Author: Kathy Waller

Hansel and Gretel and Cuthbert and Me

Posted on by Kathy Waller in Uncategorized

If I were going to write a memoir about my years as a librarian, I’d title it The Accidental Librarian.

Because the job wasn’t part of a plan. It just happened along.

One Sunday afternoon in early August, many years ago, I was sitting at home, minding my own business, when  a school administrator /old friend called and said, “You want to be the librarian?”

The previous librarian had resigned. School would start in two weeks. The principals had talked amongst themselves and designated me The Chosen.

My end of the conversation went from Who, me? to I’m not qualified to Well, I don’t know. A week later, after conferring with a dean of the UT Graduate School of Library and Information Science (UT-GSLIC, or just the Library School), I moved on to a shaky Okay.

Three years earlier, I’d completed my M.A. in English, breathed a sigh of relief, and promised myself I was finished with grad school. Oh well. I wouldn’t have to register until after Christmas.

So. The state education agency granted a waiver. I cleaned out my classroom. I gave away most of my teaching materials. I moved across the hall to the high school library. School started. I found myself with the title of District Librarian and responsibility for three campus libraries.

Which included teaching primary and elementary students two days a week. Teaching being a relative term.

I had no education or experience with that age group. I’d seen hardly anyone below the age of fourteen for years. I was certified to teach grades six through twelve. But Learning Resources Specialist was an all-level certification.

What a shame mine was temporary and had been granted on a technicality. But when the going gets tough…

I learned a lot. Boy, did I learn a lot. Fast.

I learned that writing one’s name at the top of the page required fifteen minutes out of a twenty-minute class.

I learned that if second graders said, “May we write in cursive?” and I said, “Of course,” it would take thirty.

I learned that if I showed third-graders a new historical picture book about Queen Elizabeth I, the principal would ask me, months later, why I had told students that if they went into the restroom and turned off the light and said, “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary,” a severed head would appear in the mirror.

I learned that fourth-grade boys love to use the unabridged dictionary, because it has some fascinating words not found in the abridged dictionary. Even the abridged unabridged dictionary has some really good words. Fourth-graders are impressed by words the rest of us don’t notice. (I almost convinced them not to become hysterical at the mention of Captain Underpants.)

The biggest lesson I learned was that sometimes I wouldn’t have any idea what I’d learned. To wit:

Once upon a time, I read “Hansel and Gretel” to a class of kindergartners. My audience, sitting rapt at my feet, comprised sixteen exceptionally good listeners, a fact I later regretted.

When I reached “And they lived happily ever after,” little Cuthbert (not his real name) stopped stroking my panty-hose-clad shin and tugged on my skirt. I ceded him the floor.

“But it’s a really good thing, what the witch did.”

Since he spoke kindergartner-ese, I thought perhaps I had misunderstood. Come again?

“It’s a really good thing, what the witch did.”

I should have slammed the book shut right then, or pulled out the emergency duct tape, or something, anything to change the subject. But I’m not bright, so I asked Cuthbert to elaborate.

His elaboration went like this:

When the witch tried to shove Gretel into the hot oven she was doing a good thing. Because then Hansel and Gretel would die and go to Heaven to be with God and Jesus.

I smiled a no doubt horrified smile and said something like But But But. And, while Cuthbert explained even more fully, I did a quick analysis of my options:

a) If I said, No, the witch did a bad thing, because it is not nice to cook and eat little boys and girls, then sixteen children would go home and report that Miss Kathy said it’s bad to go to Heaven and be with God and Jesus.

b) If I said, Yes, the witch did a good thing, because cooking and eating little boys and girls ensures their immediate transport Heavenward, then sixteen children would go home and report that Miss Kathy condoned cold-blooded murder and cannibalism. Plus witchcraft. Plus reading a book about a witch, which in our Great State is sometimes considered more damaging than the murder/cannibalism package.

c) Anything I said might be in complete opposition to what Cuthbert’s mother had told him on this topic, and he would report that to her, and then I would get to have a conference that would not be nearly so much fun it might sound.

(N.B. The last sentence under b) is not to be taken literally. It’s sarcasm, richly deserved. The earlier reference to emergency duct tape is hyperbole. I’ve never in my entire life duct taped a child.)

Well, anyway, I wish I could say the sky opened and a big light bulb appeared above my head and gave me words to untie this Gordian knot. In fact, I can’t remember finding any words at all, at least sensible ones. I think I babbled and stammered until the teacher came to repossess her charges.

I’m sure Cuthbert kept talking. There’s no telling what his classmates took away from that lesson.

I suppose, if I’d been in my right mind, I’d have said something to the effect that God and Jesus don’t like it when witches send people along earlier than expected.

But the prospect of talking theology with this independent thinker stopped my brain function.

I was expending all my energy trying not to laugh.

Related Articles

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My hero(es)

Posted on by Kathy Waller in Uncategorized

William is curled up in my clothes closet, either napping or plotting an outrage.

He looks so darling, wearing his little orange cream striped pajamas, that I’d like to post a photo of him here. But then you, Gentle Reader, would know more about my closet than would be good for either of us.

Moving on.

Fannie Flagg will appear this Saturday at BookPeople. Her latest novel, I Still Dream About You, is described as “equal parts Southern charm, murder mystery, and that perfect combination of comedy and old-fashioned wisdom…” That quotation appears on the Random House website but is probably accurate even though the possibility of bias exists.

Emma Hagestadt, writing in The Independent, (see link, below), says the book is “a comedy-mystery featuring a group of post-menopausal estate agents – a golden-girl romp every bit as eccentric as it sounds.” Ms. Hagestadt is an experienced reviewer who obviously knows funny when she sees it.

Here is my favorite story about Fannie Flagg: In 1975, Flagg, who had never written fiction, went to the Santa Barbara Writing Conference because her “idol,” Eudora Welty, would be there. As part of the conference, she wrote the story “Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man.” But instead of submitting it under her own name, she used a pseudonym. Flagg’s story won the contest and later became the basis for her first novel.

I don’t know which amuses me more: the fact that Fannie Flagg, an experienced actor and television writer, was too shy to enter a fiction contest under her own name; or the thought of the twinkle in Eudora Welty’s eye when she presented the prize for best story to Pearl Buck.

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Minding my own business

Posted on by Kathy Waller in Uncategorized

I was sitting here, working on a story, minding my own business, when I glanced at the clock.

11:08 p.m.

And today’s post is still a figment of my imagination.

Or it was. Or, more accurately, they were.

The process never varies.

I spend the day writing, reading, laundering, driving, meeting, critiquing, shopping, cooking and whatever other –ing happens along. And all the while, ideas whirl inside my head: I’ll write about this–and this–and this–and every this comes bearing its own first line, flawlessly conceived, flawlessly phrased, flawlessly flawless.

But by the time I open the screen with the words Add New Post emblazoned across the top, I find creation vaporized, all my pretty chickens taken in one fell swoop.

O hell-kite.

All right, that’s not what happens. Not literally anyway. Except for the hell-kite part. It’s genuine.

What happens is that I forget. I don’t carry little index cards in my pocket, as Anne Lamott says I should, or a little notebook in my purse. I don’t stop to record my epiphanies. I keep on whirling.

And then it’s 11:08, or in the instant case, 11:52 p.m. and counting, and I’ve said I’ll post daily, so I have to post something, so I just catch the nearest way. And tonight this is it.

Ham

Posted on by Kathy Waller in Uncategorized

“In the morning,” [John Cheever’s] daughter, Susan, wrote, “my father would put on his one good suit and his gray felt hat and ride down in the elevator with the other men on their way to the office. From the lobby he would walk down to the basement, to the windowless storage room that came with our apartment. That was where he worked. There, he hung up the suit and hat and wrote all morning in his boxer shorts, typing away at his portable Underwood set up on the folding table. At lunchtime he would put the suit back on and ride up in the elevator.” ~ “John Cheever, Former UI Faculty,” UI Pulitzer Prize Winners

“Reading Bailey’s biography reconfirms an impression of Cheever that I’ve carried around in my locket for years—that the man had a lot of ham actor in him, which he served pretty thick.” ~ James Wolcott, “It’s Still Cheever County,” in Vanity Fair

New Year’s is a time for looking back as well as looking forward, for taking stock of what one has accomplished over the past twelve months.

My personal inventory amounts to this: I shined my sink, wrote one scene that really really works, and baked a ham.

The ham got in just under the wire. I bought it on impulse, and we had it for dinner on New Year’s Eve, with baked sweet potatoes and fresh green beans. What was left over went into the freezer, and the bone is destined for a pot of navy beans. I found a website featuring 377 recipes for navy bean soup. By next New Year’s Eve, I’ll have had time to sort through them and find one I want to tackle.

 

As proud as I am of the ham and the scene (we’ll speak no more about the sink), I admit 2010 wasn’t a stellar year. My writing didn’t progress as it should have. I didn’t treat it as a business. I didn’t focus. I wrote at home.

Unfortunately, I need more structure than can be found in a laptop, a recliner, and a couple of cats. I need an office. A schedule. A dress code. The idea of working in pajamas all day, though tempting, doesn’t spur me to much of anything at all.

So this morning I did the writerly thing: I donned a business suit–jeans and a turtleneck–and set out for the nearest coffee shop. Six hours, a cup of mocha, a slice of banana bread, and 761 words later, I packed up and returned home.

Tomorrow I’ll do it again. And then again. And then again. With any luck at all, the focus will increase. With any luck at all, the word count will increase.

With any luck at all, my 2011 EOY report will list something more significant than ham.

 

Let the universe work

Posted on by Kathy Waller in Uncategorized
 In the matter of resolutions, I look to Henriette Ann Klauser’s Write It Down, Make It Happen.

Instead of focusing on action, Klauser focuses on objective: what do you want? Make a list, she says. Then put the list away. Relax and let the subconscious and the universe work.

In her book, she profiles the experiences of a number of individuals for whom the process has worked. The story that impressed me most concerned one of her sons.

He was a teenager when he showed her a list he’d found, I believe, on the floor of his closet. The implication was that it had been buried there for a while. He said he’d made it several years before–just written down five or six things he wanted. What was really interesting, he said, was that even though he’d forgotten about the list, everything on it had happened.

I read Klauser’s book at a time when I specialized in reading self-help books. I rarely took any of the advice in them, but Klauser’s plan required little effort–no getting up early, jogging an hour a day, giving up caffeine, eating seven helpings of vegetables–so I tried it.

I wrote the list: things I wanted, things I had no expectation of, things I could not imagine happening.

And then I lost the list. Buried it, in fact.

Five years later, during one of my feng shui periods, I ran across the book and remembered the list.

Everything I’d written had happened. I had it all.

So for 2011, I’m not writing resolutions. Instead, I’m going to make another list.

The only question is–why have I waited so long?

MMXI

Posted on by Kathy Waller in Uncategorized

My first resolution is to post every single day in 2011.

My second is to eschew perfectionism.

Que sera sera.

Friends called this afternoon to ask my advice about a grammatical matter. They call me their “go-to person” for such information.

I issued the standard disclaimer plus an opinion.

I love it when people treat me like an expert. It means I’m a good actor. So far they haven’t caught on.

The world in solemn stillness

Posted on by Kathy Waller in Uncategorized

We’re watching, one more time, It’s a Wonderful Life. Clarence Oddbody, AS2 (Angel Second Class), aka Henry Travers, is showing George Bailey, aka James Stewart, how his hometown would look if George had never been born.

In a couple of minutes, George will learn that, because he never existed, his wife, Mary, aka Donna Reed, not only never married, but became a librarian. Judging from her granny glasses, frumpy hat, and bun, that’s a fate worse than death.

It’s a Wonderful Life isn’t my favorite Christmas movie. I prefer Miracle on 34th Street, in which Edmund Gwenn–whom I rank right up there with Henry Travers–is declared, in court, to be the real Santa Claus. No librarians were defamed in the making of that show.

Nevertheless, as soon as half the town crowds into the Bailey living room to pile money on the table, I start to cry. And I cry through the credits and the next three commercials. Even a not-favorite movie can stir emotions. Year after year after year.

Favorites aren’t easy for me. I don’t have a favorite novel or a favorite song or a favorite color. Or a favorite teacher, actor, or pet. I have multiple favorites. For me, those get-your-password questions–“What is your favorite television show?”–are useless. I never remember whether I said Andy Griffith or Law and Order or I’ll Fly Away.

I do, however, have a favorite Christmas carol: “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.” The melody is lovely and singable, but it’s the words that move me. They speak of peace and quiet and rest for the weary, of heavenly song floating above human cacophony. They speak of both tidings of peace to one small group of men, and the promise of a world in complete harmony.

But they also speak of the present, of stopping, and looking up, and seeing angels. They’re there now, and they’re singing.

We have only to be still and listen.

It came upon the midnight clear,
that glorious song of old,
from angels bending near the earth
to touch their harps of gold:
“Peace on the earth, good will to men,
from heaven’s all-gracious King.”
The world in solemn stillness lay,
to hear the angels sing.

Still through the cloven skies they come
with peaceful wings unfurled,
and still their heavenly music floats
o’er all the weary world;
above its sad and lowly plains,
they bend on hovering wing,
and ever o’er its Babel sounds
the blessed angels sing.

And ye, beneath life’s crushing load,
whose forms are bending low,
who toil along the climbing way
with painful steps and slow,
look now! for glad and golden hours
come swiftly on the wing.
O rest beside the weary road,
and hear the angels sing!

For lo! the days are hastening on,
by prophet seen of old,
when with the ever-circling years
shall come the time foretold
when peace shall over all the earth
its ancient splendors fling,
and the whole world send back the song
which now the angels sing.

Nobody’s going to make you

Posted on by Kathy Waller in Uncategorized

 

I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work. ~ Pearl S. Buck

I planned to say that I’m not in the mood to write, that for two weeks all I’ve wanted to do is watch Netflix from dawn to dark (dawn being in this case a relative term), that I don’t foresee a time when I will give a flip about writing novels or blogs or even grocery lists, for that matter, but that, as someone, maybe Stephen King, maybe not, said, if you don’t write, nobody cares and nobody’s going to make you, and as Pearl Buck said, you can’t wait for moods, you just have to buckle down and write, and that it would be a shame if I quit now, because as William Blake said, there’ s no mistake so great as the mistake of not going on.

There is no mistake so great
as the mistake of not going on. ~ William Blake

But I got sidetracked by the chairs pictured in “The Poets,” cited below.

They’re folding chairs with built-in lamps. One chair is named William Blake. The other is called J. W. Goethe.

I won’t elaborate–you can see for yourself–but I find them fascinating. I want one, preferably the William Blake. Although as a right-hander, I might need the left-handed J. W. Goethe.

I wonder whether the Goethe comes in green.

No matter. Neither will be in my stocking this Saturday morning.

But they’ve served their purpose. They made me smile, lifted my spirits, and put me in a mood to get down to work.

And to avoid the mistake of not going on.

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Day 34: Keeping the stars apart

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here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

~ e. e. cummings

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Photograph courtesy of NASA Goddard Photo and Video, via flickr.com; Creative Commons License.

Day 33: Thinking

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Last August I wrote about one of my muses in My Cousin Ruth’s Statuesque Leg.

Yesterday afternoon, Ruth slipped into a coma. While we’re waiting for her to wake up, I think about bunk beds and horses and camping; and sledding down an icy hill one Christmas in Independence, Missouri, and running into a parked car; and discovering burritos at Taco Bell in Huntington Beach, California; and sitting outside on her deck one night in Bollingbrook, Illinois, and singing so loudly a neighbor came to see what was wrong; and laughing hysterically at Garrison Keillor’s rendition of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” while her adult children looked on in dismay; and singing the first two lines of “Whatever Happened to Randolph Scott” so she would be stuck on it the rest of the day; and handing her a note that said, “Fourscore…,” just before we marched down the aisle at my wedding because I knew she would remember Paul Ford in “The Music Man” and therefore would laugh through the ceremony; and watching a video of “Chicken Run” together and knowing exactly which lines would make her laugh.

Day 31: The possibility of light flurries

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Let’s get one thing out of the way: The little white flakes you see floating across the screen don’t mean a visit to the ophthalomologist is in order.

They’re snowflakes, courtesy of WordPress. After January 4, they’ll disappear. If our weather doesn’t change radically, they will be the only snowflakes most Central Texans see this year.

We’re finally getting some 50- and 60-degree weather during the day. It was supposedly in the 40s when I left home early this morning. It’s now back down to 48.

I didn’t hear the forecast, so I don’t know whether to expect William and Ernest to sleep with us tonight. If the temperature dips into the 30s, the bed will be crowded.

One day last week, we had a high of 87, which I consider excessive even in summer. After a day like that, the cats won’t even sleep in the same room with the humans.

This being Texas, of course, nothing is certain. To quote the adage, “If you don’t like the Texas weather, just wait.” Christmas Day could bring icy streets and frozen water pipes, but we could as easily be running the air conditioning. Been there, done both. And no matter how much I grouse about the heat, I prefer AC to frozen plumbing. But most of my Christmases have fallen somewhere in between.

When it does snow–as it did two consecutive Christmases in the mid-80s, measuring twelve inches when packed and iced over–things stop. Most natives don’t know how to drive on snow and ice, and automobiles aren’t equipped for it. Road maintenance crews do what they can, but they’re not equipped to deal with streets and roads that need attention perhaps once in five or six years. It’s safer to keep drivers at home.

I speak from experience. When I was a college senior, I hit a patch of ice and ended up in a ditch facing the wrong direction. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, I landed right across the four-lane lightly-traveled (that morning) highway from my father’s workplace. He didn’t appear surprised when I straggled in wearing a sheepish smile. Having driven from Normandy to Cologne under less-than-ideal road conditions, he calmly drove the car out of the ditch filled with slick Johnson grass, and twelve miles later deposited me at the bottom of College Hill. Getting up the hill to comparative anatomy was my problem.

The fact that I remember that incident is significant. It’s the only driving-on-ice story I have.

But this far south, we like to pretend. News anchors and meteorologists (I’d rather write weathermen, but I won’t) speculate on the possibility of a white Christmas. We sing “White Christmas.” Shoppers trudge through malls to the strains of “Sleigh Ride,” “Walkin’ in a Winter Wonderland,” and “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow.” We hang tinsel on fir trees to simulate icicles and put cut-outs of snowmen on lawns. We do much of this wearing cotton t-shirts.

Our friends Greg and Maryellen have the right idea. They bring a cactus plant in from the patio and string it with lights.

When we get all excited at the prospect of a white Christmas, they smile and let us talk.

They’re from Ohio. They know exactly what we’re talking about.

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Day 30: The Kiss

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I was twenty-eight, living in a small town in Texas with my parents, teaching English, and working toward admission to the Guinness Book as The 20th Century’s Least Socially Active Female, when a former neighbor dropped by to ask a favor: Her co-worker was worried that his son—a nice but shy young man—would take up with some scarlet woman and be ruined.

Could she give her friend my number?

Her reasoning was transparent. She knew my reputation (nice and shy), and believed the adage that English teachers reproduce by budding. The boy would be safe with me.

Well, why not?

The next day, he called. Larry Weinert.

“Weinert,” said my mother. “Some Weinert children used to throw rocks at my car every morning when I worked at Harper Seed.”

At a preliminary meeting at the old store in Staples, halfway between our homes—he was nice, shy, and careful—he asked me to a movie.

Saturday evening, my parents hid. Larry arrived. He boosted me into his pickup. (Whatever happened to running boards?)

He turned the key in the ignition. Something under the hood exploded.

We sat on the sofa while the engine cooled off or dried out or did whatever it had to do before it would start. Larry ran his palm through his burr cut. “Man, this is awful.”

I said car trouble did not matter. Having read Boy Dates Girl when I was eleven, I knew the duty of a blind datee is to make the blind dator comfortable.

I wanted this to go well. I was co-dependent.

About ten miles down the road, however, co-dependency ebbed.

“There’s a dance over in Laubach tonight,” he said. “Want to skip the movie and go there instead?”

A dance would mean three things: first, dancing, and I didn’t (I’d never learned); and second, drinking, and I wouldn’t, but he would, and he wouldn’t name a designated driver, which could be a problem if the truck started again; and third, talking.

Number Three was already giving us trouble. Larry spoke in paragraphs of one syllable.

The only small-talk I could muster was, “Did you ever throw rocks at a black 1946 Pontiac traveling in the direction of Martindale?” and that seemed best left unsaid.

Fortunately, his malfunctioning muffler filled the void.

A dance, I thought, would require me to be sociable; a movie would justify silence. Anyway, an evening of film might allow me to say, sincerely, that I’d enjoyed myself.

So I used excuse Number One.

Downtown Seguin, Texas, at night in the late ‘70s was almost deserted. We parked in a graveled lot across from the theater. When I slid out of the truck, Larry grabbed me around the waist and clamped me to his side.

This was more familiarity than I’d expected to encounter so early in the evening, or, in fact, in the entire relationship.

I set a rapid pace—sort of a three-legged goose step—and marched him inside. I hoped I appeared eager to see the movie. I also hoped I could dislodge his hand from my person.

I couldn’t. Once seated, he wrapped his arm around my shoulders and kept it there for the duration.

The next two hours did not trip by on rosy wings. I was mired in the Slough of Despond.

I wanted my body back.

I wanted a Jane Austen novel.

I wanted my mother.

We exited the theater silently; the movie had provided no topics. But Larry was an optimist.

“Want to stop and see how the dance is going?”

I said I still didn’t know how to dance. Again, the roar of the engine camouflaged twenty miles of silence.

Finally, we pulled up in front of my house and he turned off the engine.

“Would you like to go out again?” He was desperate.

Caught off guard, I blurted, “I guess you’ll just have to call and see.” That wasn’t kind, but it was better than what I was thinking.

He leaned toward me.

“How about a kiss?”

“I don’t believe so.”

Co-dependent no more, I opened the door, scrambled to the ground, and headed for sanctuary.

“Do you want me to walk you to the door?”

I don’t remember what I said, except that I managed the thank-you-for-a-lovely-evening part. I hadn’t read my grandmother’s Emily Post’s Blue Book of Social Correctness, copyright 1940, in its entirety, for nothing.

I got inside as fast as possible and closed the door behind me.

I’d kicked off my shoes and was making a Hemingway sandwich when my mother walked in, dressed in robe and slippers. She was laughing. Her bedroom windows had been open.

“Did he ask if you wanted him to walk you to the door?”

“It was a reasonable question,” I said, “considering what led up to it.” I scooped a spoonful of Jif out of the jar. “I’m too old for this.”

“No, you’re not.”

As usual, Mother was right.

In fact, I would be twenty years older when I found myself standing under a light on Lavaca Street in Austin, kissing, with (relative) abandon, a man who told me he’d read all the novels of Anthony Trollope. And who on our first date took me to the Harry Ransom Center to see Elisabet Ney’s Lady Macbeth. And who writes funny flash fiction from one-word prompts. And who asked me to marry him.

And who cannot dance.

I don’t know what happened to Larry. He was a nice man.

I hope he found a nice girl—actually, I hope he found a scarlet woman, if that’s what he wanted—to hug-dance with him to country-western music, and fill his silences with words he wanted to hear, and kiss him goodnight without his having to ask.

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“The Kiss” first appeared in the 2008 True Words Anthology Online Supplement, a publication of Story Circle Network.

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Day 29: W. F. Ward, Confectioner, 1958

Posted on by Kathy Waller in Uncategorized

 

Out on the porch it’s August,
But it’s cool inside and dim, one bulb suspending from a cord.
A slim brunette holding a bottle of Royal Crown Cola
Smiles down from above the mirror.
In the back, where it’s dark and you’ve never been,
Sit two small, dusty tables and four delicate chairs.
Once, flappers and their beaus
Sipped sodas there and flirted,
But now they’re ghosts.
Behind the marble counter stands Dick Ward,
Eighty years old to your seven, and deaf, and wiry as the chairs,
Blue eyes dancing.
“Chocolate, please,” you say.
He leans down, tilts his head.
“What?”
You stand on tiptoe, breathe deep, shout.
“Chocolate!”
Of course, it’s just a game, because
He knew before he asked.
He dives down, disappears into the marble, rises with a cone,
Huge, double-dipped,
And proffers it.
You hand him your nickel.
“Thank you.”
As you turn to leave, Mr. Perry shuffles in.
“Bugler!” he rasps,
And as Dick reaches for the tobacco
You know that’s wrong,
Because your grandfather smokes Bull Durham,
And anyway,
How could anyone pass up chocolate?

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“W. F. Ward, Confectioner, 1958” first appeared in the 2008 issue of True Words Anthology, a publication of Story Circle Network.