Rasco From RIF

WEEK’S END: A Saturday Six including some Half Broke Horses…

November 14th, 2009

1.  It was a great week for the RIF DC Initiative with more and more photos now appearing in the office of happy faces holding new, free books and totem poles of renown!  Congratulations to the DCI Committee at RIF and all the staff for the hours spent carrying out RIF’s mission in the most direct way with children.  And thank you to the many outside RIF who volunteered, contributed and reported!

2.  A shout out to our national partners Kappa Kappa Gamma for your support of the DCI day through volunteers; and a big thank you to RIF Board member Carolyn Simpson who serves as the Kappa National Philanthropy Chair for gathering a group of KKG Alumnae this week to discuss with RIF staff how KKG can be even more involved!

3.  As November’s days continue to roll by us, National American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month also continues to be on RIF’s “radar” daily.  The activities associated with DCI this week were as noted in a previous posting related to this special month of study and reflection.  I have encouraged through Twitter and other avenues and now ask you, the Rasco from RIF readers, to be sure and start visiting regularly if you do not already do so, Debbie Reese’s blog American Indians in Children’s Literature…a lot of food for thought there.  Next week’s WEDNESDAY WINDOW will be posing for all of us some questions about Thanksgiving;  in brief, have we really studied the American Indian perspective as we should for this holiday? 

4.  The Miami Book Fair International is into the weekend street fair;  RIF is there and if YOU are there, too, then be sure to look for RIF in the Children’s Alley where activities are awaiting children and families.  Lots of fun to be shared!  For those of us not there, we can take a look at RIF’s Reading Garden to share some of the same “flavor” and activities!

5.  I have BACK HOME by Julia Keller sitting here to start reading next…and I’ve already sneaked a peak at 15 pages;  can’t wait to finish this posting as the next pages are calling me!

5.  And a good book I read to close out the week?  Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls.   When I read, no when I rapidly absorbed Walls’ The Glass Castle, her story of being raised in poverty by parents who confounded me as a children’s and family policymaker/advocate, I had such a strong desire to further probe the women in Jeannette’s life, particularly her mother and her grandmother.  Half Broke Horses is the “true life novel” Walls has gifted us telling the story of her maternal grandmother, Lily Casey Smith.   Walls speaks in her grandmother’s voice and helps those of us who asked - upon finishing The Glass Castle - the perplexing question in one way or another as stated by Liesl Schillinger in The New York Times Book Review:  How did such untamed characters come to exist in America, in the not-so-distant 1960’s and ’70’s? 

Lily’s story is not that different from the lives many of my generation’s grandparents lived, and I know in addition to more deeply understanding Jeannette’s mother (Lily’s daughter) through this story, I also learned more about the world from which my own wonderful and strong grandmother came, one about which she spoke often.  Hardships seen as adventures, teachers of 15 years of age in one-room classrooms, young children of 11 becoming the ranch manager so to speak hiring and managing farm hands as Lily’s own mother  working “very hard at being a lady” and not capable of helping her husband with hard labor tasks.   Lily’s formal education through the achievement of eventually obtaining her official teaching credentials came in fits and starts, but her life education was a result of all her years of living.

…and we scrimped and saved, pinching every penny till old Abe Lincoln yelped. 

We’d always been frugal…we never  threw away anything.  We saved bits of wood in case we needed shims.  When
our old shirts finally frayed to pieces, we cut off the buttons and put them in the button box;  the shirts we either used
as rags or gave them to a seamstress who turned them into patchwork quilts.

But now I came up with additional ways to save money.  We made the children chairs out of orange crates.  Rosemary
drew on used paper bags-both sides-and painted on old boards.  We drank from coffee cans with wire tied around
them for handles.  Whenever possible, I drove behind trucks so their slipstream pulled me along and I saved on gas.

Happy reading,
Carol

WEEK’S END closes the work week with some thoughts, comments, feelings about some book and/or event recently experienced.  If a book, it may be a children’s book or an adult book or both.  If an event, it may be literacy-related or not.  But it comes at week’s end.

Twitter: @RascofromRIF                     

Filed under: DCI, Musings, RIF Board, RIF Events, RIF Partnerships, RIF Resources, RIF Staff, RIF Volunteers, Wednesday Window, Week's End

Tags: American Indians in Children's Literature, Back Home, DCI, Half Broke Horses, Jeannnette Walls, Julia Kellar, Kappa Kappa Gamma, Liesl Schillinger, Lily Casey Smith, Macy's, Miami Book Festival International, National American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month, RIF's Reading Garden, The Glass Castle, The New York Times Book Review