THESE are the bad old days...

A wise person recently reminded me that "Permanence is not permanent." Change is what life is about. I need to hear it at that time, too. I've been having a rough time lately. 

Since 2010, I've been struggling with one change after another in my life. To be honest, it's been going on since I was 17 years old. I've been struggling ever since my mother was taken out of my life. 

When I'm hard on myself, I tell myself that it is ridiculous and unhealthy to be consistently drawn back to a date now 20 years in the past. When I'm strong, I tell myself it was the catalyst for a whole long list of lessons learned. I learned young and well that life is short. And I knew early what it means to sum up a life. What matters is not how much money you earned, what clothes you wore, what address you had. At funerals, no one mentions what kind of car you drove, how many bedrooms your house has, or how much you weighed (in most cases). What people remember was how you LIVED, how you treated others, if you "always had a smile for everyone" or volunteered in your community, and if you helped other people out. My own grandmother's epitaph included a young cousin who stood up at her funeral and talked about how she always had time for a cup of coffee and a chat. My other grandmother raised 9 children, who talked fondly of how many yard sticks she broke disciplining the 5 boys, all of whom towered over her. My mother was remembered to me, more than a year later, as the inspiration that caused her nurse in those last days to set aside time to become a camp nurse (which is where I encountered her). My father, whose obituary read like a laundry list of community accomplishments,  left us a poem that summed up his life as something of a religious mystic in accountant's clothing. I have been reared by people who spent their lives focused on other people. 

So, now I ask, "Where does that leave me?" I was groomed at an early age to go out and be a productive, active member of a community. At age 37, I find myself without any community. Really. 

I am underemployed enough to be counted as unemployed by anyone except a census-taker - which makes me an out-of-work writer/secretary/customer service representative with excess education, in the process of getting more over-educated, who is struggling in a troubled marriage, has no home church, an almost totally unformed direction in life, with several chronic illnesses and the serious possibility of fertility issues. So those glorious poems I wrote in college about being "the mother of mothers and mother of fathers" are now pretty much reduced to b***s**t. I am not only struggling to make ends meet - the ends aren't even within sight of each other anymore. 

I feel like Jaye from Wonderfalls. If you haven't seen the show from 2004, you should see it. It never found it's place (I don't think it was ever given a real chance), but it's pretty hilarious and includes Lee Pace, which is always a plus. I'll warn you, though, it's quirky. 

Ahem...so, pity party over. This is what I see when I look with dark, dingy, A Scanner Darkly kind of way. But being me, I prefer happy endings. 

I imagine that these are my "bad old days" days. That in 20 more years, I will be looking back and remembering what it was like to come through this to where I will be then. Maybe I am feeling like I am running out of time because my parents had short lives (46 and 58). If this is only midway for me, I have almost 40 more years to go! 

Right now I have the time I wanted for so long to have to go back to school (which I am doing!) and learn some valuable, practical knowledge (which I'm doing - I am getting a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration to balance out my dual English/Journalism degree). Once I finish the degree, I am free to move anywhere I can find a job with my newly minted Bachelor's Degree! And I have a great deal of experience in many areas, which makes me a more versatile employee. I am free to go where God wants me to go! No home church means, again, I can pick up and go wherever. And my husband and I are working things out in our marriage, so it could end up being stronger than ever. None of my chronic illnesses are life-threatening in and of themselves. They are all manageable with diet and exercise and some medications. 

These struggles I've been going through are teaching me compassion and understanding that I don't think I would have had otherwise. Until you go through unemployment, underemployment, struggling with illnesses and childlessness and being dependent upon the State or your relatives, it's hard to imagine just how hard that is on you psychologically. We like to consider welfare recipients as free-loaders in the United States, but it's like adding insult to injury. You already have to ask for help. Then you get insulted for it and told by politicians that you just didn't try hard enough. I feel like I have been given a unique opportunity to understand both the haves and the have-nots. I was a world-traveler by age 16 and had a taste of what upper-middle class was all about. I was given Upper Middle Class sensibilities. However, I was also taught to never turn my nose up at honest, hard work, and I married a man who is a proud self-defined redneck who grew up on farms and in trailers. I grew up somewhere in between. I'm proud to say one grandfather was a Master Carpenter and the other was a machinist. My grandmothers were a nurse and a teacher-turned-stay-at-home-mother. My parents were a teacher and a teacher-turned-librarian. I get to be a State Clerk-turned-something else. I just haven't decided what I'm turning just yet. 

I knew a really interesting 80-year-old woman. She's the kind of woman I want to be in 40 years. She traveled to the Middle East to see the Holy Land (at 80 years old) and rode a camel. Now, that's an image I want to shoot for. I want to be 80 and ride a camel in Egypt. And as an homage to my mother, I'd like to play a game of Chess with a Turkish man while I'm there (when she was in England in the 1960s, she surprised a Turkish man because she could play). 

When I was graduating college for the first time in the late 1990s, there was a great spoken word song out on the radio called "Everybody's Free To Wear Sunscreen" by Baz Luhrmann. It's almost 14 years ago now. Being 40 years old seemed so far in the future.  I imagined I would find my path in life by then and it wouldn't apply to me. (At that time, 40 seemed soooooooo far in the future.)

The YouTube Video says the lyrics are from a famous essay written in 1997 by Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune. That whole column can be found, here on the Chicago Tribune's Website: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-schmich-sunscreen-column,0,4054576.column. It's worth a read. 


Like I said, I like happy endings, so I'm going to close this entry with my favorite line from it. 

"Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't." 

Planned Planning

Planning.
Apparently, it's a problem.
For those of us with ADD/ADHD, it can be our nemesis. We have problems getting started planning, completing planning, following through on a plan. In the worst cases, all of these are true. We can feel it is a trap - something that will squash our creative energies (probably due to memories of years of teachers and authority figures telling us to pay attention and just do THIS). The problem is that it can also be incredibly freeing once we've done the planning. It means we don't have to spend any more time than necessary on structuring things we don't want to be doing in the first place. Personally, I like having the boundaries. Otherwise, I get overwhelmed and can't start things or I get incredibly distracted by all the shiny POSSIBILITIES.
I have the almost unique opportunity to learn what it's like on both sides of the ADD aisle, so to speak. I am an ADDer and I am MARRIED to an ADDer. While that may sound wonderful to those of you with ADD who feel no one understands what it's like to have ADD, let me assure you it is most often NOT. Because that forces me to alternately act the role of the NON-ADDer or the ADDer being misunderstood.
Our house is in chaos most of the time - and I am not just talking chores. Our finances. Our social life. Our TV schedules. Our work. Our meals. Even our love life. There is no anchor in the storm. Sure, we can have a lot of fun. But without someone to be the calm influence, we're frequently sniping at each other and wondering whether or not the electric company is going to show up at our door to turn off our service for a bill that got "missed."
I'm constantly struggling to "grow up" and waiting for adulthood to begin. It would be really easy to blame all these things on my husband. Really, really easy. But I'm not going to do that because I know that I am just as much to blame. Neither of us can get a handle on things. And the truth is there is really no one to blame for it.  This is how we are both hard-wired. It requires us both to constantly be trying to figure out how to navigate a world not designed for our kind of wiring. I try to keep this in mind when we are arguing because I know that these problems are frustrating and people say things they don't mean when they are frustrated and angry that they are always fighting against the world to live. Still, you can only take personal insults so often and be called controlling so many times (and this goes both ways).
I think I've been blessed to have been exposed to so much since I first got my diagnosis of ADD in college in terms of ways to manage time and impulses. I have learned to make lists and made schedules my friends. Most importantly, I have learned to pick myself up and keep trying when one system or another fell apart (although I am pretty sure I learned that growing up with ADD and not knowing it). Unfortunately, I don't know how to teach this to anyone else, especially my ADD husband. How do you convince someone to sit for 5 minutes and discuss how you plan to move couches up and down stairs? My husband's mentality is: we just move it. Any suggestion about planning moving the items which they will have to be moved around (such as bookshelves) makes him decide I've worked in state government for too long. I guess those management classes are a waste of money, too. Why talk about it beforehand, after all? And then there is the insult that women want to talk everything to death. I'm pretty sure he forgets sometimes that I also have ADD. I just wanted to get the darn things moved without breaking anything, living or nonliving.
So, I guess we'll continue to live in chaos for awhile longer. And my husband has the satisfaction of moving the couches without me. Because I really don't want to break anything living...so I'm going to the library.

Am I really a writer?

adapted from Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

In high school, my English teacher had a several quotes upon the walls of his classroom. One of them was a quote by Carl Sandburg that said "A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than other people."

On the face of it, that seems to fly in the face of logical observation. After all, writers seek out a career doing this very thing, don't they? And when you talk to non-writers, they say they don't like writing or that they can't write. I have been thinking about this quote since that first 9th grade English class. I wrote it down. I pondered it. One might even say I meditated on it. Then I went on and studied to be a writer. And I still wasn't sure I knew what the quote meant.

Something like 20 years later, I am still pondering it, but I do think I agree with it now. To be a writer means so much more than just writing things down. It means creating. It means birthing new ideas. It means struggling to make the philosophies of your mind make sense to someone who has not spent time considering them.

As I studied Journalism,I remember hearing about two men who just had books published. One was a career writer - a "real" writer, if you will. Someone who did it for a living. The other was a novice who was an expert in some field or another and had just written his first book. They sat down for an interview (for some reason at the same time), and the interviewer asked them about their "process" for writing. The novice smiled and nodded and enthusiastically told the interviewer that he would just feel like writing, sit down at his typewriter and pound out a few pages until he felt like stopping. The career writer shook his head and explained that he wished he could do it that way, but because this was a job for him it went more like this:  Every day, no matter what he felt, he would sit down at his word processor and write 1000 words. He did this everyday. And some days the words would come. And some days they wouldn't. But he did it everyday nonetheless. And some days he would feel he almost hated writing. And some days he would love what he was doing. Either way, he would write.

And when I heard that story, I realized that the reason Sandburg was right was because this job takes discipline. It isn't as romantic as it seems. Sometimes it is so hard to be a writer, too, because you have an idea that just won't come out. And when it does, you will always face censure and ridicule from someone - you will never be able to please everyone.

Most writers do not strike it rich with their writing. They are not millionaires. Most writers are lucky to make a decent wage and are not famous.

But we don't do it for the money. Admittedly, there may be a small desire for fame. After all, if you write a book, that is something that can stick around a long time. Look at the author of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo books. They weren't even published in English until after his death.  There is a certain immortality to being a writer. The prospect that your work (and life) might be studied long after you are gone can be appealing. But it's like being a painter whose work is worth more after your death.  Your life isn't what is important to the world.  

We get scared to death about whether or not we are "real" writers because this work is not something we've slapped together easily. It takes blood, sweat, and, often, literal tears to get this work out there. And when it's good, they want more IMMEDIATELY (ask any bibliophile to confirm that this is true).
The truth is...to be a real writer, you have to feel it. It's hard to explain to the uniniated because it isn't something tangible or easily identifiable. It's like being in love. If you are, you know it. But you aren't sure enough of yourself to immediately admit it. It's like twitchy fingers over a keyboard - knowing you want to write, but not knowing WHAT to write. And then wondering if your choice was correct once you do write something.
So..."if you've asked yourself, am I really a writer?" Then, YES...you are. And YES, I am!

Talking to Fish

Ready for a rant today...here ya go, then?

In the recent season premiere of the show "Necessary Roughness," therapist Dr. Dani is in her kitchen at 2 in the morning talking to the fish in a blender that her daughter brought home from a visit to her father's house. Dani is baking biscotti and talking to herself, essentially, but it helps her to direct her thoughts to an outside entity. When caught by her daughter and son, she asks,"Which sounds worse, that I was talking myself or to the fish?"

I'm going to confess. I talk to myself. Sometimes it just helps to get the words out there. Sometimes I do it in the car while I'm driving. Sometimes I do it as a prayer to God. Sometimes I have "conversations" with my cats. In the case of my cats, they tend to talk back to me.

Wait! Wait! I am not the crazy cat lady, I swear! I don't mean they SPEAK ENGLISH to me or anything. Actually, they speak Spanish. No...No! I am joking, of course. I just mean they respond. We've taken great care to talk to our cats to encourage them to vocalize back to us when they want something...or when they are caught behind the hamper in the closet and can't get out.  Believe me, it comes in handy then.

The point is...language is important. Sometimes, it just helps to hear the words out there. Like trying to remember how to pronounce a word. You say it out loud and go "does that sound RIGHT?" Sometimes words that need to be said need to be practiced before you say them to someone's face...or through the phone. I have no proof of this myself, but I believe that language is an essential human instinct. We desperately need to communicate.  Verbal language developed as a means to do that. I imagine the "cave men" making singing noises in praise of their deity at this point in the discussion, because it feels really good to make noise sometimes. Look at Tom Hanks in "Castaway", for instance. Desperate for companionship and communication, he develops "Wilson" out of a volleyball so he has someone to talk to!

I wonder what the internet is going to do to language, actually. I've SEEN what it's done to written language.  "LOL OMG wut's u up 2? " *shudders * To be fair, I don't know what people's language skills were like before this, so that may be an improvement.  I heard there is talk of discontinuing cursive writing lessons in schools now. I go on record as believing that to be a bad move. I remember being a young child and I couldn't WAIT to learn this secret language of CURSIVE WRITING. (insert Dum Dum Da music here). I scribbled everywhere pretending to write it.  I can't imagine taking cursive writing out of the world. They'll have to give special medical school classes to doctors so they can learn to use it to write prescriptions, I guess. How can we ever sign our ineligible signatures without it!?

Hm...I know I started with a point. What was it again?

Oh, yeah, I remember. Talking to Fish...and cats...and inanimate objects...

Just remember, if you don't learn to be comfortable with it now...you'll never be able to be okay talking to apparently thin air when you go travelling back in time and Al comes to you as a hologram... Or when you move into a house and find you're rooming with a ghost that only you can see because you've been turned into a werewolf....

Just sayin'...

Tax Collectors AND Debtors

Someone shared something Faith-based with me recently that I never thought of before. I am used to thinking in terms of being like Christ - ministering to the poor and those in need. I've always gotten that message. That I should be like Christ. Growing up in a church, I always saw myself as the evangelist. Lately I've been going through a lot of rough times in my life and I've been feeling ashamed because it's meant that I haven't really had much to give back to others, even to the point of not attending a church regularly.  This woman pointed out "Look who Jesus associated with". I've never thought about myself as someone whom Jesus is ministering TO.

I have kept thinking about that every since.  I remember learning that Jesus was friends with the tax collectors (like Matthew) and the harlots and the drunkards. After Kim mentioned this to me, I kept thinking about it. If these were the people no one wanted to be around, isn't it likely that debtors would be in that category, too? One of the things I've been ashamed of myself is not being able to pay bills, or having to depend upon others for things when I feel like I'm not carrying my own weight. In Jesus' time, the less respectable people would have included divorcees as well, right? People who lived in ways that were considered sinful. I mean, wow, is there anyone amongst us who can say they have never fallen into that category? But also, those who were looking for comfort and to know that they were not worthless. That just because they were lame or blind, they were still worth something to the Lord.

Could it be that, rather than just listening to Jesus' message as a list of tasks and requirements, I should be listening for the comfort He was bringing, too? For the uplifting of my spirits by his gentle words? 

I grew up as a Christian. I've always assumed that meant that I'm the elder brother of the Prodigal Son story. Could it be Jesus was saying that the fatted calf could be meant for me to share, too?

For years, I have shied away from the messages that have said "God cares about YOU." Maybe I couldn't believe them. Maybe my own depression, anxiety, and low self-worth got in the way. I heard it, but I don't think I listened. The idea that God is a loving God was something I embraced as a child. After my mother died, I think I may come to doubt that.

For years, I have felt that God hasn't been talking to me. Maybe He's been trying to reach me all this time, saying "I love you. Come home" and I've been deleting the voicemail messages.

I Am Not A Book

I had a dream. Not unusal at all for me. I sometimes think I am always dreaming. Sometimes I wake up and I just KNOW that the dream I was dreaming was important in some way. It has been this way since I was a child.  I have had visions this way. I have had what I sometimes see as messages from the Dreamtime  (and sometimes I just dream that the Doctor has dropped me home at Hogwarts after a trip to see the city of Atlantis in the Pegasus Galaxy and then I worry I've been watching too much TV...)
What I want to share with you from that dream was the realization, when I awoke, that my life is not stagnant and that I will not find the answers to my questions inside myself. My life is spark of light and I have to live it to see how it goes.  I realized that I cannot write the story of my life and live it at the same time. 
I was seventeen when my mother died. I learned something then. I learned what it means to sum up a life lived.  I heard the stories of my mother's life and realized that someday people would be talking about my life the same way. I picked up a bad habit at that point. I started to try to live my life with an eye to how people would view me - when I died and in history. All those literature classes in college did not help. I had an internal editor working on my life the way it works on a writer's work. If a writer does not suspend the internal editor, she never gets anything written down. She questions every word, every line. I wanted to be a writer that got studied in colleges! I thought, "how cool would that be?" and I shifted my focus. The result has been devastating to my life and my work. Talk about putting pressure on yourself! Everything I did, I decided that I had to look toward the whole picture.  So everytime I "wasted" a day playing a computer game or watching TV, I berated myself for not working on what I "should be" doing.
Ah, the dreaded "should be"...my nemesis. At this risk of sounding like Sheldon Cooper, it's my mortal enemy - the Khan to my Captain Kirk, if you will.
What it comes down to is expectations. I worry that I'm being arrogant when I say it, but it's true. I have great expectations for myself. I believe God has put me on this earth for a purpose. And, like Clark Kent, I don't think it's to kick footballs. I think I have a greater purpose.
But the truth is, I think everyone has a purpose. And, for each person, that purpose is a great one. 
I read a book once called "Embraced by the Light" by Betty Eadie. I've thought of it often in the years since I've read it. Ms. Eadie claimed to have had a near-death experience where she went to heaven, was allowed to see and remember important parts, and return to tell everyone. Now, firstly I was point out that that in itself is a pretty great purpose.  But, also, one of the things she reports when she returns is that souls get to meet each other in heaven before coming to Earth. And they agree to act in certain ways in each other's lives. It may be something that seems unimportant, like a smile or a gesture or some kind of "bumping into them" on one particular day. What I remember is that even that small interaction was deemed extremely important in Heaven.  I've seen this in action in my own life. I'm sure you have as well. Sometimes we impact other people's lives without really comprehending how much of an impact we've made.  We do it every day. Some interactions we're never going to realize were important until the day we die. Some interactions we learn years later made more of an impact than we knew at the time.  I guess sometimes we begin a work in someone's life and sometimes we are the ones that help the person finish it.

Prayer for Enough

I keep a box on my desk marked "SFGTD." It's a trick I picked up years ago. It stands for "Something For God To Do." Originally, I think I read it as a metaphor in an e-mail, but I found an old, small tissue box and started doing this. I take a piece of paper, write a prayer to God on it, something I am struggling with, then put it in "His In-Box". The idea is that I then "walk away" from the worry, and give it up to God. I'm not saying it always works, but you'd be surprised the number of times, when I, infrequently, dump all the papers out and look through them, that they are prayers that have been answered. Today I did this again, and found this prayer from 2009. I thought it might be time to share it!

Dear Lord,
Please give me enough.

Enough money to live moderately
Enough love to sustain me
Enough friendship not to be lonely without being crowded
Enough patience to ease others' trials and pains
Enough intelligence to understand
Enough faith not to need to understand everything
Enough food to not be hungry
Enough want to not be gluttonous
Enough generousity to share the blessings you give me with others
Enough power to never be a victim
Enough will never to be a slave
Enough humility to never be a tyrant
Enough honour never to cheat or lie
Enough sex with love to stave off lustfulness
Enough pain to make me appreciate pleasure & peace
Enough activity to keep me stimulated
Enough rest to make me strong
Enough weakness to make me humble
Enough darkness to recognize light
Enough work to appreciate what I have
Enough sweet to make me not feel deprived
Enough savory to keep me nourished
Enough family to make me feel at home, wanted, and safe
Enough danger to recognize safety
Enough travel to appreciate home
Enough relaxation to ease my tension
Enough tears to appreciate smiles
Enough water to keep me from being thirsty
Enough contact with You to remind me always that I am your child

Love,
Ilene

"Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day"
2 Corinthians 4:16 (NIV)

I Grew Up In a Library

I don't like to look at it often. It prompted a neurologist once to cluck, shake her head, and sympathetically say "such TRAGEDY". Despite my estranged husband's claims, I do not live in it. And I've mostly accepted it.
It's my past. Everyone has one. Some are fraught with misdeeds, some contain nothing but petty dramas, some are shrouded in mystery because the person "just doesn't want to talk about it". It's probably what really made me a writer.
One of my first memories (aside from that one when I was throwing a fit because I couldn't go to school with my sisters), is of sitting at my oldest sister's writing desk scribbling. I knew I wasn't really writing. But I was pretending to be writing. Now, if that didn't mark me as a writer, I'm hard pressed to find something that would!  (Well, there are those years and years of cognitive behavioral therapy...)
All that aside, when I do actually look at my past, I'm tempted to look only my childhood, because that was the happiest time of my life. As it should be, I would guess. I was loved and protected, and I had the distinct advantage, to my mind, of being born into a family of thinkers.  By that I mean, they were all about the education of the mind and body. My father had a degree in Business, followed up by a Master's Degree in Education. Born to a nurse and machinist, he took business classes in high school and then went into the Army. He was smart enough to use the GI Bill to his advantage, and wound up teaching high school business for 33 years. My mother was born to a Master Carpenter and a former teacher who raised 9 children (5 of them boys who towered over her). She got her own degree in teaching, certifying in both math and English. Now, it is common knowledge that those who excel in math usually do not excel in English and vice versa. I asked my father about that once. He laughingly repsonded "Oh, she was definitely better at one than the other." I have a vague recollection of looking at one of her college transcripts once. I defnitely take after my mother in this regard. While Mom did substitute teach for awhile after college, shortly after I came along, she was offered a position as the pioneering librarian in our little valley, and she never looked back. Librarian suited her immensely. I'd even go so far as to say it was her calling in life. 
As for me, I begin my memories of life in that library. To begin with, it was only a few rooms in the front of an old yellow house on main street. The front two rooms - living room and parlor area, the kitchen, and a long sun room off to the side.  I remember the smell, though. The downstairs of that house were a veterinary office. Thinking about it now, it seems an unlikely set up. But they were willing to rent the space to the fledgling library. And it had the advantage of catty-corner across the street from our own house.
I played in that library from the time I was three years old. Everyone in that valley knew me as the librarian's daughter. Kids used to come in with their parents and we'd play. I especially remember Rachel Morgan and I playing with pinkish red plastic "Barrel o' Monkeys" monkeys, linking them together by their little bent arms, making chains of them that lifted up and up until they finally fell off their precarious perches. I remember that the music was out on the sunporch in bins. At that time, it was Vinyl. Beautiful black plastic long playing records - "78s"- with lovely, decorative cardboard cases. We had an album of Kiss, and I remembering staring at the faces in make-up and trying to figure it out. I used to spend so much time growing up wandering amongst books and music, and puppets, because we had crafts, too, in the kitchen, and a Junior Puppet group.
Shortly after I went to school, the library had grown enough to need a new location. That caused some confusion for me and my bus drivers, trying to figure out where I should be dropped after school. My sisters had a different schedule than me because they went to school all day and I had half-day kindergarten.  I remembering peering out a bus window to see Mom waiting on the beaten sidewalk in front of the library...and watching the bus drive away with her standing there. Eventually, the routine was decided and I got dropped at the new library location, which was further up in town, beside the fire station. 
The weird thing about time and places is that, well, time passes, and locations that live in your memory one way become other things to other people. A family actual moved in to the old library location, and the "new" library location eventually became an insurance agency. MY insurance agency. It was a strange experience to walk in to talk with people and stand on the other side of a counter under and over which I once played.  I looked at the counter and all I could see for a moment was the cool paperclip magnet Mom once had there. I loved to play with this thing. With a true child's fascination for magnets, I would make paperclip trains that extended off the magnets to see how far I could take them before they lost the magnetism. And that  big clunker of a "check out" machine that I learned to use - you slide in a card and heard a satisfying CLUNK when it took a bite out of the card (so it seemed to me) and printed the date it was due back. Back behind my mom's monstrosity of a metal desk (where she kept that plastic cube containing all our pictures), was the children's section. Looking at it now in my mind's eye it was TINY, but back then I could sit for hours reading and re-reading my favorite books and picture books. My favorite for awhile was one involving a boy and his imaginary friend. I can still see the pictures, but, with all due respect to the author, I have a feeling I made up a better story for it than what was actually in it. At least a better story for me, because I still have this warm attachment to that story that defies description. It was like my security blanket.
A good number of years was spent at that library...all through grade school we were there. I spent afternoons and weekend and evenings there. I read Garfield cartoons, Dr. Seuss books, "Dicey's Song," Judy Blume, "A Wrinkle In Time," "The Language of the Goldfish," "Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret," hygiene books, "Sweet Valley High" books, watched "The 5000 Fingers of Dr. ...somebody-or-other" and "Cat Ballou" films on a screen in the main room, joined the Junior Puppeteers and wrote puppet plays, and had Girl Scout meetings. I got caught stealing candy and punished for being unkind and rude in that library. I played "diving competition" off the steps along the side of the library, too, which had such a charm for me at the time, but I couldn't adequately explain to you now. 


(continued)