It has been a Wonderlife

April 19, 2018

“I had to be a witchy-b in a man’s world. For 25 years I was married to a man who turned out to be mentally disarranged. It made me strong having to take care of my son and him. Thank God he ran away with my best friend. I was raised by a professional show groomer for dogs. I opened The Waggy Tail in Daphne even though I didn’t have business skills. I sold it and became the director of the Baldwin County Humane Society. We made the first shelter happen. People worry about the have-to’s and I can’ts and I focus on the needs. I look at everything as an opportunity. I got to sing on the stage at Carnegie Hall with the Presbyterian Church choir. It is hard to top that. I lobbied Congress. I lived in the islands in the Pacific and went scuba diving with Philipe Cousteau. I am just a little girl from Bay Minette, Alabama. We lived on the courthouse square and my mom got tired of my dad not feeding us and moved us to Mobile. She left my dad and her family turned against her, but she got off her knees and put herself through nursing school and never looked back. She always wanted me to be like the other girls, but I wanted to be strong like her.

My grandfather is Grancer Harrison, the Dancing Ghost of Alabama. He owned a big plantation in the corner where Georgia, Florida and Alabama meet. He loved to dance. He had winter jamborees at his plantation and the neighbors brought food over and danced. Dancing was clogging in wooden shoes in the pavilion. When it was close to time for him to die. He got a bunch of bricks from Fairhope and built him a tomb. That was before the Civil War. He was wealthy and he had a coffee pot full of gold coins and they disappeared when he died. I wrote a book about my family and it is coming out soon. His daughter was my great great grandmother and she was the biggest madam in the whole damn county. My grandfather on my mom’s side made the best corn liquor in the state of Alabama. I am not ashamed of my family. Lord, that sounds fun to me. I have lived a similar life. It has been a wonderlife.

I have been visiting with my friend Lucindian. She is schizophrenic. I gave her a puppy and she named her Milly. Lucindian once said ‘Milly knows if the voices I hear are real or not, I just have to look at her and know. She tells me if I should answer the door or not.’ Every person who has a mental illness should have a dog.

I would like to go to Europe, Mexico, and South America. My ultimate retirement is to get on that ship at the docks and stay on it until I die and go everywhere. I am going to die anyway. I want to die happy.”

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