50+ Lifestyles

Max’s Musings

By Max Molleston

As time rolls by we have moved through that joyous Thanksgiving gathering and meal. Some hosted family and friends, others drove to the site of merriment and great stories and fine food. We are not neglecting those of you who underwent airline specs to get to your destinations or are anticipating that trip this month for the joy, love and seasonal gifts. Most 50+ers can put together parts of their early Christmas joy. It has to do with childhood. Our fun challenges this month are from poets reflecting on brothers and sisters when we were in the single years of our lives.

Dorothy Aldis produced this remembering.

LITTLE

  I am the sister of him

  And he is my little brother.

  He is too little for us

  To talk to each other.

  So every morning I show him

  My doll and my book;

  But every morning he still is

  too little to look.

How cute is Dorothy’s remembered brother?

Another reminder of young memory, and perhaps you could have been a part of this poem by Elizabeth Madox Roberts.

BIG BROTHER

Our brother Clarence goes to school;

He has a slate and a blue schoolbag.

He has a book and a copybook

And a scholar’s companion and a little slate rag.

He knows a boy named Joe B. Kirk,

And he learns about c-a-t cat,

And how to play one-two-sky-blue,

  And how to make a football out of a hat.

We climb up on the fence and gate

And watch until he’s small and dim,

Far up the street, and he looks back

  To see if we keep on watching him.

These very cute (and accurate) memories turn into a great (and needed) service, refreshing our childhoods as we approach these giving and receiving Holidays.

An editor and poet, Helen Ferris, selected poems and stories and placed them in a book titled Favorite Poems Old and New, uncomplicated, short and terribly cute, copyright 1957. Your poems came from there.

As brothers with our sister, we watched what mom and dad, and perhaps our grandparents felt we needed, and maybe wanted and hid the presents. Our family was young, as the Great Depression was spending time with most families. Socks and underwear came to the boys, and maybe a pair of those boots with a knife holder. Little girl things for our younger and cuter sister.

I shared a bedroom with my sister in those early days. We were awake at 2 a.m., wanting to get to our gifts under the tree, and we were told it wasn’t time yet. Soon that crucial time will reappear and thousands of fortunate youngsters will want to dissolve all that guessing that has taken place recently. May your memories alert you to the joys of a child’s Christmas.
A new year looms. Be here in January as we work to find poets and their poetry that charms us all.