Regrettably, I don’t read as much as I once did. It seems that the older I get, the less time I have to read. Or, maybe, because I am getting older and slowing down a little (a little?), it just takes me longer to do the things I once did more quickly in order to have time to read.
Growing up in a time before the advent of television, computers, Ipads, and such, reading is what we did to pass our time. We didn’t have a lot of books in our house, but what we had were cherished. I learned to read in a small one-room school which was called Big Foot by most people. I’m not sure I even knew the real name of the school for many years. The official name of the school was Elm Grove, located a few miles north of Tahlequah, and just north of Fourteen Mile Creek. Our teacher at Big Foot was Virgil McJunkin, and he instilled a love of reading in his students. Over the years, I have come to realize just how fortunate we were to have had Virgil McJunkin as our teacher.
I remember once hearing a man talking to my mother about how, during visits to our home, he was amazed to see all of her children sitting quietly reading while the adults were talking. Discipline had something to do with that, but we did love reading. Our mother loved to read, too. She had been forced to quit school to help out on her family’s dairy farm when she was in the 11th grade. When she talked about the fact that she did not get to graduate from high school, one could see the pain she felt even after all those years. All seven of her children did graduate from high school, and she was very proud of that. In fact, as each one graduated, she added a senior picture to the collection in her bedroom. This continued until she had all seven of the pictures hanging on the wall.
I confess to being somewhat of a “hoarder of books”, even saving school text books. My husband is just as bad. After forty plus years, I still have almost all of our daughter’s picture books and story books, and have had the pleasure of sharing them with our grandchildren. I shall never forget reading Shel Silverstein‘s “The Giving Tree” to Susan for the first time. She was four years old at the time, and she had picked out that book to buy at a place that was one of her favorite places to explore, a little bookstore on North Muskogee in Tahlequah. She was so sad and cried the first time we read that book, but she loved it, and we read it over and over. As a matter of fact, she chose several of Shel Silverstein’s books, including “The Missing Piece”, a book that my grandson has certainly enjoyed as well.
Books have always been a big part of our lives, but I do worry that with the new curriculum in the schools and all the technology to which children are subjected, that reading as we once knew it will almost be a thing of the past. And that will be a sad loss.
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