Friday, April 20, 2018

Time Capsule - So Long Royalty Checks....

As various extended family households begin to be "tidied up" there are boxes opened, trash and treasures revealed.  Time Capsule will be an occasional glimpse into these.  I'm not sure who might find them interesting but you could say that about most real time capsules dug up years later....

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The trove of mementos that make up this "Time Capsule" series came to me courtesy of my brother.  When he showed me this he said I had written some pretty good poetry for a kid.




Reading this I did have doubts. Oh,  sure I was a precocious little imp but "taper"- meaning a candle - was not a common word even back in the early 1960s.  And the theme of most of these entries was rather oriented towards bugs.  I seem to remember being more into dinosaurs, just as my grandson is two generations down the line.


With a bit of searching I was able to track down the source of these little ditties.  It seems I was only being asked to copy from a book of poems by a woman named Aileen Fisher.  As the pages are titled Spelling and Writing I would guess the criteria were different for each exercise.

I don't know if I was also graded on quality of bug drawings but I have to say this is pretty good work.


Ms. Fisher was a much beloved author of poems and stories for children.  In the 1930's she moved out west to live in a log cabin with her fellow author Olive Rabe.  Back then nobody made a fuss about this sort of thing.  Now I fear school children - who properly remain primarily interested in bugs and dinosaurs - would be expected to celebrate it.

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