My Hometown

"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?"

~Emily in Our Town by Thorton Wilder

Additional Reading: http://theatreworks.typepad.com/murrayross/2009/09/you-are-here.html

                I don’t know where to begin. I do not love my hometown…my love for my hometown is brimming over? The relationship I have with Mansfield, Missouri is a bittersweet one and I have just as many bad memories as I do good ones.

                 I liken my relationship to Mansfield to the relationship Rose Wilder Lane must have had with the town and maybe this is why I’ve always had an affinity for Rose. I love Rose Wilder Lane. I’m not sure the people of Mansfield do. She said their schools weren’t good enough, she didn't marry and settle down in the town, she was a divorced Libertarian come back to help her parents, but she did not join in with the town…instead she wrote about it. And, in the same manner as Harold Bell Wright in The Calling of Dan Matthews, her book of short stories Old Home Town ruffled the feathers of those in the town who knew the stories were about them. She eventually moved to Connecticut, where she had a barn for a library and staved off stories that she wrote the Little House books by adamantly proclaiming she helped with the editing and that is all. Many of her biographers say otherwise.

vintagepostcards.org

                You see, we’re reading Our Town in my Sophomore English classes. Reading this play always makes me feel nostalgic for a Mansfield, Missouri that I’m not sure has existed during my life time. Growing up, we went to baseball and basketball games. When I was little we went to a place called Susy Qs and got orange soda floats and curly fries after we cheered for Mighty Mights football. My sisters and I would walk to the library, which was just down the road, and the librarian would know exactly what books we wanted to check out. We cruised the “Y”. When our friends passed away in accidents or of illness we went to their funerals. We knew everything about everyone. I remember thinking, “Wow, nothing happens in this town.” And, nothing did? I have learned that everything happened in that town.  I've also learned that it’s those kids who love this play and cherish their home town of Lebanon, Missouri that have something on me, they’ve learned to love their hometown and at an early age they’ve learned to have ‘roots and wings’ too! (Thank you very much “Sweet Home Alabama”!)

http://www.legendsofamerica.com/mo-lebanon.html

It is because of this play, Our Town,  (granted I didn’t make this effort until I was 25) that I listen to and look at my mother when she’s speaking, that I cherish the moments I have with my family and friends and it is because of this play that I try to inculcate in my students a love for a town that many of them don’t really like. And, it’s when we read this play that I begin to think about the town in which I live currently.

My life in Lebanon resembles the same bittersweet love I have for Mansfield. I have just as many good memories as bad, I long for a Lebanon that I’m not sure ever existed (a Lebanon that I see in postcards and books) and I have to take a deep breath and realize that while I consider many days here to be boring and useless...there really is soooooo much going on.  There’s a great documentary called “Jo’s Town”, it encapsulates all that is beautiful about small towns, about America, about Lebanon and the gloriousness of living. It’s about a young lady from Lebanon, who played Rebecca Gibbs in the 1978 LHS production of Our Town, she died in a car accident during her senior year. To honor her memory,  the cast, 20 years later, reproduces the play. It chronicles their lives since the play and shows how some people and things never change. A couple of my friends and I went to watch the documentary at Summer's Auditorium a few years ago, and it made us all cry, not because of the fact that this girl died in real life--we did not know her, but because this girl lived and continues to live in each of her friends. We don’t know how many lives we touch and who we change just because we are born.

According to Wilder, life just comes in three short acts, Daily Life, Love and Marriage, and Death and Eternity and, he says in The Woman of Andros, "Suddenly the hero saw that the living too are dead and that we can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasure". What is your treasure and how are you conscious of it?



Christopher and I in front of Wrink's Market at the beginning of our trip on the Mother Road with our friend (she's taking the picture). Historic Route 66 runs right through Lebanon, on Elm street.

 

Twist Your Noodle...

"In our new knowledge economy, if you haven't learned how to learn, you'll have a hard time."
---Peter Drucker

         So far my kid loves to read...no seriously, she does. If there are toys on the floor and a pile of books, she picks the books. She'll grab one of the books and hand it to me, nodding her head, while quietly and passionately saying, "Yes, yes". We read to her at night and well, frankly anytime she wants. She loves books that have animals, and Seussian sentence structures and princesses...I can't wait until she starts reading the Serendipity books. We watch "Super Why" where you learn that if you have a problem you 'look in a book'. This genius cartoon teaches theme, rhyming patterns, spelling, phonetics and has caused my kidlet to sing, "ABCDEFG" over and over...I know she doesn't know that these are letters, but isn't it a start?
          I don't know how to keep this passion for books going, I don't remember not loving books, nor do I remember ever being told to read, so I don't know how to fan the flames. My mother read to us at night, something from the Bible and then something that we wanted like a chapter from the Laura books, "The Purple Pussycat" (Kim's favorite), "Popcorn" "Sheldon's Lunch" et cetera. On the rare occassion that I got in trouble and was told to go to my room, my mother would say, "No radio, and no reading". For as long as I can remember I have had a book in hand, in brain and/or in head. There was one night, just a couple of weeks ago, that the my whole tiny family was reading. Lila with her books on the floor, Chris with his Nook and me with my book. No television, just books and the occasional grunt of happiness...over books. We do this often.
            The men we have married are readers, sure it's non-fiction, sports books, man magazines or, in the case of my husband, "The Grumpus Under the Stairs"...a book he still wishes he had, by the way...a book that I can't find for sale under $100, but it's still reading. In our different ways, all three of us girls have become avid readers...sure Kim reads boring books like the manual to my car and Marissa reads scary books or VC Andrews, but we are ALL readers.
            Of course, my sisters and I had the same upbringing and, because we grew up in the world's smallest town, we had the same wonderful teachers, all of which did their very best to instill in us a love for reading. One teacher I remember especially, her name is Mrs. Coday, because she had a reading bathtub. It was one of those claw toed tubs that she painted some sort of obnoxious lime green and she had this tub sitting off to the side by the bookshelves. It wasn't attached to water or anything, there was no swimming involved, it was just an empty tub. But, during reading time (if you had been good) you and 2 or perhaps 3, I don't remember exactly, of your classmates got to sit in the tub and read. These times were the best times ever. In 5th grade, I got to be in the 8th grade-level reading class. Even then I understood that splitting kids up by their reading level and challenging them to read, at no matter what level, made them better readers. I understood this because my sister was in her grade-level class and she learned as much and had as much fun with reading as I did.
          We had Book-It goals (free pizza was way cool, Book-It was not tied to our passing our respective grade-level) and SSR, we did not have AR.
          In our own different ways, my sisters and I have figured out that reading is essential to life and understanding. We understand that the power to read and process information is stronger than monetary assets and we do not take this for granted.
          Being a high school teacher has also shown me the pitfalls of people who don't have a love for reading and I have also seen to what lengths students--smarts students--will go to NOT read (I can't even get all of my honors kids to read books in the summer--something I still assume every honors kid should just do by nature)...I do not want my kiddo to be one of these kids.
          How will I be able to make sure that my kiddo has teachers who instill in her a love of reading and how will I make sure that these teachers are more concerned with her learning than they are test scores and AR scores and MAP scores?
          How will I make sure that I teach my tiny person a love of reading without killing, in her, the joy of reading?



Happy Sparkly Halloween



Grandma (Nona) reading to Lila Jane