Imagination Can Get You Many Places

When I was a youngster of eight years, I was very interested in reading and writing short stories. I read many books gotten from the library because we did not have lots of money to buy books. We borrowed them from the library where everyone went to get reading material. When I was thirteen, I got a part time job earning forty-five cents per hour putting the returned books back on the proper shelves where they belonged. It was a job sought after by lots of teens to do to make some money. Every other week, the city of Baltimore would send me a check for about five dollars and Dad would go to the bank to cash it for me. Wow, I felt like I was rich. Rich I was because I was around my beloved books at this few hours a week job and I had five dollars in my wallet. I owned about six books and I have them in my family room now still looking lovely to me.

They are old and yellowed but still dear to me. One was called The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. It was not about salad vegetables, it was about a family named Pepper and their adventure. I had the habit of reading the first chapter and then going to the last chapter and reading that and then reading the rest of the book.

Somehow, I got pleasure out of doing that.

Now I record my soap operas daily and I watch them at night. Sometimes, if I know something special is about to happen, I watch the end first or zip through the story of that day and see what I want that was exciting and then I watch it as a whole episode.

Now a psychologist might try to interpret that as a something or else flaw in my character. I say it is a plus in my character. How so, you ask? Well, I will not waste time watching parts that are boring, commercials or story-lines about characters I am not interested in at that time. So the psychologist could interpret that as being very intelligent and diligent about not wasting precious time.

Anyway, it is interesting that in this point in time of seventy years later, I can do what I did when I was a mere child of seven or eight. I need not read the end of the book first, I can most often see the book made into a DVD and I can see the end first. I can see the end first of a daily serial and can decide whether to waste my time or not viewing the whole story of that day.

So times have changed from my childhood of radio being the informed source of our lives and us sitting there in a chair mesmerized by this little brown box spouting news, stories, sports and weather. On Monday nights there was a program called Lux Radio Theater sponsored of course by Lux soap. It played the sound of a recent movie or one from the past and you sat there and you imagined the scenery, the age of the character and what he or she looked like. You sat there and listened, not watched and your imagination took over and gave you the specifics.

Sometimes you would see a picture of the actor that had played the part and he or she did not look like what you had imagined.However, your imagination was a beautiful part of your young or older life.

It was as if you were painting a picture in an art class and you brought to life in your mind the colors and style of the storyline

I think we have lost our imaginations because everything is put before our eyes. We need not imagine anything. It is there for us every moment in commercials, in television, in movies.

So here's to the lovely thing called imagination. Back then, I could not imagine I would be writing stories for the Internet on a thing called a computer. My mom and dad came back from the World's Fair in the nineteen thirties which was held in New York City.

They talked about this movie thing they saw for the first time called T V and how eventually everyone would have these 'movie screens' in their homes and no one need ever go to a movie again. That was what was happening then.

So to imagination, to television, to books and to radio, we salute you for making our lives more tolerable, more beautiful and most of

all more exciting.

Now I imagine I am back dancing the whole evening or daytime at the studio. The twenty-third of October 2011 was a momentous occasion because we went back to dance and had not been dancing for sixteen months. Now to date, I have not been dancing again for almost two years and my goal is to be back to it by this October 2017. The knee shots seem to be working and by then I should be at least able to dance several dances. This is not my

imagination. This is real and I need not see the end first because the beginning will be exciting. So sometimes knowing the end is good and other times, it is nice to go through something from beginning to end as I did two years ago. This does not mean to say; I will never read the ending first of a book or watch the recorded DVD ending first, but life is good and do whatever makes you happy now.

There was a lady at the dance yesterday who I have known for about thirty-five years. We see each now and then at dances. Her name is Jane and she told me something quite unusual and interesting. She went online at some time and found lots of dancing sites. On one, she found my name listed with articles I had written. One such article was about a woman who had three husbands who she danced with, of course one at a time when she was married to each one. The first one passed on and at a dance studio, she met number two husband. I remember her telling me that she told him he would have to learn to dance to get her to marry him. That they did and took lessons together, though she needed none because she was very adept at dancing. When he passed on years later, she met number three husband, a lovely, handsome senior and he knew how to dance. They all were nice marriages. When he passed on, Jane found this story that I had written telling about the three dancing husbands. She told the woman, Lillian, that she found this story I had written and would get her a copy. At the end of that week, Lillian passed on and Jane took the story to the memorial/funeral services. She gave the paper to the minister for him to read it at the service. He came up to her and said she should read it and that she did. When she got back to her seat, a young man tapped her on the shoulder and thanked her for reading it. He was the step-son of husband number two mentioned in the story.

So imagination becomes reality and this true story shows the depth that dancing happenings occur. A story of mine, true, written online gets to be a eulogy at a dancing lady’s funeral. That made me feel great that I was a part of this woman’s legacy with my little story.

Bravo to books, to online sites, to love, to dancing, to husbands and wives and to libraries and bookstores. I could not have imagined this event when I was eight and working in the library. I could not have visualized something I had written years ago being part of an acquaintance of mine. I have given two eulogies at services of dear friends, but they I did in person. This was done by a third person-Jane for Lillian, the deceased and written by me.Wow. Norman Vincent Peale said “life is the true magic carpet.”