I’m invited to a women’s dinner, themed “A Few of my Favorite Things” where we are all to bring five objects that describing us as am individual. An eighty plus friend of mine is so excited to have others know about her, she put her five selected items on her couch, ready to go, a month early! When I visited again a few days later most of the things were put away and new ones were out, each representing different facets of her uniqueness. There will be many attending and I ‘m imagining women all over my neighborhood trying to select ONLY five objects to feature their many peculiarities and also they’re wondering what surprises we’ll discover about each other.
When I mentioned the dinner’s theme to John he was he excited! The first thing he said, in response to, “So we’ll bring five of our most favorite things.” was; “I’M NOT GOING!”  But within minutes he was dashing around the house showing me things that SHOULD BE BROUGHT. Like a bayonet!?? An antique wrench! A member of his lantern collection!
“Are you saying I should take those?” I said. He looked at me like I was stupid, “No. Those are some of MY favorite things.” “Wow those are great.” I said,’ Now help me think of what I should bring.” This only caused a moments confusion as he mentally changed gears, then he said, “Let’s get back to the movie.”
Upon reflection, I might be attending a Dinner of Babel! Will each of us, me included, be so busy telling extended, very extended stories about ourselves that we don’t listen to the others? More likely we’ll do both at the same time. Women can do that. We could completely download our lives several times to various people within MINUTES, and still be able to report back later to our husbands, in great detail, all that was said by everyone else. Men would never successfully survive this environment so as sorry as I am I can’t take John as my favorite thing I’m glad for him.  nancymauerman.com

Sometimes your best friend can drive you up the wall. Sometimes your enemy acts in the position of a best friend when he confronts you, illuminating and mirroring your opportunities to improve.
Yesterday John answered the phone and a childhood friend was so excited to finally find him, The old friend had been wanting to return a guy type thing he’d borrowed almost fifty years ago. The borrowing, and not returning, had cause a riff. But now all is square.
One of my childhood friends I visited a while back and returned a small white plastic horse she always thought she’d unjustly manipulated from me. The horse stands proudly in a display case not far from where I’m blogging. Its a beautiful little horse not because it’s well proportioned, it isn’t. It’s head is too small. The head looks like it was sawed off a smaller animal and glued onto my horse. Its beautiful because it reminds me that living honestly makes me happy with myself and others.
Sometimes your best friend is your sister. In the book ‘Dragon’s Tale’ Paul is fascinated but also exasperated with his sister’s imagination. Paul reports to his mother the strange stories his sister, Anna, has told him, hinting Mom should fix Anna. But then there are times when Paul would love to step into those stories and try them out.
“My dragon’s using Dad’s screw driver,” said Anna, “and that’s why he can’t find it. She’s fixing TV so I can walk inside the picture and go swimming.”
When Iva Lou swims underwater she breaths in the water and spits it out her mouth. She can spit it out between her side teeth to change direction.”
“I’d like to do that.” said Paul.  nancymauerman.com

Dragon’s Tale is based on myself and my children Paul and Anna as we grew up and down together.
I learned up and down the ladder of life with my children. Paul, at six, sometimes played like a child, but at others he assumed the role of our family’s provider and bought us all dinner at a fine restaurant, the local doughnut shop.

Anna’s mind solved any problem she encountered with a fluidity of hot butter on the mica belly of a landing space craft. She explained ‘The Mysteries’ like she was directly and genetically related to Jung and Madam Curie both. She once reminded me, as if EVERYBODY has always known it, that people grow up to grandma age to then down to baby, then up again.
I can’t figure out how to get my body to grow down but because I hated holidays I decided to grow down, start over. So I invented two holidays a month to look forward to and celebrate as a family.
With this fluid butter brainness in mind I’ll explain a story problem I’ve written myself into.  It concerns Anna’s dragon, Iva Lou. Sometimes she’s heavily furred but at others she has more scales than fur. Worse yet; her scale pattern changes. (I didn’t want to redraw the pictures) I thought it over and couldn’t explain it. Finally I asked Iva Lou, who probably taught Madam Curie all she knew, and Iva Lou told Anna to tell me, “My Grandma’s a shape shifting muskrat!” I can see that now.
To read Anna telling strange women, “Thirty two.” when they asked her how old she was, read Dragon’s Tale at Amazon.  nancymauerman.com

Her statement didn’t sound right when she said, “I didn’t marry him because I liked him! I married him because I knew I could fix him! It was my duty to the world to improve him; make the universe a better place.”
There’s a lot that could be written about these statements. Like the denudation of the accumulated forces of nature: wind, rain, rivers, and sun.  She applied all her manipulative skills but she did not wear him down or reform him; or attempt to fix herself. Over time I’ve lived with this experienced memory and I’ve come to believe we’re accountable to fix ourselves ONLY. Even in a child/parent relationship we only, “Train up a child in the way he should go.” We only have power to fix ourselves, which in my case seems to be a full-time job.
We see this frustrating expenditure of energy, to FIX SOMEONE ELSE, most in families. As my main goal in writing is to examine and encourage family life I wrote many stories about Paul and Anna. In the book ‘Dragon’s Tale’ he feels called upon to lead his family, by ordering food at the restaurant. Then, under his TUTELAGE, and recognizing in women a refined zeitgeist, penchant, and proclivity to try to fix others, he calls upon his Mother to RETRAIN ANNA, his sister.
Like that’s going to work: see the fun and down load Dragon’s Tale as an eBook, free for as short time starting tomorrow at Amazon.  nancymauerman.com

Anyone who’s lived with a lizard, snake, or frog can tell you when it’s cold outside a reptile will adore you because you’re warm but when THEIR body temps go up they don’t want to be held, touched, or hardly looked at. They need to MOVE. Those critters have so much energy you’d think you were seeing a sneaky two year old, who’d just finished off a five pound bag of sugar, or John, a sixty-two year old, who, last week ate TWO large pieces of lemon meringue pie (instead of dinner) at three AM.  Then he attempted to go to bed, (and that boy didn’t sleep for the next two days, by the way.)
Cold blooded reptiles that get warm cannot sit still except in the presence of my father. He brought home three anoles when I was six. We kept three to seven in our terrarium until I reached my teens when we only had a one eyed toad. We’d found it as a (puppy?) and we knew it couldn’t see straight, and when you’re a toad and can only see out your left eye you strike at a fly and miss the first five times. That wasn’t going to hack itBin nature and you don’t have to have a fly as a pet to pretty much guess IT didn’t sit still for THAT!
My Father had Don and I catch flies, remove one wing, and my Toady chased his prey down, hit and miss, hit and miss until he caught the thing. Of course Toady had to be warm in order to expend all that energy (and perhaps he expending so much energy he didn’t have it to grow in size, because he never grew larger than a spool of thread even though he lived at our house twelve years.)
As a boy my father learned to combine his two activities. His mother told him she’d reward him with a little green lizard if he’d stop biting his nails. He promptly did. His lizard became his second favorite thing which he combined with his first; reading. He’d sit in a soft chair and place his lizard above his nice WARM pocket and the little fellow climbed in. The two of them would sit together for hours! I can still see my Dad now sitting under a warm reading lamp and Lizzy, (they all had the same name) sitting without moving, her nose stuck out from one side of Dad’s pocket and her tail out the other side. Both of them content and the only one to move was my Dad, occasionally tuning pages. The only way I can explain it is that my Dad must have been a cross between St Francis and Buddha.

From my Grandmother, to my Dad, and my brother Don and then his daughter Elizabeth, whose nick name you can probably guess, and her brothers, we love lizards. nancymauerman.com
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I can remember as a child thinking, “Oh, no! I hope Mom doesn’t sit down and watch TV with us.” Her problem was she was educated and our problem was that she was contagious. “Have you ever heard anyone talk that way?” she’d say or, “What a bad actor. No one moves around like that, he looks like a plank of wood with legs.” “Have you ever noticed all westerns have a fat or an old guy that we’re to think is funny, but is really dumb?” she’d point out.
Soon we saw a shows through her eyes. They were ruined. Suddenly we could hardly stand to be in the same room with the silly shows even at a friend’s house and you know being with a friend makes a show taste better.
I’m reading two history books, one published in 1944 the other 1918 both at fourth grade level, and both written with complex sentence structure, which I’m told children never understand. I rewriting all my children’s books to simplify them somewhat but you know, two hundred years ago it was common to enter college at age 13? One of my goals, therefore, is to ruin kids. Do you want to help? My hope is stretch kid’s minds a little so they won’t be satisfied with the mundane.  nancymauerman.com

“He’s so bad all of Leafman’s leaves die, all his green sticks turn brown because they don’t even want to be him. No one likes him, not even his mother will give him a box of dirt on his birthday. And they say he wanted to marry a black widow spider but to get away from him; she ATE HERSELF!”
I’m writing another book in the Leafman series of books. Here Anna is telling her Mom and her brother Paul, better known as Superman, about Leafman.  Leafman’s mother is known as Rose Woman. She doesn’t sound like a very good Mother, does she?

Let me tell you about visiting my Mom when she and my high school aged Don when fishing. Don LOVED fish, As a man he tried growing a fish farm, and helped to run one, raised trout in a wading pool in his living room for years. Once when 12 of us hoped to order 12 dishes, not 11, at a Chinese restaurant, Don refused to participate. He wanted to order a giant fish platter recommended for 20 people. I tried to shame into behaving but Mom said let him be.

Our table would have been crowded any way but then Don’s dinner was brought in. Our plates were already all but falling off the edges. His fish was THREE FEET LONG and its oval platter even bigger! Don’s behemoth not only hogged the table but it was UGLY! It should have been outlawed! I scolded, but Mom beamed. The thing stared at us during the entire meal! It had been presented in its entirety, the GREY mud looking gravy couldn’t hide its fins and EYES. Don ate the whole thing! Well I should qualify that staement, Don ate the whole thing but its EYES which were still mocking me through the fortune cookie course.
So, as I was saying, I visited Mom and we took Don fishing. Don knew exactly where to go, and evidently my Mom knew too because she didn’t need directions. It was a place where fish hung out and other fishermen didn’t! As you probably know fish LOVE skulking about in and among fallen submerged trees and as you can undoubtedly surmise NO FISHERMAN IN HIS RIGHT MIND WOULD FISH THERE. That is unless he brought his MOTHER! Don cast out and almost immediately yelled, ”Mom, I’m caught!” So mom waded in, up to her waist, and as she bent at 45 degrees, chest in the water and chin just barely out, she untangled his line. By then he’d set up his second pole cast and tangled this line, but I must say he was patient as he waited on her to work her way through the sunken trees to the second tangled line. I took pity and waded in too but still he had to wait over and over and over.
Maybe, just maybe, if Leafman’s Momma was as nurturing as mine, Leafman wouldn’t have turned out so wrong! To see pictures of that dastardly Leafman and read about his encounter with Paul, Anna, and her dragon, Iva Lou. Catch the four books in the Leaman Attacks series at Amazon.  nancymauerman.com

Not to be bragging but just by way of explanation: I started writing stories against my will at about eight, started unpleasant and rigorous life drawing at thirteen. Now gleefully I dedicate most all my time and efforts to writing books no one reads and drawing and painting pictures no one looks at. What an interesting life outcome.  nancymauerman.com