There was always music in our house.

Mom majored in music in college, until she dropped out during World War II to marry Dad. She played the piano and sang in the church choir. She also participated in a local singing group that sang standards and show tunes and performed around town.

Dad enjoyed the music of the forties, which was when he courted and married Mom. Sometimes he’d put a record on the hi fi, grab Mom, and they would dance around the family room.

I took piano lessons for many years. I bought a guitar once but couldn’t get my little fingers to fret properly, so I passed it along to my brother. He’s the musician in the family who plays with local bands and never travels without multiple guitars, just in case someone, somewhere, might want to jam.

I love listening to all kinds of music—rock, folk, jazz, country. I sing along. I first heard of the Beatles in 1963 (yes, I’m that old) and have been a fan ever since. The Rolling Stones, the Animals (Eric Burdon!), bring it on. Then there’s Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, and Gordon Lightfoot. I saw Lightfoot in concert twice, once at the University of Wyoming fieldhouse and the second time at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheater.

My best memory of that venue is a concert in the 1970s. As the sunset hit those massive, tilted slabs of red sandstone, making them glow even redder, John Denver came out on stage singing “Rocky Mountain High.”

I like songs that tell stories. There are so many of them, in all the permutations. Think of the tales we heard on the radio: Wake Up, Little Susie by the Everly Brothers. House of the Rising Sun, and no one sings it like Eric Burdon. Dolly Parton’s Jolene, El Paso by Marty Robbins. Ode to Billie Joe by Bobbie Gentry. Eleanor Rigby, the Beatles classic. Alice’s Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie. City of New Orleans, the Steve Goodman song that’s been covered by everyone from Guthrie to Willie Nelson. And of course, Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Songs that tell stories, yes. I had a fling with opera at one point, but my longest love affair is with musical theatre. I was raised on Broadway musicals, particularly those of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.

A native Oklahoman, I spent my early years in that state. The state song is “Oklahoma!” Of course it would be, the title song of the groundbreaking R & H musical of the 1940s. I was about six years old when the movie version came out and spent my childhood hearing all those tunes.

So did lots of other people. I recently visited the Museum of Broadway in New York City. There’s a room in the three-story museum dedicated to Oklahoma! and I chuckled at the number of people who strolled through the exhibit singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.”

Before R & H came along, musicals were different. The Rodgers & Hammerstein website explains why.

The tradition . . . was largely a non-narrative one, i.e., revues and loosely constructed vehicles for singers, dancers and comedians.

Why was Oklahoma! groundbreaking? It was a narrative musical which:

. . . places a priority on telling a narrative – a story with a beginning, middle, and end. What made Oklahoma! groundbreaking as a narrative musical was not simply that it told a story (dozens of opera, operettas, and musical comedies had done that for decades), but the ruthless discretion that Rodgers, Hammerstein and their collaborators deployed towards dialogue, music, lyrics, staging, dances and décor in order to tell that story. Like Michelangelo chiseling away all the superfluous marble that wasn’t essential to his statue, the creative team was boldest in paring away all the obstacles that got in the way of their story.

We’re writing fiction, not musical theatre. But essentially, we writers are doing the same thing. We use every element at hand. First, we throw our plot, characters and story into the mix. Then we pick up that chisel and start working on that big slab of marble. Cut here, polish there. We eliminate everything that’s superfluous until we have the story we want to tell.

Grab your chisel and get to work. And sing along with your favorite show tune if the spirit moves.

I have hummingbird feeders on my patio, hanging from the bottom of the balcony above. They are made of red glass and have a wire rim at the bottom, so the birds can perch while feeding. I also have hummingbird-friendly plants in my garden and frequently see hummingbirds feeding on the blossoms outside.

These are Anna’s hummingbirds, common in the Bay Area, native to western coastal regions. They are tiny birds, with an iridescent bronze-green back, pale gray chest and belly, and green flanks. The bills are long, straight and slender. The male is the most colorful, with a crimson head and a flashy gorget, which is the patch of colorful feathers at the throat or upper breast. The female hummingbird also has a gorget, though not as bright.

Several weeks ago, I glanced at one of the feeders and noticed something new on the wire rim. Upon closer examination, I discovered it was a nest. Hummingbird nests are shaped like cups and in this case, about the size of a walnut. I was delighted to see this addition to the feeder, hanging just a few feet from my patio door.

Mama Bird wasn’t done building the nest. I watched her swoop around the edges of the balcony and the nearby downspout and realized that she was gathering spider silk. She would add that to the nest, along with wispy bits of plant fluff. The outside of the nest appears to have a coating of lichen. I haven’t examined it too closely, since I don’t want to frighten Mama Bird from her nest. I’m careful when I go out on my patio. She often flies away but she will sometimes stay on the nest when I step outside. Maybe she has decided I’m not a threat, though I imagine she’s giving me a wary look with those tiny eyes.

Hummingbirds typically lay a clutch of two eggs, about the size of small jelly beans. According to what I’ve read on the Internet, the eggs incubate for 21 days before they hatch. At first I noticed that Mama Bird had switched to feeding behavior, poking downward with her long slim bill. Then a few days ago I caught a glimpse of a baby, then two. Mama swoops in and out, seeking food for herself and her babies. She returns to the nest to pump partially digested food into the mouths of those two hungry chicks, naked without feathers, their little beaks turned upward. Then she settles into the nest on top of them, to keep them warm.

My research tells me it’s about three weeks from hatching to fledging, with the chicks growing feathers, getting big, then ready to leave the nest and fly. I hope both little babies make it. Mama is certainly doing her best, focused on her task.

I think of Mama Bird and I think of the three Ps—patience, persistence and perseverance. We’ve had some cold rainy weather lately, also wind. Yet she’s there, day and night, in all kinds of weather, sitting on that nest in between forays for food.

Patience, persistence and perseverance are watchwords for writers, too. We have an idea for a book or a story and we build our nest using plot, characters and setting, working on the project until it hatches, feeding it until it fledges and we can send it out into the world.

It may certainly take longer than it takes for Mama Bird and her chicks. Years, even. But we keep at it.

Remember what Emily Dickinson wrote.

Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul.

I rode the camel. Of course I did. It’s one of those touristy things I just had to do. I was in Egypt, after all, visiting the pyramids at Giza and contemplating the Sphinx.

This once-in-a-lifetime trip to Egypt was fabulous, marvelous, wonderful. It was a Road Scholar program called “Up the Nile and Into History: Sailing Through the Stories of Egypt.” There were twelve of us on the tour, a manageable group and what’s more, we all got on famously.

Our guide, Ahmed, was personable and knowledgeable, with a sense of humor and lots of stories. He also had a face like that of the Pharoah Khafre, whose statue is displayed in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum.

Khafre built the Great Pyramid in Giza. That’s where I rode the camel. The camel wore a saddle cloth with a number and the words Ali Bob Marley. I guessed this was the camel’s name, but I’m not sure. Now, I’m quite short and the camel was tall, even while kneeling. It took Ahmed plus the camel handler to get my foot in the stirrup, let alone get me into the saddle. And once I was up there I felt quite precarious, as I wasn’t seated quite right in the saddle.

I felt like I was going to fall off, especially when the camel got to its feet. The camel handler shifted me into the proper position and off we went. Two or three minutes of riding the camel was plenty for me. The camel knelt, I scrambled off, and Ali Bob Marley and I parted company.

Cairo is overwhelming, full of energy, chaos, all sorts of images. The city is home to about 22 million people and it sprawls on both sides of the Nile, a juxtaposition of ancient and contemporary. Traffic is crazy. Ahmed told me that local drivers view traffic lights and travel lanes as suggestions only. As we navigated the streets in our bus, we saw minivans used as public transit as well as three-wheeled conveyances known as tuk-tuks. And motorbikes, everywhere.

Then there’s the City of the Dead, a huge and ancient cemetery complex that in the 21st century is home to thousands of people. It’s jarring to realize that people are living in those abandoned tombs, some of them with satellite dishes on the roofs.

We visited the recently opened Grand Egyptian Museum, which is vast. Ahmed told us the museum contains over 100,000 artifacts and that it would take a whole week to see everything. As it was, we hit the highlights, including the large gallery devoted to King Tutankhamun.

We left Cairo for Luxor, where the Queen of Egypt served as our hotel. It’s a dahabeya, a traditional flat-bottomed boat, which was towed by a tugboat, though one afternoon there was enough wind for us to sail. I spent plenty of time on deck, reading, making notes, but frequently just staring at the scenery on both sides of the Nile. As we passed villages, children gathered on the riverbank, waving and calling “Hello.”

The names of the temples unwind—Karnak, Luxor, Dendera, Esna, Edfu, Kom Ombo, Philae. And El Kab, the location of a cracking good mystery by my blogmate Janis Patterson. The Valley of the Kings, where tomb KV 62 once held the grave goods of Tutankhamun. I was surprised at the small size of the tomb.

Most awe-inspiring? So many wonderful sites, almost overwhelming. The Great Pyramid, the Sphinx, the Step Pyramid, the island temple at Philae. And definitely Abu Simbel.

Two enormous rock-cut temples carved out of a mountainside in the 13^th century BC, one temple for Rameses II and the second for his wife Nefertari. I am old enough to remember the heroic efforts to move the temple complex to higher ground so it wouldn’t be submerged by the rising waters of Lake Nasser when the Aswan High Dam was built and put into service. The temples were cut into over 1,000 pieces and transported to their new site, above the level of the lake. Being there and seeing the temples makes me realize what a remarkable feat this was.

I’m home now, recuperating from jet lag and getting back to my routine. And thinking about the stories I can tell, with ideas gleaned from my travels. After all, some of Ahmed’s stories about the adventures of a travel guide provided some interesting plots that need to be explored.

Travel is wonderful for a writer. Ideas abound. And one should always ride the camel.

Several years ago, I had knee replacement surgery. When I got out of rehab and came home, a friend moved in with me for a few days to help with my recuperation. On Sunday morning, she brought me a mug of coffee. I thanked her and told her it wasn’t my Sunday mug. She looked at me like I’d taken leave of my senses and told me I was high maintenance. Well, maybe I am, but I have my rituals and having my Sunday morning coffee in that particular mug is one of them.

Rituals are an important part of daily life, from starting the day with that first cup of coffee to the getting-ready-for-bed routine. One website I encountered while writing this blog says that rituals can bring a sense of wellbeing into an unpredictable life. We have social rituals, such as getting together to celebrate a friend’s birthday, or some other significant event. We have working rituals, too. I like to have a fairly clean desk while I write. And my filing system seems to be piles of paper. I like to have documents, notes and books close at hand, where I can reach them. And I prefer black ink to blue.

As for personal rituals, I read my morning newspaper in the morning. During the years when I was working, I got up very early so I could write before going to work, which meant I wasn’t able to read my newspaper in the morning. During the lunch hour, I would go for a walk if the weather was good or eat lunch at my desk or in the break room, managing to read a few pages then. Now liberated from the day job, my ritual after eating breakfast is to settle on the sofa with my coffee, usually with a cat or two vying for space on my lap, with me angling the pages I’m reading over a recumbent lump of fur.

It’s early January and for me the holiday season is not quite over yet. And the season is full of rituals. The day after Thanksgiving, I haul the Christmas decorations out of the storeroom, put up my little tree and start decorating with the ornaments I’ve collected through the years. I play Christmas music and sing along with Mel Torme, Johnny Mathis and Rosemary Clooney. Then I watch my collection of holiday movies. I usually start with Miracle on 34^th Street and work my way through all my old favorites, culminating in White Christmas—Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney (again)!

Then let the baking begin. My holiday ritual is to bake loaves of pumpkin bread to give to friends and neighbors. I would miss it if I didn’t bake—and so would they. So my delectable pumpkin bread puts in its annual appearance. It’s delicious with a mug of coffee.

Back to those coffee mugs. Mom had quite a collection, which spent most of the year hanging on wooden racks on the kitchen wall. She also had holiday mugs. Every year, she would fetch the holiday mugs from the boxes where they were stored and put them on the racks, storing the other mugs until the season’s end. After Mom passed away, we divvied up the holiday mugs. Now, my own holiday ritual involves drinking coffee from Mom’s mugs as well as using a few of my own mugs I’ve collected over the years.

However, if it’s Sunday, I’m still drinking coffee from my Sunday mug.

What rituals bring you a sense of wellbeing in this unpredictable life?

I have a lot of books. I love to read. I suppose that’s why I became a writer. I want to tell the stories as well as read them.

No, I haven’t read all the books on my shelves. I enjoy the anticipation and the possibilities of reading them, someday.

Yes, I’ve read many of my books. There are old favorites I read over and over. With the advent of the internet, I discovered I can buy books that I read long ago, for the pleasure of having those books on my shelves, whether originally written for children or adults.

The recent airing of Ken Burns’s The American Revolution has me thinking of that era. However, the American Revolution novel on my shelves takes place in England. The Reb and the Redcoats, written by Constance Savery, was published in 1961. Charlotte Darrington, her brothers Joseph and George, and her little sister Kitty live in a manor house with their mother and their grandparents. Their father, a British officer, is fighting in the colonies. Uncle Laurence, also an officer, has recently returned from the war. The Reb—Randal Everard Baltimore—is a prisoner of war billeted with the family, a 15-year-old boy who was captured aboard a ship while carrying war dispatches from America to France. He’s escaped several times and is now kept under lock and key. A friendship grows between the Reb and Charlotte. It’s a fascinating book, letting the reader glimpse the Revolution from the point of view of English loyalists. I highly recommend it.

A longtime favorite by Phyllis Whitney also sits on my shelves, a book that early on fed my fascination with Japan. Whitney was born in Japan and spent her early years in Asia. The book I love is Secret of the Samurai Sword, published in 1958. Celia and Stephen Bronson arrive in Kyoto to spend the summer with their grandmother, a writer. They soon learn that the ghost of an old-time samurai supposedly haunts the garden. The artist who lives across the street, Gentaro Sato, is sure that it’s the spirit of one of his ancestors. Sato doesn’t like Americans. He’s determined that his Nisei granddaughter, Sumiko, who has come from America with her mother to stay with him, will conform to Japanese tradition, whether she likes it or not. Stephen and Sumiko’s cousin Hiro camp out in the garden, determined to see the ghost, but the figure disappears. It’s left to Celia to find out the truth.

Anya Seton wrote two books that sit on my shelves, read and reread. One I discovered because it was in a Readers Digest Condensed Book. It’s Devilwater, which is a fascinating look at the Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and 1745, and the American frontier in the intervening period, when one of the characters travels to Williamsburg and points beyond. The other Seton book that I frequently revisit is Avalon, set against the background of Anglo-Saxon England, with Vikings expanding their influence to Iceland and Greenland. Both the Seton books are grand historical novels, the kind of books I love, rich with characters, story and details.

I’ll finish this short list of books that bring me comfort and joy with one that I’ve read so many times I swear I have it memorized. My mother had a copy on her shelves, and I first read it way back in my junior high school years. I was dismayed when she loaned it to someone who never returned it—an unpardonable sin, in my opinion.

The book is Désirée, by Annemarie Selinko. Published in 1951, the book takes the form of a diary written by Désirée Clary, the daughter of a silk merchant from Marseille. The book begins in 1794, some five years after the start of the French Revolution, and the naïve 14-year-old has just met an upstart named Napoleon who professes to love her, though he throws her over for a more advantageous marriage with Josephine. Through the course of this historical novel, we get a fascinating picture of France during and after the Revolution, with Napoleon’s reign and his wars thrown in for good measure. And through the years, Désirée observes it all and finds a man who truly loves her.

Ah, books, so many books, so many possibilities—and so many pleasures!