​But! At exactly thirteen and one-half minutes past ten o’clock on that same morning, the entire situation changed!
 
Because, that was the exact minute, the precise time, the historic moment when Algernon discovered Chocolate-Covered-Ants!
 
Someone, I don’t know who had left a full jar of chocolate covered ants in Algernon’s backyard. Someone – it could have been anyone – left that jar with a partially opened lid, just waiting to be pried off by a long, sticky, anteater tongue.
 

Whoever that someone was, they were most careless, and that someone will go down in anteater history as either the most blessed or most cursed, depending on the point of view.
 
You see, it all depends on the way one looks at the situation because finding that jar of chocolate covered ants changed Algernon’s life completely forevermore.

​I never remember a time, when my mother was not either reading or writing. She read everything and anything she could get her hands on and wrote stories, poems, articles for the local newspaper, letters to the editor, and once a letter to John F. Kennedy when he was a Senator. (Yes, she got a reply.)

After being diagnosed with MS, she moved in with me, and for the next twenty years, I was her caretaker, friend, and roommate. At times, she treated me as a daughter, at other times she was my daughter.
​
We laughed together, traveled about the country, talked, and cried together. And she started me on my path to writing and gave me a love of reading.

She would have loved Facebook, and all of you, as she was a very social person.

In 2003 she passed away, and I promised her that I would finish the stories, and books that she had left partly done, as well as get those books she had finished edited and published. Some of the stories that were partly finished are available on Kindle, under both hers and my name.
​
But her children’s story Algernon, which I came upon recently, is now available for pre-order. It is one of the only stories that was finished. I fell in love with Algernon, an anteater who decides he needs to learn to read to fulfill his wishes. It is an adorable tale, and one can hardly not love Algernon.