Walking For Our Lives (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781935530503)

Since my 80th year, I have written and published three books of stories based on my rich and varied life. I nurtured four sons born within five years. When they left for school and their father left, too, I returned to school for teaching credentials and opened a tutoring center for dyslexic students. After 15 years, I heard about the Great Peace March and walked from Los Angeles to New York to Washington, DC, then from Leningrad (S. Petersburg) to Moscow for Peace. When 230 Soviets came to the United States, for a peace walk, I joined. Born with crippled feet, I have walked more than 5,000 miles for a single cause. Then I remodeled four houses; two in Mexico, one on a farm in Oregon, and a cottage above Monterey Bay in California and married again. For a while. I am keeping the cottage. Each day I write. And speak to audiences about the pleasures in telling our stories. I believe that writing our stories gives us an opportunity to understand our families, our culture, and ourselves. That understanding often translates into forgiveness, which is fundamental to peaceful co-existence. One more step toward peace in the world. To people who are intimidated by writing, I say, "Write your lives one tale at a time. Remember, you don't have to start at the beginning." My first book, Tell Me a Story, is a compilation of 43 short stories that view aspects of my heritage and life. Initially, it was a Christmas gift for members of my family, but has been available on Amazon since its publication. The second book, To Make the House Complete, is about the four houses and marriage that needed work. Walking For Our Lives is twice as long as the others, about 300 pages, and gives an autobiographical perspective to the Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament, 1986, and to the other peace marches in the United States and in Russia. The memoir follows the journey from my life of comfortable conformity to becoming comfortable with myself. Through the tales, readers discover how my experiences walking for peace transformed my opinions of what is important and what is worth fighting for from the easy choices to the meaningful ones.