Well I decided on one particular picture for my profile, and kept my "tribal wolf" to watch over my quote. I chose this one beautiful picture because it ties together so many things that I love about the Pacific Northwest, my Native American culture, and the journey through life thus far.

My tribal People were once called People of the River and I love seeing our Yakima River whenever I visit. Our valley would be a desert if not for the river. There is the Cascase Mountain Range that cuts through the state and I can see it's ridge at times.

When I look back on the path I've traveled I can see the flow of the river has been my companion. I trust the river to return me to the sea, which is the end of this part of the Journey.

I have been here on this website for several months now and today I find my page is set the way I want it to look. I have made many wonderful friends who live far away or just down the road. I know that when I come here that there will be messages for me to respond to, new Journals to read, and great articles that will help me navigate these troubled times.

I am grateful for all that AARP offers, by this website, and for all the supportive columns that speak to this age group I've entered while on my own Journey. I am especially grateful the IT group was able to save this site from crashing entirely. Hope is the promise of Spring, but for now I am going to enjoy the season and watch for the first snowflake to fall on the river side trees.

Many of my good friends have asked after Carl, since his heart attack. I want to thank you all for your care and concern and most importantly, for your prayers.

Carl is doing okay but he is finally realizing that as good as he feels he isn't quite back to full strength yet. He pushed himself to get out and visit everyone who visited him in the hospital and ran himself ragged. I have to sit on him to stay home and rest.

He isn't happy about the change in diet but has had to accept that all of us have to change the way we eat as we get older. It is the only way we will continue to get older!

I remind him that the grandsons will be graduating from High School here in the next few year and then they will be off to college, hopefully. And our precious granddaughter will get married one day and have our great grandchildren, hopefully.  I ask him if he wants to be there to hold those precious ones, and he nods his head--Yes!

I then tell him that we will have more time to do what we want to do, like write our life story, give time to a ministry to other's who need to hear that God will end their alcoholism, give peace of mind to those with ADHD, and mend relationships where these things have caused harm.

But most of all we will be together, walking hand and hand as has been our greatest joy from our first date. At age 45, Carl never married until he met and married me. I lived twenty-two years unmarried, after my divorce from the kids' father. I enjoyed that time alone. But God said it wasn't good for man to be alone. So he brought us together and it has been good.

We should all find our own reasons for taking care of our health and our relationships with friend and family. I hope you find some good reasons today because I want to keep my friends for as long as God gives me breath. I've come to love you all.

Thanks for praying for my Carl, and for reading my Journals, and leaving kind words of encouragement and concern.

Your Friend,

Cby

The drums are heard across the land, for the man who brings real hope. Obama! The 44th President of the United States of America

Mt St Helen blew May 17th, 1980 and life was never the same again.

I always blamed that volcanic eruption for my divorce. My husband became a little squirrely after that morning.

It probably had more to do with the fact it was exactly ten years since the day he stepped on a land mine, on the last day of his tour of duty in Viet Nam.

The truth of the matter was he had run out of ways to hide from the trauma. He never said so, but there at the end I got the feeling that every time he looked at me he was reminded he had been grasping at straws.

"A desperate person will try anything to save himself no matter how unlikely"--Thomas More

I was probably the least likely of all to make a good wife for him. I was a bit of a dreamer and didn’t talk much. I had my own ideas on how to raise the kids, run the house, and amuse myself with sewing projects. I let him pay for it all, and he did.

When he wanted a real meal he went to his mother’s for home made tortillas and Chili Verde. When he wanted real companionship he would go play poker with his brothers, shoot pool with his cousin, or coach a long list of sports. The only thing we had in common were the kids we brought into this world, and the one son we had buried. We existed on a set of parallel tracks heading in the same direction, until we ran out of ground.

A few years after the divorce I enrolled in some college courses and was delighted that my brain still functioned. My Biology teacher was a little impressed too. I decided to make a go of it and applied to Gonzaga University for the Fall Semester, and was accepted as a transfer student. I don’t know who was more thrilled, me or my Chemistry teacher. She is the one who told me about the Indian Health Scholarships. I was awarded a full scholarship that paid tuition, books, and a living stipend. I was set.

Since I was awarded full custody of our two kids, and a smittens of child support, we all packed up for the four hour drive to Spokane, Washington. But before we went an inch we stopped to pray. I arranged a circle of stones and kneeled in the dust of the road, and made a covenant with God. I layed my life in his hands and welcomed His guidance.

Everything fell into place. We found a house, made some friends through the church, and even received a visitor the first month we were there. Somehow my old boyfriend, the Indian Cowboy, got wind that I was divorced and looked me up in the phone book. He and I walked through Riverfront Park and talked about our life since we’d last talked. He wasn’t happy in his marriage. It just seemed to him this was perfect timing. I was happy to see him, but my feelings for him weren’t strong enough to last this long. He accepted that and we remained friends.

We became really active in our church. An Indian Prayer Group was formed and I joined. It was so much fun to get together with other Indian people and pray and sing and share food. Membership began to grow until there was quite a few of us. It was remarkable enough so that our Prayer Group was invited to another Indian Reservation to share how we had done it. We accepted.

It took seven hours to get there but we finally arrived on the Swinomish Indian Reservation. Our first evening with the Indians there was heart warming. I met several people, but I was most impressed by this miniature woman who was an elder. She gave her testimony and when she was finished I asked someone what her name was. They told me her name was Myrtle Bailey. I smiled as I wondered...could it be?

At breakfast the last morning I asked my host if Myrtle Bailey had any family members named George. He nodded his head and said yes, she had a son and grandson. I smiled and didn’t say anything more. Not until it became obvious my host and his family wanted to know why I asked. Without preamble I just said, "George Bailey is my real father."

When I layed my life into God’s hands I had no idea he would re-unite me with my real father. I had only ever heard his name once, when I was eight years old. My Mom told me that he had shown up at the party we’d attended that weekend, at the home of some friends. He noticed me in the pack of kids running in and out of the house and asked her if I was his. She admitted I was, but she asked him not to say anything. She didn’t want me to be confused. She later changed her mind though, and decided I deserved to know.

I never thought of George as my Dad. My Step Dad was a great father and I knew he loved me. I knew both my parents loved me, even when they lost me for a while. But my Step Dad passed away the year I was 14 and I missed having him around. I guess God decided it was time to know the truth.

We had eight wonderful years of getting to know each other and we kept up a weekly exchange of letters until he passed away too. My Mom refused to see him. She wanted him to remember her the way she looked the last time he saw her, when I was eight years old. That made her 28 years old then.  Wow, she was still young!

Now they are both gone. But I am glad for the last few years I had with each of them. Love and respect was restored. I know it was because of the covenant.

I did graduate from college but not until I flunked out of Gonzaga. I had to go back to the community college level to fix my GPA. I did better than fix it. I made the Dean’s List three times and the President’s List once. I graduated with an Associates in Arts and Science. I was all set to continue at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon as a Biochem Major, but my daughter asked me to wait until she graduated High School with her friends, before we moved to Oregon. That was the longest four years I’ve ever lived though.

I met a great guy before the end of the ’80’s. He was in the Air Force and we dated long distance for five years. It was the perfect arrangement. We saw each other on holidays and summer vacation. He had the best sense of humor and he was so smart. He wasn’t very spiritual though and I guess thats where the relationship broke down. He asked me to marry him and even though I said yes, and flew to England to marry him, I ended up flying back eight weeks later. I didn’t date again for twelve years.

At the end of the summer, in 1968 I began to make some major decisions in my life. I was still a ward of the court of King County. I was attending a great school that was preparing me for college. I had met someone I knew I would marry someday, but I had decided I would never have any children of my own.

My boyfriend was an Indian Cowboy. Talk about an oxymoron! He would travel every summer to rodeos all over the United States, trying to rack up points in the RCA. I didn't mind him being gone because I got to keep his '56 Chevy and drive my friends around. When he wasn't following the rodeo he was taking classes at the community college. He was four years older than me and took care of me by buying me a winter coat, or showing me how to keep my shoes in good condition. He was the best boyfriend a girl could have and if I had been older I would have recognized that fact. I didn't. 

Viet Nam was a going concern in those days and yet it was a new concept to me. I never thought about foreign countries or their problems. My boyfriend enlisted in the Army because all his buddies were going over. Warrior blood seemed to blaze through all of them. I kissed him goodbye and sadly for us, it became out-of-sight-out-of-mind.

It wasn't long before I met a returning Viet Nam Veteran while my boyfriend was gone. It was so tragic; he had lost both his legs the last day of his tour of duty. He was an older brother to one of my friends and everyone in their family was torn up about it.  I have to shake my head in dismay at how ridiculous I was about him. I was thinking he needed me, that he would never have anyone in his life if I didn't protect him with my love and my life. When he asked me to marry him I said yes. I was 17.

I tried to tell him I never wanted to have kids. I never wanted to put my kids through what I had lived though. He didn't hear a word of it. He said he needed to know he was a whole man and he had to have a son to prove it.  Against my worst fears I gave in and became pregnant. We had a son and then ten months later another son, that we eventually lost to Reye's Syndrome. To heal from that trauma I got pregnant again and had my daughter. All this before I was 21.

Ten years of marriage went by in a blur. I was busy raising my kids and trying to understand my husband who suffered Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.  I tried so hard to be a better parent than mine were to me, and it was darned hard work that never stopped. Don't ask me about politics, or the economy, or even who was the President. My only focus was on the stretched out elastic on my pants. Three years in a row I was always wearing maternity smocks.

It was a good thing I had those kids because they are the only good thing to come out of that marriage. My husband divorced me  and married a woman more compatible with him. He and I had nothing much in common at all. It wasn't all that hard to let him go. We stayed friends to this day.

I know that if I hadn't had my kids when I did I never would have had any. I had to have a hysterectomy by the time I was twenty-two. I cannot imagine what my life would have been without my son and daughter, or my grandchildren. I try not to let my mind wander to "what If" in regard to the son we lost, or my Indian Cowboy. I just have to stick with what is real.

Some of my most endearing memories are of my childhood, growing up during the 60’s. The days and nights of those childhood days seemed to stay around longer than they do now. The summers took a long time to pass and it was always a restless time for me, because I would look forward to the new school year with great longing. I was an old soul in a young body.

I tried out a lot of skills around the house and learned to cook and clean and even crochet and knit. I was my Mom’s "little helper".

I watched after my brothers and sisters and played along side them even when we all jumped in the bath tub together and bumped around like a bunch of guppies. It seemed we stayed there for hours, until the water got cold and our fingers wrinkled up. Then we would attach the towels around our neck and fly through the house like Superman, buck-naked! I was both a wild child and the responcible oldest child at the same time.

 One summer night my Step Dad suffered a heart attack and some High School boys found him laying along side the road to our house. They carried him all the way home. They layed him out on his bed and he called me to his side to tell me he was sick. He gave me a quarter to give to our neighbor so they would call an ambulance. It seemed a strange request but I did as he asked. Sirens arrived and so many people came through our house. No idea where my Mom was that night so they packed us up and took us away in one car, with my Step Dad going in the other direction in the ambulance.

It was six months before we got to go home again. It felt like years.

That was the first time we had ever heard of the word "foster home", and "foster parents". It felt wrong. I didn’t see my younger brothers the whole time. My sister and I were put in the same home and she suffered from boils on her bottom all the time because they made her sleep on plastic. I learned to steal while I was there because the food on the basement shelves tasted better than what was served in plates at dinner time. I still hate the smell of Hominy!

After we returned home life was always a little bit on edge. My parents did the best they could, but after his heart attack my Step Dad didn’t work again, and poverty settled into our home and never left. It may sound like something out of a comedy act but we were so poor my sister and I shared a single pair of underpants, taking turns after each wash day. She was a bed wetter and always hid the wet panties until they were all gone, and only one pair remained.  

Meals were always interesting because we were given food that was always in a brown bag or a can with a white label. It was called "commodity". We were poor but my Step Dad could always make a batch of oatmeal cookies with raisins. My Mom made the best yeast bread ever! I never had to steal food in our house, but I continued to take things when I "wandered away" from the house.

It didn’t stop even when my Mom caught me and yelled and screamed at me that she had better never "catch me stealing again".  So that meant I had to be better at it than I already was, so I wouldn’t get caught.

It was around that time that my Step Dad saw more of his older kids, from before his marriage to my Mom. They were mostly all grown up. My Step Dad was seventeen years older than my Mom. I remember one Sunday they came to visit and we all got into our best clothes and we went to "church". We’d never been there before and it was so incredible! I loved the smell, and the candles, and the music was like nothing I had ever heard before. I wanted to go back there again.

My Step Dad explained that if I wanted to go to that church I had to take special classes on Saturdays, called Catechism. I would get myself up and walk the two miles to the church and take the classes. I had to memorize lots of prayers and make the sign of the cross at the beginning and end of every prayer. I thought it was like picking up the phone to call God.

They also talked about how to talk to the priest, and how to answer him when he asked about my sins. I didn’t know I had any. We went through the list and yes, I did have sins. Every time I took something that didn’t belong to me, it was my sin. What was worse was My friend Jesus saw me take it and it made him sad. I had to say I was sorry and give it back ,and not do it again. Plus I had to say lots of prayers over and over. That was hard.

The classes never ended but I did get to dress up in a white dress and a little white veil. We didn’t have the right shoes for me, or sox either, but I didn’t care. I was going to get to eat the special bread God sent down from heaven to feed us and I would never be hungry or thirsty again! Amen! (making the sign of the cross with no smiling)

 I was now a baptized Catholic and I was given to the Catholic Children’s Services when we were taken away from my parents, for the last time. My parents were alcoholics and considered unfit parents. No one would listen when I tried to explain that I took care of the kids sometimes, but not all the time.

One of my older Step-sisters took us all to her house, but she wasn’t as nice to us as she was when our Dad was there. She was bossy and made us eat things that were hard to swallow, like Bulgar cereal.

 The younger kids started wetting the bed every night, just like before. She made my three-year old brother wash his own sheets in cold water. It was impossible to live there, so I ran away and went straight to the Juvenile Detention Center, and told on her.

We were sent to separate foster homes and I rarely saw my brothers and sisters again. Not  until we grew up, one by one, and met at our Mom’s house, back on the reservation. Mom had moved back there after her and my Step Dad got divorced. Once we were grown up we saw for ourselves how bad her drinking was. We finally understood why were were taken from her. It turned out okay. We did learn a lot of things that we never would have otherwise, I have to admit, but we never forgot where we came from.

The 60’s for me will always be the good memories of swimming like guppies and flying like Superman and eating dropped oatmeal cookies with raisins. Going home again has since become the major theme in my life. I look forward to seeing Jesus face-to-face, and thanking him for forgiving me, every time I ever made him sad.

Today I am an old soul in an old body, but God has promised me a new body one day. Amen! (smiling but no longer making the sign of the cross. )

Only great minds can read this
This is weird, but interesting!
fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too

Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

I was born in April of 1953, the same year that James Watson and Francis Crick gave us the double helix of DNA. Perhaps that was what precipitated my interest in science. Although it was more probably the first time I sat on the sidewalk and watched ants coming and going. My mind expanded that day to realize that God had placed the tiniest heart into this little ant and it beat just like mine.

During that time we were Urban Indians but we still lived as though we were still on the Reservation. Dad would bring home a huge fish and we’d sit down to dinner and I will never forget those big eyes in that dead fish. Dad offered one to me and when I refused he’d pop it into his mouth! Ugh. I develped some great skills as an actress quite early, I recall. My sense of smell would let me know when to pretend to fall asleep in my highchair. If there was seafood on the table the smell would literally put me to "sleep" so I wouldn't have to eat it. I saw a picture of it once. My head was dropped side-ways and it did look like I was asleep. Mom was fooled!  Wish I had snagged that picture then, because its in someone else’s box of old photos now.

Up until I was three I thought I was a pretty cute kid but then Mom started bringing home new babies and I became her little helper. I never had much say as to who came into and out of my life so I just tried to make friends in my own way. Sitting side by side, making mud pies, or dropping oatmeal cookies, and climbing up a tree to eat plums worked pretty good. I prefer one-on-one conversations when I make friends.

I became a wanderer early in life. I walked out the door when I was only four and made my way around the big city of Renton, Washington. I found a little bible class in the basement of one of our neighbors. It was there that I first learned about ’school’, and about Jesus. I wasn’t a regular attendee because I didn’t know one day of the week from another. But every once in a while I’d wander by that place again and enjoy the morning with all the kids and sing songs about Jesus. My favorite one was "Jesus love the little children...red and yellow, black and white...Jesus loves the little children of the world.

Dad was an electrician and was called on to work hard setting up power lines all over the state. We moved a lot. I remember one year I went to a one-room school house, just like Little House On The Prairie. I probably learned more in that one year than I did at any other time because I could listen in on the lessons of the older kids while I drew pictures of sun flowers, or molded clay turtles. My world expanded even more that year.

Urban life was okay, but it lacked something vital. We went home to the Reservation often to reconnect with Grandma and Grandpa and all the rest of the family. But instead of being renewed my parents brought something home with them that made everyone in the family fight. It was called ’booze’.

By the time I was six I knew I couldn’t trust anyone ever again. Booze made people crazy. They would laugh and talk louder and louder and then before long the  arguments began and then the fights with fists. The smell was the worst. I’d want to leave, to just walk away, but I had to wait until everyone was asleep. They would sleep a long time the next day and be sick. They didn’t notice then that I was gone, or for how long.

That was how I became a wanderer when I was four. It’s a good thing I met Jesus that first time. He has been my only trusted friend since then. I still make friends along the way and get to know people, but deep in my heart I know that they will be like my parents, unable to deal with problems. I can’t do much for them either, except be a friend, make pies with them, or drop oatmeal cookies. Sometimes Jesus will whisper something for me to say to someone and it cheers them up. Sometimes they hear something from Him and they tell me and it cheers me up. Jesus is just that kind of guy. I hope he is your friend too.

 Early on Sunday morning my husband, Carl, woke up with severe nausea that I could hear coming from his bathroom, when he woke me up at 2:30 am.

I felt around the headboard for my glasses and tried to focus and asked him what was wrong when Carl returned to bed-- he looked so pale. He said he thought that the Flu shot he got Friday gave him the flu, and then he rushed back to the bathroom.

I searched for our bottle of Promethezine to help his nausea and gave him a tablet and we hoped he could keep it down. It seemed to help. Then Carl asked if I would rub his back because it really hurt. His chest hurt too and he was rubbing that. I remember how sore I would get from vomiting so I rubbed his back and we talked a bit more.

It was when Carl tried to lay down to go back to sleep and then sat up again that I realized he was not doing good. He complained he couldn’t relax because of his sore chest and it seemed to spread clear through to his shoulder blades. I sat up and looked for my clothes and told him, "we’re going to the hospital".

Later that morning, around 7am, we were in the CCU at St Vincents hospital. Carl had had emergency surgery and two stents put in to open a blocked artery. He woke up and looked at me a moment and when he recognized me he asked, "did they ever find out what was wrong with me?" I said, " yes, you’ve had a heart attack". He went back to sleep for another hour or so and then came to again and seemed more awake this time. He looked at me and said, "I feel pretty good, can we go home now?"

I laughed and it felt good to be able to do that so soon after the morning I’d had. But it was better than the one Carl had! He said he felt like a flea being squeezed in half.

The moral of this story is that we need to be aware of the symptoms of heart attacks. I had been very familiar because of my own episodes with Atrial Fibrilation. But I also give Safety Topic Meetings every Monday at work, and we talk about this very topic once a year.

So I knew it was better to take Carl to the hospital and check out the chest pains. His doctor said if he had gone back to bed he would not have woke up again. We got him to the hospital in the "Golden Hour", the first hour the symptoms ----nausea, chest pain that comes and goes, shortness of breath, and fatigue--became apparent.

In emergency medicine, the golden hour is the first sixty minutes after the occurrence of multi-system trauma. It is widely believed that the victim’s chances of survival are greatest if they receive definitive care in the operating room within the first hour after a severe injury. Recent scrutiny has questioned the validity of the “golden hour” as a rigidly defined timeframe, although its core principle of rapid intervention in trauma cases remains universally accepted.

While the golden hour is a trauma treatment concept, two emergency medical conditions have well-documented time-critical treatment considerations: stroke and myocardial infarction (heart attack). In the case of stroke, there is a window of three hours within which the benefit of clot-busting drugs outweighs the risk of major bleeding. In the case of a heart attack, rapid stabilization of fatal arrhythmias can prevent sudden cardiac death. In addition, there is a direct relationship between time-to-treatment and the success of reperfusion (restoration of blood flow to the heart), including a time dependent reduction in the mortality and morbidity.---Wikipedia

  Carl is coming home today, feeling more alive than he has in a long time. We are grateful for the prayers and good wishes.