I still remember the first time I saw it. I was browsing through a used book store and re-reading The Great Gatsby for pleasure, (hey, you have your pleasures, I have mine) when I saw it at the end of Chapter three. Someone had underlined the last sentence in the paragraph and drawn a star beside it at the end. They wrote in a book. A book full of someone else’s words. I wasn’t aware people did that. Not that my family tried to safeguard our books; you can’t safeguard possessions you love and use daily. Our books were tattooed with coffee-cup stains, dog-eared and limp with wear. A few loved storybooks suffered with fractured spines and key pages had to be turned carefully. We were hard on the books we loved, but we never wrote on their pages. I bought the used book, partly because I love the story and partly because I was curious about the previous owner’s additions. The check marks and dashes seemed like someone else’s coded commentary that expanded my vision of the story. I wanted to decipher the code. I never quite succeeded in that but I learned why some folk annotate text: they…
Now I have no use for trolls, whether they live under the bridge or on-line. My darling passive-aggressive mom taught me to be polite or silent, even if that meant biting my tongue. So, I never thought I’d be blocked as a troll for telling the truth. But then I reckoned without the World’s Largest Book Pusher. WLBP started mainlining me books back when the dot-com revolution was in force. First I was a regular patron, then a “1-click” shopper and an early participant in their on-line review program. WLBP and I both were happy. I got a lifeline of books and WLBP got my money. Then Sandra Worth’s Love & War had to appear. Love and War is another historical novel based on the War of the Roses. Now, I became a fan of the losing side of that war before I learned to drive so I tend to scoop up any book on the subject, non-fiction or otherwise. This one promised to focus on John Neville, one of the supporting players. Off I go through the pages, happy as a lark until I hit a passage where Neville is writing home to his wife. “Tomorrow we give battle. Lest I…
He was in my very first high school class, a wiry, little guy behind a lectern, with gravity-defying hair and feverish-looking eyes. He wasn’t much taller than the lectern and it probably weighed more than he did. The stranger stared at us briefly before introducing himself as Mr. S___, taking the roll and passing out Literature text books. “Another first-year teacher,” I thought with dismay,”this class will eat him alive.” Then the little man barked out an order and half the class jumped. For a small man, this guy’s voice was loud. “Mr. So-and-So” he boomed at one of the better-behaved boys in class, “What have you got there? Bring it to me.” The poor kid named slunk his way toward the front of the class while I cowered in my seat and revised my opinion of the instructor. This guy would control the class but I didn’t like him and doubted if I’d learn much from him either. Little did I know I was facing the greatest teacher I’ve ever meet. Mr. S. taught my favorite subject, English, but I never would have told him something that personal. The man was far too intimidating. We were in an era…
We’re coming to the end of another election season and, like almost everyone on the planet, I’m glad this miserable contest is almost over. The mud-slinging, innuendo, and overall nastiness of political rhetoric have made this a loathsome campaign year and the parade of contradictory polls is exhausting me. But I will vote on Tuesday, as I have in every election. I can’t help it. I was politicized long before I could read and my parents deserve the credit/blame. That’s what happens when you’re kissed at a young age by presidents. My mom had a button like this in herjewelry box for decades See, my mom was a big fan of John F. Kennedy in 1960. YUGE fan, another candidate might say. Well, what wasn’t there to like? He was young, attractive, and charismatic, enough to charm any woman in her early twenties. And my mother was never tepid about politics. She paid fierce attention to the news and loved or hated most people in public service. So when she heard JFK and his running mate were arriving at the Wichita Falls, Texas airport, she had to be there to greet him, along with me and Dad. Now my Dad…
Great Uncles and Nephews(The only record of my family on the porch)The bare edge of the rocker is at the left My dad’s family lived in a house with a front porch they never used. I mean they never used it during my lifetime. When we visited, we always parked in the side yard and used the kitchen door for our exits and entrances. (Some farm families do that; the kitchen is the heart of the house and everyone’s go-to spot before and after the fields.) All the indoor rooms were lived in but the front porch, with its wrought iron supports and cement floor was just not a comfortable place. The only decorations I remember seeing on the porch were some Elephant Ears growing out of coffee cans and the only seats were some wooden rocking chairs that could put splinters in your thighs if you sat in them. These chairs were hard and unfinished and the antithesis of comfort. Alone, they were enough to turn me into someone who hated porches. Luckily that didn’t work because my adult home came equipped with a porch that I wouldn’t change for the world. Running the length of the house it…