The new year is approaching and I need to fulfill a promise.
At the Po-Hi reunion in October 2016, I promised my friend and former neighbor Marcene (McGrew) Nelson, that I would once again take up my laptop and post something to my blog. I had missed it at the time, but work and family obligations had largely prevented it.
In my defense, I actually wrote one at about this time in 2016, but my computer literally died (no kidding) as I saved the email, and when my computer techs got it running again, the file was nowhere to be found. (I ask you, how many places on my computer would you expect the word to appear, but a complete disk search wouldn’t make it appear.
So here goes (the letter, not the computer I hope).
This blog is basically reminesces of how the former generation has helped shape me. But in this case it is not my parents but Marcene’s mother who was a huge early influence.
Without airconditioning and television to distract us, summers were a time for playing with the other neighborhood children, often involving almost twenty kids in the games. Marcene and her brother Keith lived across Ash Street and three houses north of us, so they were regularly among the gang.
One year, when I think I was in early grade school, Marcene’s mother invited us kids (after it got too dark to play the usual games) to join her in her home for snacks and a story. After snacking, we sat around the living room and we listened to a chapter a night from a book of her choosing, and I must have been enchanted with those cowboy tales, because I still remember them.
Now being read to was not a strange experience. My father read us to sleep at night and some of the teachers at Jefferson Elementary would read aloud after lunch. The fact that we were fascinated by western stories, of course, was a natural crowd pleaser. Most of the ten-cent Saturday matinees at the Ponca Theater included a Cowboy movie serial each week, and the main feature of did so too.
But for someone else’s parent to invite the neighbors in was pure gift. Taking in tired (cranky?) children at that time of night – who should have probably been at home in their own bed by that time — was first of all a gift to our parents, since they could linger in the breeze of the porch a little longer, and secondly I am sure it was not an easy matter to hold the interest of a gaggle of elementary school age children. I never wondered about it then, but I have since wondered what kind of woman it takes to reach out in that way.
It is, of course, such individual acts which build the strong secure communities that we sometimes wonder whether our children will experience.
I would, of course, be delighted if some of you could share other stories or any recollections you might have of special story hour experiences.
