Classical music, played on a player that was almost a phonograph, crackled Beethoven and Mozart, and especially Vivaldi. It was turned up loud enough that we could hear it in our bedrooms even though it played in the living room half a floor away in our split level house. The music soothed us to sleep on nights that did not include a book. A book read from the hallway between rooms by a parent who sat on the floor. Books like Huckleberry Finn or Treasure Island whose author used words we didn’t know, but it was okay because the adult read so well we figured out most of them.
White paper with thin blue lines sewn into a cardboard cover. The cardboard cover was decorated with fabric and glue and crayons and colored pencils. Sometimes the leftover yarn from weaving the paper into a book was also glued onto the cover. After the Elmer’s glue dried we could open the book carefully. The thread and glue would pop and the paper crackle the first time the cover laid open to reveal the clean fresh paper within.
Ballpoint pens where new then. Well, new to me. When we learned to write we were taught with cigar fat pencils capped with rubbery pink erasers. When finally we were allowed to hold the thin number two it was like graduation. We were writers. But then the joy of being old enough to write with ink! Permanent ink. Ink that would stain our pockets or fingertips or smear on our paper.
Words decorated my youth like the Van Gogh prints that hung in the dining room. We celebrated learning new words like “determine” or “repercussion” that sounded funny leaking out through our teeth and between our lips. The family Bible stand held the most impressive Webster Dictionary in the neighborhood. Every English word known was in that book and we referenced it more often than a preacher opens his bible during a Wednesday night meeting.
Hot summer afternoons, when the sun was at it’s zenith, we were relegated to the cool basement rec room or the curtained bedrooms. Staying quiet and reserving our strength for the afternoons and dusky evenings before the street lamps lit, we read and journaled. Afternoons with Encyclopedia Brown, the Hardy Boys and Laura Ingalls Wilder ignited our imaginations and fueled our brains for creating our own stories.
In our public school we were lucky to have imaginative and creative teachers who, despite the serious over crowding and classroom relocations to local churches, taught us to think as well as read and write. They gave us permission to learn to fly, and when we crashed, helped us look up “collar bone” in the encyclopedia before going to the school nurse and hospital.
How couldn’t I write?
“A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.” Oscar Wilde