and no longer small cars.  There is now the preference in China for bigger, fancier cars that attest to one’s status.  The political elites of China always had fancy cars, but they didn’t flaunt them to the public’s eye.  But now, even the police are driving Porsches.  Chinese officials can be seen in $560,000 Bentleys.  It is called by some, “corruption on wheels” and the Chinese public is getting angry at such extravagance.  And it’s quite clear by where these cars are seen that they aren’t on official business.  To throw off the public, some officials are dealing with such scrutiny by buying logos for the cars that indicate a cheaper car, while the common people affix logos to their cars of fancier cars.

The inventiveness of the Chinese continues on….

Comments?? E-mail Suellen at ZimaTravels.com

I saw their angry painted half white/natural half black faces on the tv news.  These are the children of the newly-arrived Ethiopian teenage boys I took care of as a housemother in a boarding school in Maalot, Israel, back in 1984.  Those boys, now fathers, were traumatized by walking out of Ethiopia, living as hungry refugees in Sudan, being whisked to Israel in the belly of cargo planes in the dark of night, and plopped into boarding schools with Israeli kids who didn’t want them there.

I remember their beautifully sculpted faces, their melodious chanting as they walked around the boarding school, their frustration at trying to learn Hebrew and fit into what the boarding school administration wanted them to be.  Their thin bodies shook in the cold of a Maalot winter where each would hide even his head under his one allotted blanket at night.  They were so grateful for the lotion I put on their dry skin, cracked from the cold.  No one knew why so many broke out in boils.  Without warning, the cycle of malaria would turn some suddenly into a shaking mass of feverish sweat.  And they endured the painful frequent combing of their lice-infested kinky hair.

Believing that all Jews were their brothers, and that Israel was the paradise they yearned for, they wanted to be Israeli.  But, coming from Ethiopia that had never been dominated by a white country, they were not prepared for being black in a white society.  Nor had they expected being looked down upon as primitive in a technologically advanced society.

Grieving for the family members who never made it to Israel, struggling with a strange language that they were expected to learn instantly, being unwanted and unliked, they defended themselves by throwing stones at their attackers.  Even in the more harmonious boarding schools,  these proud, dignified Ethiopians began to understand that Jewish or not, there was a difference between black and white.  And black wasn’t as good.  They eventually confided in me that they wanted to be white too.  It was heartbreaking.

I have followed their immigration in Israel over the years enough to know that theirs has not been a happy story.  Although the government tried to provide what the Ethiopian families needed for a healthy transition, the Ethiopians sank to the bottom of Israeli society.  The only place where Ethiopians have excelled in Israel is in the army where their natural physical attributes make them outstanding.  A few are crawling into law and politics, but the number of success stories is still low.  One movie I saw of an Ethiopian child struggling with the emotional conflicts of being Ethiopian in Israel was agonizing to watch.  A few painful books have been written by older Ethiopian survivors of coming to Israel.

The teenagers I took care of lost the innocence of having no color line when they came to Israel.  They could “see” black and white, but they didn’t “feel” it.  Now their children are chanting too, but these are angry slogans in demonstrations against what they are calling Apartheid in Israel.  The  racism that turns couples away from buying homes, segregates Ethiopian children in schools and neighborhoods, and keeps Ethiopians in low paying jobs is being challenged as never before.

I weep for them now, as I did then.

Comments?? E-mail Suellen at ZimaTravels.com

I was 14 when Elizabeth and Hazel were 15 years old.  I lived in Massachusetts and they lived in Little Rock, Arkansas.  But just about everyone in the U.S. got to know Elizabeth and Hazel through a black and white photo by Will Counts that became iconic.  Little Rock was being forced by the federal government to integrate Central High School in 1957.  Nine selected black students tried to go to school that day.

The photo branded Elizabeth and Hazel — black Elizabeth as stoic and strong, white Hazel as the ugly personification of racial hatred.   It was a shameful day in American history that has not been forgotten even 50 years later.  The National Guard prevented the nine black students from attending school that day, but Elizabeth’s camera-caught “mix of hesitancy and resolve”  lasted a lifetime.

Elizabeth had wanted the advantages of a white high school over a black high school.  In reality, along with the other eight black students, that year was mostly a nightmare of being subjected to daily humiliations dealt by their white classmates.  There were a few exceptions to that, but far too few.  Hazel, although not identified by name in the photo, didn’t return to Central.  After suffering through a year, Elizabeth dropped out.

A newly published book by David Margolik, “Elizabeth and Hazel:  Two Women of Little Rock,” documents the rest of the story of these two women about to enter their 70s.  Their stories follow lives that diverged and intersected.  Elizabeth fought depression and suicidal thoughts.  Hazel could not forget the image of her face contorted in rage and hatred in that picture.  About five years later, after having married young and having a couple of children, Hazel called Elizabeth and apologized.  She then embarked on a “life of self-discovery and activism, much of it in the black community.”  She atoned for her prejudice any way she could.

In 1997, Hazel reached out to Elizabeth again.  As they drew closer and became friends and confidantes, they provided a much needed “source of hope and inspiration to a community intent on moving beyond its troubled history.”  They posed for newspaper pictures, made joint speaking engagements, and enrolled in a seminar on racial healing.  Even Oprah invited them to appear together on her tv show.  Elizabeth gained strength from her relationship with Hazel, got a job she loved, and set her life on a smoother course.

Far from being forgotten, the Little Rock nine were often honored.  There were many news stories about them, especially on anniversaries of that 1957 attempt at desegregation.  One of Elizabeth’s proudest moments in 1998 was hugging President Clinton after he presented her (and the other eight) with the Congressional Medal of Honor.

After a few years, in little ways, Elizabeth began to sour on reconciliation with Hazel.  By 2000, “quietly, unceremoniously, their great experiment in racial rapprochement was over.”  And herein lies the crux of the story.  “As Margolick charts the labyrinthine turns of this complex relationship, and acknowledges the pain that persists between the two women, the fissures and misunderstandings that continue to divide the races are laid bare.”

I didn’t learn that my parents were prejudiced until my husband and I adopted a black child.  When I asked my mother why I hadn’t known she was prejudiced, she said, “Because I knew it was wrong and I didn’t want to pass it on to you and your brother.”  When black speakers came to talk to our group of white parents who had adopted black children, almost all of them tried to convince us that, as whites, we had to face the fact that we were prejudiced against our black children.  And, in the mid-70s, black social workers in California stopped trans-racial adoptions dead.  They said that white people were not capable of raising black children.

It’s very complicated.

Comments?? E-mail Suellen at ZimaTravels.com

I heard the sea call to me, and like a faithful servant, I come.  Date palm fronds reaching out in a wide circle partially obscure my view of the long stretch of beach as I perch upon a bench above the sea.   Otherwise, my view is unimpeded to the sea and beyond.  Though the tide is low, the waves are quite high and break loudly.  The far view is flat and goes to a fog bank on the horizon waiting its time to creep in.

But the calm and flatness of the sea is an illusion.  So much is happening within its depths.  There are whales, dolphins, and fish even within the small portion of sea I can see.  I know that seals and sea lions are also living within my view.  Black-clad swimmers bob expectantly with their surfboards.

Thousands upon thousands of shells house a myriad of sea creatures.  Within the waves I can see, there is a swatch of algae and seaweed.  Although I cannot see it, spread throughout the water is the pollution of nitrates, phosphates, infinite and permanent beads of plastic remains, and DDT that is slowly leaking from the barrels dumped into the sea many years ago when DDT was banned. Sad, so sad.  The sea has become a wastebasket, a gigantic toilet bowl, a mix of unsea-like stuff.

The sea is powerful beyond our paltry human imaginations.  Intermingling, infinitesimal drops of saline and fresh water are changing the composition of the sea.  Climate change is in the air, and in the sea below.  This small section of sea, connected to so many other sections of the sea, responds to many forces.   Humans and tectonic plates are only part of them.  The sea has no morality as shown by the rush of the tsunami in Japan less than a year ago.  Only luck saved those that survived.

I walk to my favorite part of the beach to see sunsets.  It is like meeting a precious old friend again.  The hummingbirds are filling up on the flower nectar, the birds are standing like sentinels on their accustomed rocks out from the shore, the sun makes a sparkling path between it and the cliff where I stand and watch.

But only minutes before the sun can set, at some invisible cue, the fog bank does not creep,  but rolls in quickly.  Within a couple of minutes, all is obliterated by the fog — no sun, no moon, no islands, no rocks.  It has changed moods, preferring to hide from human eyes.  Only the sound of the waves and brief moving  bands of white froth tell us the sea remains.  The drama of the sea never disappoints me.

By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea.  There is no more majestic, mysterious, unpredictable, and strangely inspirational place on our earth.  It is a strange comfort to know that no matter how much we abuse it, the sea will remain long after humans are only an unpleasant memory in a speck of time.

Comments?? E-mail Suellen at ZimaTravels.com

Continuing with the wisdom of travel writers throughout the centuries, Paul Theroux points out that some travel writers use only their imaginations to travel.  Edgar Rice Burroughs said that creating Tarzan helped him to escape the humdrum life he was leading.  “My mind, in relaxation, preferred to roam in scenes and situations I’d never known.  I find that I can write better about places I’ve never seen than those I have.”

Saul Bellow, “henpecked, exasperated, in need of imaginative relief, felt cornered in an unhappy marriage when he conceived and wrote the book (Henderson the Rain King).  If he couldn’t go to Africa and leave his miseries behind, at least he could fantasize about such an escape.”

Travel writers can’t always be counted upon to tell the whole story.  Ernest Hemingway knew and loved Paris well in the 1920s.  He complained that “Travel writers wrote about the men fishing in the Seine as though they were crazy and never caught anything; but it was serious and productive fishing…it was interesting and good to know about, and it always made me happy that there were men fishing in the city itself, having sound, serious fishing…”

Where is the truth in what one writes?  Theroux points out that “the native of a place seldom sees what the alien sees, seldom remarks on what he or she takes for granted.  In the “Rings of Saturn” by W. G. Sebald,  Sebald “describes how the passengers in the first train he takes, from Norfolk to Lowestoft, are so silent ‘that not a word might have passed their lips in the whole of their lives.’  This is empty hyperbole.  English people, and in particular the provincial English, seldom yammer on public transport.   Without saying so, the German is comparing the English to Germans.  Still, the originality of the book arises from the remarks that only a foreigner would make, and such observations, even when they are misapprehensions and distortions, have value.”

What visions do we have of specific places we have never visited?  Theroux provides us with a list of places under the topic, “Evocative Name, Disappointing Place.”   They include Casablanca, Baghdad, Mandalay, Tahiti, Timbuktu, Marseille, Samarkand, Guatemala City, Alexandria, Sao Paulo, Biarritz.  Sometimes time is to blame.  About Kunming, he says, “Once a small, self-contained agricultural town in the rural south of China, ancient, visually bewitching, known for its serene parks, Kunming is now a huge horrendous city, overrun by cars and buses, concrete and tenements, and one of the main routes of the drug trade from Burma.”

On a variety of levels, travel can be life-changing.  To Theroux, “It sometimes seems to me that if there is a fundamental quest in travel, it is the search for the unexpected.  The discovery of an unanticipated pleasure can be life-changing.”  He lists five of what he considers “epiphanies” in his life while traveling.   I, too, have been fortunate to claim some life-changing epiphanies along the way.

“The Tao of Travel” leaves us with 10 Essentials –

1.  Leave home

2.  Go alone

3.  Travel light

4. Bring a map

5.  Go by land

6.  Walk across a national frontier

7.  Keep a journal

8. Read a novel that has no relation to the place you’re in

9.  If you must bring a cell phone, avoid using it

10.  Make a friend

I wish you BON VOYAGE in 2012!

Comments?? E-mail Suellen at ZimaTravels.com

I take travel very seriously.   Not only were my traveling years the best years of my life, but they were extremely valuable in broadening my view of the nature and cultures of the world.  Paul Theroux, noted travel writer and author of many books of his travels, has put together “The Tao of Travel:  Enlightenments from Lives on the Road.”  It is a compilation of his own thoughts as well as a vast array of other travelers over the centuries.  Here are some quotes from the book I thought were worth writing down because they made my head nod in confirmation when I read them, or offered me different mental roads to travel.

“Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination, but becomes indistinguishable from living your life.”  Paul Theroux

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.”  Mark Twain

“Ah!  Traveling makes one modest — you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”  Gustave Flaubert

“A national crisis, a political convulsion, is an opportunity, a gift to the traveler.  Nothing is more revealing of a place to a stranger than trouble.  Even if a crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveler into an eye witness.”  Paul Theroux

“All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.”  Pico Iyer

“Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next moves slowly, over periods of years,  from one part of the earth to another.”  Paul Bowles

“Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing.  Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world.”  Paul Theroux

“Airplanes have dulled and desensitized us; we are encumbered, like lovers in a suit of armor.”  Paul Theroux

“Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.”  Paul Theroux

“Perhaps the future of the travel book is the travel blog, with all its elisions, colloquial tropes, and chatty stream of consciousness.  It is obvious from the circumnavigation of the Australian Jessica Watson that the great advantage of the travel blog — especially one reporting a feat-in-progress — is the way in which anyone with a computer can be in touch.  The highs and lows of such a trip can be experienced and shared by the world in real time.  What this trip demonstrated was the exuberance, resilience, and modesty of this sixteen-year-old sailor and her successful voyage.”

“One can only really travel if one lets oneself go and takes what every place brings without trying to turn it into a healthy private pattern of one’s own and I suppose that is the difference between travel and tourism.”  Freya Stark

“The great and almost only comfort about being a woman traveler is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.”  Freya Stark

TO BE CONTINUED

Marilyn Mansdorf  holds the honorable title of  “the bunny whisperer.”   I met her a couple of years ago because she is an author.  You get to meet a lot of interesting people when you’re an author.  She had written a children’s book, “Bunny’s Busy Day,” and used photos that showed wild cottontails coming over to her house to play.  In fact, after they started coming to her house 7 years ago, she began to buy little toys for them to enjoy.  And they have come regularly ever since, bringing along relatives and the younger generation.

Technology is a double-edged sword.  It can be extremely helpful in becoming known if you know how to network and use it properly.  On the other hand, the photos could have been photoshopped.  Even though she wrote that they were very wild cottontails and in no way trained or enticed, how to prove it?  Before taking pictures digitally, she had taken hundreds of photos with the negatives to prove that they were not altered in any way.  But how to get someone to really listen to her that these were WILD cottontails?

Being an author myself who is constantly frustrated by not being able to attract much attention, I understood her frustration.  While I wanted very much for people to understand through my book, “Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird,” China’s emergence  into stardom over the last two decades beyond anyone’s expectations,  Marilyn was on a mission to teach young children tolerance and respect for the little wildness still left in our world.  Along the way, she had some encouraging false starts, but they faded away.  She kept asking herself, and me, “Why doesn’t anyone care?’

Marilyn has always been attracted to animals, and they to her.  She can’t explain the last 7 years of these wild bunnies continuing to visit her without fear.  But telling other people about it became her passion.  With one book published, four books are awaiting publication until she knows there will be a market for them.

Although lacking skills in technology, Marilyn had an abundance of energy and passion to cultivate an audience that cared about the bunnies and their continuing desire to have a human friend.  Some friends helped get her website started at bunnybooksinc.com.  And, on December 20, a beautiful article with many pictures appeared in the Orange County Register by Pat Brennan, Science and Environment Reporter.  He doesn’t understand either why the rabbits come to visit her, but he believes her bunny friends and her mission is newsworthy.   The article is reprinted on her website.

In the mission statement on her website, Marilyn “hopes that introducing children at a very early age to the mutual kindness depicted in her stories will help them grow up to be happy tolerant adults. Her love of nature and photography has melded into a mission to educate us all on how to do the same. She has managed to capture on film the ultimate example of humans living in harmony with nature.” Well said, Marilyn, and very well done.

Comments?? E-mail Suellen at ZimaTravels.com

I like happy stories anytime of the year, but particularly during holiday times.  And so I rejoiced along with the elephants upon learning of TEAPA, the Traveling Exotic Animal Protection Act, that was introduced in Congress in November.  We are not the first country to consider it.  In fact, we are at the end of a long list after Bolivia, Austria, India, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Sweden, Portugal and Slovakia that already have passed measures that ban wild animals in circus acts.

I share Jay Kirk’s feelings, “If you’re like me, you find the spectacle of animals at a circus not only disturbing but weirdly embarrassing.  It has to do with knowing that the only reason these animals have suffered is in order to learn, let’s admit it, a fairly lame set of tricks, especially when we are truly eager to see the acrobats and trapeze artists.  The paid entertainers.”  Jay Kirk is the author of the just-published “Kingdom Under Glass:  a Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man’s Quest to Preserve the World’s Great Animals.”

The documentation of what amounts to torture for these animals is sickening.  The massive elephants, who can walk 15 miles a day in their natural habitat, are confined in overheated trucks for long periods of time over what can be 50 weeks of the year going from circus location to circus location.  The ways they are “trained” to do stupid tricks involve other tools of torture — bullhooks, whips, metal pipes, and kicks.  The spirits of these majestic animals are broken to make them more compliant.

This bill will not ban circuses, but is being fought by spokespeople for Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey circus on the basis of taking away jobs provided by the 141-year old family business.  However, Kirk points out that circus animal trainers often hold a variety of jobs within a circus and will still be needed.  And, the circus did survive phasing out the cruel freak shows.  Besides, what about all those other countries ahead of the U.S. who have banned it?

I learned about TEAPA at the same time as I read that elephant rides at our local zoo have been stopped.  The reality of an elephant going on a rampage loaded with children was all too scary and possible.  Personally, I believe it’s better for the children to see the giant elephants as intelligent animals that should be respected rather than as a huge toy to play with.

I lost my admiration for Walt Disney many years ago when I had neighbors who had worked for Disney.  They told me of the horrible ways that live animals (before computer characters were possible) were forced to do what a script required.  Some even met untimely ugly deaths if they didn’t comply.  Years later, when I was at a zoo in Israel, I remember watching a camel cry — at least that is what it looked and felt like to me.  In China, I watched in horror as bears dressed in frilly clothes stood on their hind legs with a large chain around their neck as people snapped photos.  A lion was paraded on a float as a supposedly dangerous animal, but it was easy to see the animal was paralyzed and close to death.

I was never a big fan of the circus, and I particularly hated zoos after I went on a safari in Kenya where we had to search for the animals in their natural environment.  TEAPA won’t change all the cruelty to animals, but it’s a worthwhile start.  Hooray!

Comments?? E-mail Suellen at ZimaTravels.com

Once upon a time, a pretty 11-year-old girl named Jaycee is walking from her home to catch her school bus.  Rolling around in her mind are rather ordinary pre-teen thoughts like disappointment that her mom forgot to come into her room and kiss her goodbye before she went off to work,  an upcoming class trip to a water park, and the best way to ask her mom if she could shave her armpits and legs.  A car comes up and stops.  Jaycee thinks the couple in the car need directions.  And then Jaycee’s life changes into a nightmare no 11-year-old can comprehend.

Kidnapped, handcuffed, imprisoned in a small dark locked room, Jaycee awakens to unspeakable years as a sex slave to a wizard who hears angels.   He calls her special because, since she is always available, he doesn’t have to find other little girls to hurt.  Jaycee understands nothing of what is happening to her, only that it hurts — a lot!  In the worst times, the wizard takes drugs that keep him energized for many straight hours of sex.  In the long hours when he leaves her alone, she is very scared, and very bored.  She sleeps a lot because dreaming is a respite from the horrors of being awake.  She is dependent upon the wizard for everything.  When he isn’t hurting her, he can sometimes be entertaining and fun.  The wizard has a witch wife.  She doesn’t hurt Jaycee, but she is jealous of Jaycee’s relationship with her husband.   It’s all so confusing to a young girl!

As the next few years go by, Jaycee is still not allowed to go out in the sun and fresh air.  Her boredom is relieved somewhat by a limited number of books, magazines, a television, numerous cats and dogs that come and go at the wizard’s whims, and a journal that Jaycee writes.   But the wizard tells her she must never write or say her name ever again.  She tears her name out of her journal.  She chooses the name Allissa, but keeps her real name deep inside her.  She misses her friends and her mom so very much.  Do they remember her?  She tries to please the wizard and the witch so that they will be nicer to her.  After all, they totally control her life.

When she is 14, her body begins to change.  She is pregnant.  Her first daughter is born — right there in the dark room.  At last she does not feel as alone as before.   Television and instinct become her guides to taking care of a baby daughter.  Three years later, another baby girl is born.  Although she and the girls are allowed outside in the fenced in backyard, she must raise them without doctors, dentists, playmates, or teachers.  She finds ways to teach them from the computer.

It’s a life — of sorts.  She helps the wizard with his printing business.  She feels loved.  She feels safe.  But she doesn’t feel free.  Yet, she doesn’t make a move out of the reach of the wizard and his witch wife.  Even when they finally go out together to shop, or even to the beach, she does her best to look invisible and only really feels safe back in her tent in the fenced-in backyard.

Eighteen years after the day she never got to school, some police officers come to her home and ask her her name.  She tells them Allissa.  They ask her over and over again.  Although she can’t say Jaycee outloud, she finally writes her name for the police.  And her captivity is over.  The wizard and the wicked witch are taken to jail.

Her body is free, but her mind doesn’t yet know how to be free.   She can now make her own decisions, but how to make decisions as an adult when she has never done it?  She is reunited with her mother who never stopped talking to her little girl through the moon, and the whole family lives together with therapists and horses.  The process is slow, frustrating, and sometimes painful.  But not as painful as those terrible years.

And they all, except for the wizard and the witch, live happily ever after.

Comments?? E-mail Suellen at ZimaTravels.com