Library patron - "I'm looking for the poem that begins - 'the world is full of a number of things'.."
Me - "I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."
She stared.
I grinned. "Robert Louis Steveson, 'A Child's Garden of Verses." My mother quoted them to me all the time."
That small poem, like countless others, reside somewhere in my memory because my mother's mind was layered to the top shelf with verse. In her one-room schoolhouse they had few books. Thus, the blackboard's contents went from slate to composition books (in true Palmer script of course!) to mind. And there they stayed.
And as I was the fourth of five children, Mother had little time to read to me, but she accessed those shelves of memory and offered Longfellow, Whittier, Stevenson and all her school-day poets as she cooked and cleaned and ran the household.
I mourn the passing of memorization, because a mind is a wonderful thing to google.
More than that, I mourn her.
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