Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

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"Lovely the lateness
in summertime darkening.
Dinner is over.
The grownups are talking.
Smell of the water
on pots of geraniums.
Lovely the lateness
in summertime dark."

What I remember is how quiet it got once you started counting and everyone had stealthily moved more than the first dozen steps in the direction of their respective hiding places. In between calling out numbers, as you leaned your closed eyes against your arms against the telephone pole, you could smell the light scent of the creosote in the pole and feel the vibration of the wires humming above, the cool grass between your toes below.

"Outside and inside
is lost in the doorways
...forty-nine, ready
or not, here I come!
Moths and mosquitoes
are biting the lampposts.
Outside and inside
is lost at the door."

Back in the late 50s and early 60s, before the Beatles, back when the lightning bugs would appear in giant clouds at dusk, I lived on Sunrise Street, the first home my parents owned. At the time I didn't understand what my granddad Rex meant when he chuckled and said that we lived in "Fertile Valley," but there were that many kids living along that little piece of Plainview with whom to grow up.

Once every summer there was a day and a night when they roped off the street for a neighborhood block party. On other days we'd draw chalk mazes in the street to ride our bikes around. There were a trio of older girls who'd often want to organize us younger kids. Once they spent a week making us rehearse for a show in the garage next store. (I remember having to learn the chorus to "Kissing and A-Hugging With Fred.") Those same girls were pitching and catching a Spalding pinkie the first time I ever swung a baseball bat.

"No one is leaving,
then everyone's running
to look for the ball
as it rolls into morning.
Millicent Tomkins!
Your mother is calling.
No one is leaving,
then everyone's gone."

When I was asked to come "talk about books I like" with a mixed-age group of kids at a writing camp this week, SUMMERTIME LULLABY was one of my immediate choices for all ages. This book has been tugging at me for months! I still don't speak art very well, but Gabi Swiatkowska's two-page paintings are each a story within themselves, accompanied by two lines of the poem dancing and spinning their way across the pages.

Like the memory of popping one of those little asphalt bubbles that would rise in the ninty-plus-degree sunshine in the middle of Sunrise Street, the timeless rhythm and magical pictures of SUMMERTIME LULLABY have sunk into my brain.

Richie Partington
http://richiespicks.com
BudNotBuddy@aol.com