Do You Like Worms?

Are you looking for a Christmas gift that's fun, inexpensive and doesn't come from China or anywhere else that might get held up on a barge off the coast?

My memoir of growing up in the small town of Springfield, Vermont in the 1940s is a light-hearted read. The title, If You Don't Like Worms, Keep Your Mouth Shut refers to a trick my sister played on me while walking down a hill one day. She is on the left in this picture and I'm on the right. 

If you want a gift for someone over the age of sixty, they will enjoy this book as it will spark memories of years past. I was born in 1940, a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Even after the war, my dad was an air raid warden so while he was out on the street making sure the neighbors' lights were off when the alarm sounded, my mother, sister, and I were huddled under a darkened window with the shades closed waiting for the all clear to sound. It was also a time of ration stamps where staples, like sugar, were in short supply.

It was a time when in the evening we listened to radio as a family as we had no television yet. It was a time before computers, cell phones (we had a rotary phone with a party line), fast food, and any kind of hand-held device. Life was simple and easy.

The newspaper then and now, the Springfield Reporter, recently ran an article about my book, mentioning that Worms now sits proudly in the Springfield Arts and Historical Society as part of Springfield's history. The article included the following two excerpts from the book:

On cold icy mornings after a snowfall, Dad was afraid he wouldn't be able to make it up the hill to get to his job at the Gas Company where he was a meter reader and fix-it man. So Mom, Donnie (my sister Donna) and I would bundle up in our coats, hats, mittens, boots and scarves and sit in the back of his pick-up in order to make enough weight for him to make it up the hill. At the top of the hill, we piled out and walked in his tracks back to the warm house where hot cocoa and oatmeal would soon be waiting for us.

Summer was a different matter. Donnie and I were outside a good part of the day, usually playing baseball in the street. Normally it takes at least 18 people to play a game of baseball, but not so with Donnie and me. She was one team and I was the other. Home plate was at the end of the street a few yards from the woods. First base was the Hughes' driveway, second base was some unseen spot half-way up the hill, and third base was the telephone pole. Donnie would throw the ball and I'd swing at it with all my might and miss it. She'd yell "strike." She'd throw the ball again and this time I wouldn't swing at it. She'd yell "strike."  I never understood her umpiring. I also never hit the ball, but I did get plenty of exercise running down into the woods to retrieve all the balls I missed.

If You Don't Like Worms, Keep Your Mouth Shut is available through Amazon for only $12 plus shipping. It's a fun read for anyone who remembers that time as well as an informative read for those born more recently.  

Quote of the Day: We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they're called memories. Some take us forward, they're called dreams. Jeremy Irons

Worms Anyone?

Today I want to remind you of an oldie but a goodie.  By oldie, I mean the book is not terribly old, but the author sure is.  I'm talking about a book I wrote a few years ago about growing up in Vermont in the 1940s.  I would say in a small town in Vermont, but they’re all small towns.  This town happens to be Springfield, a quarter of the way up the state.  Population ten thousand during the war years because of all the machine shops, and eight thousand by the time we left Springfield to move to Connecticut, in 1954.

 

An odd title? Yes.  It refers to a trick my sister played on me when I was around ten and she was twelve.  We were walking down an enormous hill to get to Main Street (probably to go to the library) and she said to me, “Do you want to play a game?”

Well, to have my big sister want to do something with me was a big deal, so I said, “Yes!”

She said, “Close your eyes.”  I closed my eyes.  She said, “Open your mouth.” I opened my mouth.

Then I said, “Yuk!!”  I had a tree worm in my mouth.  She had seen it hanging from a tree ahead of us and decided it would be fun to “play a game” with me.

All that aside, it would appear that we lived a very abnormal life.  We were happy, well adjusted, had two parents that did fun things with us; we grew up with a good set of values and knowing we were loved. To hear people talk today, that is not the norm.  

I was born in 1940, during the Depression, but before World War II. I remember ration books and trucks pulling into town carrying sugar and flour and all the housewives rushing to get their allotment before the goods ran out.  I was brought up, for the first ten years, without television.  Horror of horrors!  The four of us sat around the living room at night and listened to radio shows.  Saturday morning, my sister and I curled up on the floor in front of the radio, our jammies on and a cup of hot chocolate in our hands, and listened to Let’s Pretend.  In the afternoon, she and I might walk down to the Ideal Theater to watch a Roy Rogers movie, or a musical, along with Movietone News, sports, and a serial. 

Did we have computers, cell phones, DVDs, Gameboys, iPhones or iPads?  No. We made our own fun and weren’t wired into anything.   We were free to let our imaginations go wild and take us anywhere we wanted to go, be it outer space, an underwater kingdom, or anywhere in between.  That my friends, is how childhood should be lived.  In my humble opinion.

This book is available at www.amazon.com or www.diversionpress.com.

Quote of the Day:  This little world of childhood with its familiar surroundings is a model of the greater world.  Carl Gustav Jung