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Dear Reader,
It's back to school week at the book club and my question for readers is, "When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? And how did you turn out?" If you haven't replied, I'd love to hear from you. Email me at: Suzanne@DearReader.com (And while you're pondering the question, your answer might make a good topic for your entry in this year's Write a Dear Reader Contest, that launches August 28th.)
When you grow up in a small town, you're never more than five minutes away from Main Street. In my small town, Main Street felt "uptown" because that's where everything was when I was a girl. An IGA Grocery store, a movie theatre, the Five and Dime, a burger and pizza place, Minnie's Candy Store, a barber shop, the post office, two corner bars with a few extra bars mixed in between, the drug store and three gas stations--my dad owned one of them.
My mother worked at the Five and Dime. It was a great place to get school supplies, because I got first pick at everything before it was put on display. But the Five and Dime was my worst nightmare when it came time to buy school clothes. If my mother couldn't buy it at the Five and Dime, then in her mind, I didn't need it.
The Dime Store's fashion statement was the same every year: a short sleeved striped cotton shirt (in four different colors) with a button down collar, and a few A-line cotton skirts. Who ordered this stuff anyway?
My mother never understood fashion. She only understood her big employee discount, and if I didn't have a coupon for another store that matched it, then in her mind, a short sleeved shirt over top an A-line skirt was going to be my look for the school season.
But that wasn't the look I'd been dreaming about, and that certainly wasn't the look that was going to impress my friends. So I spent my summers babysitting, and selling lemonade and nightcrawlers. Any odd jobs to earn money, so I could afford to buy my own school clothes.
My babysitting job was really more like supervising. The two kids that I watched were older, so they only relied on me for lunch, and my only other responsibility every day, was some light housekeeping. The rest of the time I spent sitting in the sun, listening to Neil Diamond, and looking through my "wish book". Actually it was the JC Penney catalog. Pencil in hand, I'd grab the catalog, stretch out in the lawn chair, and turn the pages of my own personal dreamland. Looking through the catalog was just as exciting as the day my new clothes arrived in the mail.
Every hour I babysat, I put another 50 cents in my school clothing fund, and there wasn't an A-line skirt on the list.
It's back to school week at the book club, and my question for readers is, "When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? And how did you turn out?" If you haven't replied, I'd love to hear from you. Email me at: Suzanne@DearReader.com
Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com
AUTHORBUZZ: SEVEN BIRDS (Fiction) by Amy Sargent Swank
Fez Bradlee, at the age of 52, is struggling with a crumbling marriage, financial ruin, and a teenage daughter, Hazel, who is becoming more and more withdrawn. Then Fez is hit with a major shock; she has an older sister, Penny, about whom she never knew, who was institutionalized at the age of four because of an extremely low IQ.
Go to: AUTHORBUZZ click on Seven Birds to read more and to email author Amy Sargent Swank, you'll get a reply.
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