reading love, writing love

We were after magic, Diane, and me. We’d find the location that we wouldn’t be bothered by younger sisters, twin brothers, and meddling mothers. In the summer we roamed our neighborhood for a sturdy oak or my apple trees that hadn’t dropped their loot. We’d spread an old blanket, and feast on our latest library finds. Our authors included Louisa May Alcott, Eleanor Estes; moving on to Betty Cavanna and Phyllis A. Whitney as we entered our tween years. We parallel read, occasionally sharing an awesome scene. We munched on cheese and crackers, drank Tang at my house, and sneak pop at Diane’s.

School wouldn’t have probably placed us in the high reading groups because our Think and Do Books were always messed up by our teachers’ big red checkmarks indicating our comprehension indeed was poor. We also balked at writing the formula bound book report, I resorted to copying the back flaps and turning those in. But sweet Diane would have never cheated like that. Believe it or not, I didn’t get caught cheating until 6th grade. The teachers seemed to conspire every year to ruin every book by making us write about it. But at least we had CHOICE and I could read All -of- a- Kind Family, even though my family wasn’t Jewish.

But there were great times in school during the late sixties. Once we were told we all needed to write a play from a scene in a book we had read or write an original play that would be performed. Diane and I loved that assignment. We wrote two scenes together and our teacher accepted it and even pronounced it SATISFACTORY.

Reading was our life and poetry became a fast love in Junior High and beginning High School because not many authors wrote books about Hippy love (all of us curious), racial protest, Vietnam, or black armbands; I guess it was deemed inappropriate for tween eyes. It was almost like we were expected to go from childhood to War and Peace in the summer of 8th grade.

So what were we to do? Magazines of course. We devoured Sixteen and Glamour for many years. We were lucky if everyone once in a while there was a short story. I resorted to sneaking my mom’s  Good Housekeeping because they always had a short story; sadly—today, they do not.

The summer of 8th grade, when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, we had a stupendous idea! We spent two hours a day writing in my dad’s supposed ‘at home office’ (which was really just a storage spot for winter clothes and coats). We used at least a pound of yellow legal pads and finished writing our first book, between the winter coats, finishing before the end of the summer. The masterpiece was titled Summer Camp Love just because we loved going to summer camp. We composed together, argued about scenes and sentences, and alternated the handwriting part when our hands cramped up.

Oh, I wish I had those pages. I loved our sweet friendship— our reading and writing life together.

But those good things, those things I  loved about my childhood continue on inside me forever.  An SOS invitation arrives and words are breathed out and that particular happiness of shared reading /writing love springs from the deep and I am so grateful.

P.S. because I really like them… funny to me how easy it is to recall details from fifty years ago and I can’t remember where my cell phone went this morning.

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