Late Nights and Books on Texas

I wrote this over ten years ago during the week of Mother’s Day. I was a sick man and wasn’t sleeping well at the time. Reading through it today, I feel the same way as I did then. I hope that you have a wonderful Mother’s Day. bd

Last night as I was reading a pretty good book as everyone else in the house slept, I got to thinking about where my reading habit really began. I am sure that it was the fault of, or credit to my first grade teacher, Ms. Peacock. Now I know that I’m getting older and my memory is not what it used to be, but I remember her as a woman in her mid to late eighties and weighing at least three hundred pounds. She wore her hair in a knot, drank grapefruit juice out of those little cans through a straw (that always had lipstick on it.) She put on that really red lipstick using the back of her granddaddy’s pocket watch as a mirror. I remember someone asking her once why she drank that stuff, was it really that good? And she said that it helped her keep her weight down. We couldn’t imagine how big she must have been before she discovered this miracle juice.

At any rate, Ms. Peacock wrote on my report card at the end of the school year that my reading skills were weak and that my mama might want to work with me on it over the summer. Although Ms. Peacock may have started it mama followed through with a vengeance. You would have thought that I had been diagnosed with a serious, if not fatal disorder the way mama attacked the “problem.”

The bookmobile came to Empire once a week, Tuesday afternoons, I think. My mother and I were there to drop off and pick up a load of books every time it came. I remember it looking like a big pink and white bread truck. Before the summer was over we were visiting other libraries too. I became an authority on the Hardy boys and the Bobbsey Twins that summer. I also caught up on Samson and those poor wandering Jews that desperately needed a map. (I already knew about Kim, Wendy and their rowdy dog Tyke.)

Our routine was to sit on the front porch swing and I would read out loud and mama would shell butterbeans, or whatever hand work was needed, and just listen. I would read a while and then I could go play a while, and then read again. When I finished the book, I would close it and mama would have me tell her the story. Sometimes she would ask me questions. I climbed my Chinaberry tree and played in the creek that summer, but I read a lot of books too!

That was forty-odd years ago. I hadn’t really thought a lot about any of it until last night, as I reading about Texas. When mama sat there beside me shelling butterbeans and helping me with the hard words, I thought that I wasn’t going anywhere that summer. I was wrong. The journey that I started that summer has taken me many places and I hope it won’t end for a while….

This Sunday after a nice lunch I’d like to sit on that front porch swing and read a pretty good book to my mama, close my eyes and tell her the story that I just read, just one more time.

And what are YOU doing this Sunday?