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Where I'm From
By Judi Moreillon
I'm from 49¢ Golden Books purchased at the IGA -
storybooks advertising animated movies and cartoons;
Disney's Snow White and Mickey Mouse read to me
by Uncle Tony,
too-busy Mama singing from the bedroom with the baby.
I'm from Daddy's bedtime adventure stories
and tales told 'round campfires - hot-faced and listening hard
and sometimes scared in the dark - with vibrant images
drawn by imagination behind the covers of my heavy eyelids.
I'm from TV's Captain Kangaroo and Howdy Doody
where all the kids in the Peanut Gallery looked like me;
I'm from Amos and Andy and from The Little Rascals
where I learned to laugh at people whose skin was dark.
I'm from Bible verses written in Miss Stephenson's
even manuscript on sharp white index cards;
passages memorized in my heart for Sunday School
then carefully collected and filed in a little silver box.
I'm from reading Fun with Dick and Jane until Miss Schwab's
class.
Then, I'm from Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of
Verses
from which she read every day to a class of eight-year-old poets
who wrote and recited our own heart-felt verses each week.
I'm from an elementary school without a library
where a bookmobile full of dog and horse stories came every two
weeks.
There I satisfied my hunger for real books with tales of telepathic
talk,
loyalty and unconditional love between animals and children -
most of them boys.
I'm from a working-class Christian home in the middle of America
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a home full of cradle and campfire songs and borrowed books,
full of Bible verses and classic poems, a literacy-rich place
that since my birth has painted my window on the world.
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