Favorite Pasttime....

Journal Jar -- What was your favorite pastime as a child?


The key word in that sentence is “favorite”, I don't know, so I will just start writing some down and see. My interpretation of a pastime is things you do for fun.

It worked, I was writing all these things down as realized that I did have a favorite pastime at least favorite after the 5th grade. Here is the original list –(I will start first with eggs, Easter, sparrow, rotten, chickens what came first chicken or the egg, hunting, chicken run city, raising cats, dogs, and animals, animal hospital, dolls, TV, movie stars, forts in the haystacks). Wouldn’t those all have been fun?  (ha,ha)

I don’t remember the chronology necessarily, so I will hit a few memories.  (very few this post went long)

 The bookcase behind us in this picture … just down out of sight behind Larry …

We had a set of books in the built in bookcase, blue green covers seven or eight in the set, of bible stories. I don’t remember reading them but I suspect that Mom read them to us when we were little. Anyway I would go and pull out volume 2 and turn the pages to the most beautiful picture of a woman I had ever seen. It was a picture of Eve close up. Did they have air brush techniques back then? I guess I am lucky that she had brown hair, so that I could dream of looking like that someday. After that intro you probably think my pastime was beauty, but no it certainly wasn’t that.

One time while visiting Aunt Elaine (mom’s sister) in Wendell, Idaho. That is weird because I was thinking I was young. My memory is that they lived all over…my favorite place was when they lived down the long narrow road that went up and down like a roller coaster, and Dad would drive it fast. My stomach would stay up and way back behind the car while my body would move down and forward. That house was somewhere near ____gorge because we would all go through the desert and see it. Well, I digress. Aunt Elaine had an attic full of boxes of stuff and as kids will do I went exploring alone this time (that is why I think I must have been older than I remember and I remember a different house) In one box I found some books, one of them had a house with gables just like where I was so I sat down on the dusty floor and started reading. Mom and Aunt Elaine finally started to worry about what I might have gotten into and came to find me.

I was sitting there on the hard floor totally engrossed in a little red-headed-girls story, laughter and tears all mixed together. I was so loath to put it back in the box and leave. Luckily Aunt Elaine said something about no you can take the whole set and bring them back next visit! That is how I was introduced to Anne of Green Gables.

I am sure we read as a family. I know my Dad and Mom read to us because I can still hear Dad’s voice, “down on the beach in the sand in the sun lived an old mother turtle and her little turtle one, we dig said the turtle, we dig said the one, so they dug all day in the sand in the sun” One of my favorites. Another was “Where does the Butterfly Go When It Rains?” both very small children’s books. I love them. Mom did and does read whenever she got a moment. When we were little she would read at night after the washing, cleaning, cooking, cleaning and waiting for Dad to come in from the last irrigation run or something like that.

I don’t remember reading much before the fifth grade.

Now, I know my memory does not serve me well in this area at all. Here is a picture of our new school library. It is probably 5 by 5 feet. I think that the cameraman had to have been standing outside the doorway to get this shot. After reading the caption I see why I was chosen to be in the picture. Mom was the “membership chair” in the PTA. It was small, I think what you see in the picture was the whole of it, but still it was way better than the shelf in the classroom with a few books the teachers were willing to share.


I do not know what transpired that year in school. What I remember is being introduced to Nancy Drew books! I remember again laying on the hard dirty floor in the back to the side of the room reading while everyone else was working at their desks. Why? That is a good question and some of you think I must have gotten my work done early, I know that wasn’t it. I was not a very good student. (In the third grade I got a big fat red F in spelling – I even had to walk up in front of the class and put it there) That is a whole other story but it applies here because the only thing I can come up with for that big F was that we got hardback spelling books and so the work had to be done in class and not taken home. Why did that make all the difference? Mom must have helped me by spending extra time. I know we had to share the hardback books and I didn’t have time to do the work. So, I wonder if in the 5th grade the teachers decided I could be helped the very most by broadening my mind, thru reading? All I know is that Nancy Drew had an amazing life of mystery and intrigue. I read every book Mrs. Spink’s had. I was so excited to go to junior high school where they had a large library since it was connected to the high school and finish reading all of the Nancy Drew books. That dream was shattered…I couldn’t find any…when I asked about them I was told, “Those are little kid books, we don’t have them here.” That should have ended my library career, I was crushed, but it didn’t. I actually volunteered in the library during a “your choice” hour over my high school years. (I had a scholarship from it too … that I forgot to ever use.)

I have read books far into the night, and when I should have been doing other things from then on. They say reading helps you write…I wish that were true.