Boring Part I

I grew up with a mama who made me believe that "boring" was a bad word. If I whined that I was bored, Miss Carlene would promptly hand me a basket of wet sheets to hang on the clothesline, or suggest that I practice piano or scrub the bathtub--all equally unappealing.

Growing up in a small Georgia town where Nothing Much happened, and where the only phone in our house was the rotary phone attached to the  kitchen wall, the Town Library was where a girl could find endless friendship and knowledge.  No bookstore, no Amazon, no Internet, no iPad with instant downloads of books.

Miss Virginia, the town librarian, was a cousin of Miss Marguerite, my piano teacher.  Both seemed ancient--though I suspect that they weren't all that much older than I am now.

Miss Virginia smoked at her desk.  The library reeked of smoke.  And if you so much as made a peep of a sound, she'd glare at you, shake a nicotene-stained yellow finger, then resume stamping books.  As long as you didn't interrupt her stamping, you could check out anything. I hid the racy books like Peyton Place in the middle of the stack of children's books and age-appropriate biographies.

Walking home, I could haul ten books ten blocks, easy. With ten books, boredom could never linger for long.

Traveling now, my iPhone packed with thousands of songs and podcasts, and Pandora radio extending the music selection to infinity, I sometimes think of the days when my friends and I huddled around the stereo and listened to our paltry selection of 45 rpm records, thinking ourselves rich.

One thing remains the same:

All my childhood friends loved talking to my mother, Miss Carlene.  We'd sit with her while she sewed, while she shelled peas, while she fried chicken, and we'd  tell her Important Things.  She would listen intently and tell us her own Important Things.

While she doesn't shell peas and fry chicken anymore, I can still call her any time from the road. From one iPhone to the other, we talk about everything, and she follows along on this blog and her map, finding Everything Interesting!