The book was the Golden Treasury of Bible Stories. It contained Bible stories and poems that were easy for a child to understand.
And it had glorious and beautiful pictures.
My mother inscribed it for me.
The book contained nearly 500 pages of stories and the Table of Contents was laid out in a way that it was easy to find a story you wanted to read.
But, perhaps, the best thing I found about the book, as I took it off my shelf today was not the well-read and well-loved stories, but the things Mama had hidden inside its pages.
I found the card where Mama had given the book to me for my birthday one year after I had become a mother. She was so excited about giving it to me to read to my first son that she couldn't wait for my actual birthday but gave it to me early instead.
Mama also had tucked away in the pages a newspaper clipping of our neighbor's daughter, Linda Roberts, when Linda was in high school back in the 1960s. Mama always loved the Roberts family.
I also found an old Valentine that I made for Mama when I was little. Yes. I have always loved dogs. Probably since before I was actually born.
The last thing I found in the book today tells you exactly why I ended up working in education nearly all my adult life. This is the message my Mama instilled in me from the time I was a baby. It appears here in the form of a bookmark from National Library Week, April 12-18, 1964, but Mama lived this message. She read to me often during my formative years, and she read the newspaper and books in front of me every single day.
It is a magical message to send to a child. It has the power to turn a life of poverty into the American dream. Never stop reading. Never stop learning.
This is the gift my Mama gave to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment