Mom's Birthday May 4, 2006

May Elvira Clark Stevens May 4 1908 -- June 11 2004

Mom's birthday is always a special day, even though I do not have an addresses to send cards to anymore. But she is always in my thoughts, especially those days when cards were possible to send and phone calls could go through.

This year I'm remembering Mom reading to me when I was 6 years old, plus or minus. After supper and before bedtime Mom would have me sit in her lap while she read prose and poetry. I often heard Robert Frost poems, the ones many of us know, about the crow shaking down snow, about walls and neighbors, horse and sleigh rides in winter woods, and the favorite- "so young it tottters when she licks it with her tongue."

Mom graduated from Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont USA and though she enjoyed her school work she mostly spoke of summers waiting on tables at Breadloaf when Robert Frost was in residence and teaching. Though she was not attending the writing confrence, there were public events that she could attend due to her being a Middlebury student.

An other of Mom's favorites was, Alfred Noyes, "The highwayman" and when she was finished she would smile gently down at me, all the while I was trying to handle the tragedy that had just flooded my ears and senses. The beginning was stirring, I agree..."The road was a ribbon of moonlight, over the purple moor ..." but the ending always burned me alive. But then, I have never found violence to be entertaining, for some odd reason, because so many people do. It's a staple, a given that most serious entertainment has to be violent. Well, I didn't understand it back then and still don't.

But I understand very well how important it proved to be for me that Mom read to me in the evenings when I was a small child. Would that every child could be read to.

Alfred Noyes poem The Highwayman
 
 
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