[the_old_crowd] Re: happy merry

[Kat Macfarlane]

I'm so sorry. I'd love to hear your long story when you have the time. I 
hope they went to someone who would love and treasure them. Any chance 
you could get them back? (If not, you're welcome to come to Santa Cruz 
and read mine.)

My parents got married in 1940, but there was a /war/ on, so they waited 
three years to see what was going on before having me. They reckoned it 
was safe by then, and the next thing my father knew he was conscripted 
and shipped off to Panama to deal with elephantiasis and other exotic 
tropical diseases. My mother and I joined him there in early 1945. I 
have eschewed the tropics ever since! I still loathe Spam, which was 
often the only meat the commissary had on hand. What else? I learned 
that coatis and small native children love bananas (I never did, much); 
my father would buy them by the bunch and hang it on the back porch, 
first come, first served. Our native housemaid used to chew my bacon to 
soften it up for me, which is probably why I came home with a mild case 
of tuberculosis. And I adored our Panamanian milkman, who called me "la 
niña; one time, when I was just out of my bath, I came romping out to 
see him in the altogether, which got a gasp out of my mother and a 
bellow of laughter out of him (I was all of two years old, so it was 
hardly a social episode). And I remember my father carrying me in his 
arms to Fort San Lorenzo and showing me where the Spaniards chained 
British prisoners in dungeons below the tide line, so they would drown 
when the tide came in. I wish I could remember more, but I was only just 
small.

I was one of those irritating children who start reading spontaneously 
at about three and a half; I can't remember a time when I couldn't read. 
/My Book House/ and /A Picturesque Tale of Progress/ arrived in my life 
when I was about five, and I took off and haven't stopped yet. I still 
have penitential thoughts about what I put my kindergarten teacher 
through, asking when we could stop drawing stupid pictures and /read 
some books/--and then when I hit first grade, there were books, and they 
were /Dick and Jane/. I utterly rebelled for the first time in my young 
life, and refused to have anything to do with them! (I probably trotted 
in a volume of /My Book House/ to inform the teacher of what /I/ 
expected books to be about!)

I still have the /Treasure Island /my father used to read to me with the 
wonderful, scary illustrations by Norman Price, with pirates that really 
/looked/ like pirates! (They didn't scare me, because I was snuggled up 
against my father, and I knew he'd protect me!) In fact, I have most of 
the childhood books I loved so much. When my father went off to college, 
my grandmother packed up all his childhood books and sent them to the 
/dump/, if you can imagine, and he never, ever forgave her, and put the 
fear of god in my mother of doing the same thing to me. So they kept 
them until I could get them out. Most of them are in that big bookcase  
with /MBH/ and /APToP/. :D  Whenever I need heartwarming, which I have 
recently,...there they are.

Pederobibliophilic purrs,

--Gatta

Catlady (Rita Prince Winston) wrote:
>
> --- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com 
> <mailto:the_old_crowd%40yahoogroups.com>, Kat Macfarlane <katmac at ...> 
> wrote:
> >
> > Oh, I do hope you still have them!
>
> Alas, I do not, which is one of those long stories...
>
> > My edition is from 1948, and I suspect yours probably is
> > from about then too, which would put you about a generation after
> > me.
>
> No, I'm about the same generation as you: 1948 was when my parents got
> married.
>
> 



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