Guest Blog: Frieda Wishinsky

Monday, May 12th

Okay. I admit it. I do not have a pet. I know many kid’s book authors blog about their pets so in case this makes you stop reading, I once did have a pet. I actually had two pets. They were both parakeets. One was called Lucky one and the other Lucky Two. (Maybe they weren’t so lucky since they both died). I don’t remember how Lucky One died but I vividly remember Lucky Two’s demise. It was traumatic.        

I’ve wanted to write Lucky Two’s story for a long time but I’ve never figured out how to do it. It’s a tricky tale, full of parental love and deception, a friend’s jealousy, anger and betrayal. Those are all good elements for a riveting story but I can’t figure out how to make it work as fiction. Should it be a picture book, chapter book or a middle grade novel? How much of the real events should I use?

Reading other Orca writer’s blogs about their pets made me remember Lucky Two. Maybe it’s finally time to figure out how to write the story.

The real story goes like this.

My mother loved Lucky. Lucky sat on her shoulder and poked at her dangling earrings.  Lucky perched on her finger and chirped as she dusted or washed the dishes. She taught Lucky to push a ping-pong ball across the floor and Lucky loved it. (I don’t know if Lucky was a girl or boy parakeet. How do you tell anyway?)

I liked Lucky but not as much as my mother. She was a stay at home mom and Lucky kept her company as she worked around the house.

Then one day when I came home from school I knew something was wrong. My mom’s eyes were puffy and red. She looked like she’d been crying for hours. When I asked her what had happened she told me that Lucky was gone. She said she’d left the window open by mistake and Lucky had flown out. She explained how birds fly south and that’s probably where Lucky was headed.

This sounded reasonable to me (I was about seven or eight—naive and trusting ). I imagined the little parakeet lounging on a chair on a Florida beach, enjoying the sun as it warmed its yellow and green face. It was a comforting thought. I figured Lucky was having a lovely time.

A week later my fantasy was shattered. My neighbor and friend Norman and I were playing Monopoly in his apartment. We were both fiercely competitive and Norman was losing.  Suddenly he stood up, glared at me and accused me of cheating. I denied the accusation but Norman wouldn’t leave it there. He blurted out, “You think your bird flew to Florida. Your bird is dead and your father buried it in the park.”

I blanched. “You’re lying,” I screamed at him. “My parents said Lucky flew out of the window and  flew to Florida. My parents wouldn’t lie to me.”

I raced home and confronted my mother, who then tearfully told me that she and my father had indeed lied to me. She’d found Lucky dead in his cage (She may have accidentally contributed to that by covering his cage with too tight a cover. She was feeling not just grief but guilt).

My father took me to the park the next day. He gently showed me where he’d buried poor Lucky under a tree.

As for Norman and me, we still played together, although something was lost in our friendship. Some trust was also lost with my parents.  How could they lie to me? How could I buy into the lie?  I knew they were trying to shield me from pain but whose pain? Was it more their discomfort or mine? Or both?  It was a moment that happens in many kid’s lives. You suddenly realize that not everything adults tell you is the truth—even adults who love you.

So that’s how the real story ended. A trip to the park with my father and some of my innocence gone.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to shape this real story into fiction. I believe you should tell the stories that stay with you and this one has for years.