Light of Egypt

Years ago, I read a book called Light of Egypt: The study of the soul and the stars.

This book had been left in my classroom by a student, and I had picked up without returning it to the library. I kept it to read and found that at that immediate time, I could not get interested in it, and that for some reason it seemed as though my eyes were blinded to reading it.

I lived in Southern California at the time, and an upcoming election was waging. I had just purchased my own furnishings for my unfurnished apartment and more or less, was beginning to settle down. I was adapting to the fact that so far I had not married, and that I needed a home of my own. I had moved from Arizona to California after a two teaching term in Glendale, Arizona, and began adjusting to life in Southern California.

Because I was raised in the era following the Great Depression and World War II, my major influences were to have suffered through the wartorn years with food rationing and a very frugal lifestyle. I was reared in a very small town where life was in abundance through nature. We had maple trees, cherry trees, hickory nut trees, and buckeye trees but no citrus of any kind. But we could go into the backyards and find mulberry trees, blackberry bushes, gooseberry bushes, and eat to our hearts content. All we had to do was reach up and pull a fruit off the tree, and be satisfied. Life in rural Ohio is great in that respect. My grandmother and grandfather planted and grew rhubarb plants, potato plants, tomato plants, as well as the staples of corn and wheat.

But because we lived far up in the northern part of the world, the excitement of the wild west was delivered to us by Hollywood movies. On the weekends, we would all go to the local Ohio theatre to see a movie about old western cowboys, starring Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, or Rex Allen, Hopalong Cassidy and the sidekicks of Gabby Hayes and Smiley Burnett. Smiley Burnett actually came to our small town for a personal appearance which meant that I kept a signed autograph of his photo in my album for years.

So we fell in love with the wild west of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and California, not realizing that this was all made up and manufactured in a sound studio in Hollywood. We really believed in these old western movies.

In our town there was one main railroad, and at night, I would listen to the plaintive wail of the train as it whistled down the track, and I would long to go to faraway places such as Arizona to see for myself the beautiful scenery that Hollywood depicted in these films.

As a kid, I often envisioned being kidnapped and taken to far away places in Italy or Greece just for the spirit of adventure. I was a tree climber in those days, and I would climb many a tree, dreaming about untold adventures in lands that would free me from the boredom of just walking around the block, trying to find things to do to make every day life interesting instead of routine and monotonous.

I also liked to jump off rooftops onto the ground below. My brother and I would play in my granddad's hayloft and jump onto the floor from way high in the air...my other granddad had had an old shed in his backyard and my brother and I would vie with each other who could jump from the roof to the floor or to the ground the farthest.

Those were the ways in which we entertained ourselves as children. Movies on the weekend, romping and playing in the yards, climbing trees, and reading comic books and other story books to our delight.

Childhood in Ohio with a minimum of ready made toys or games to play as we had to make up our own forms of entertainment and fun...Has life ever changed!

We had a sense of family in my family as we had regular trips on the weekends to visit with the grandparents, and at holidays all members of the family who lived in the area and even from far away would come to a single members home to celebrate Christmas or Thanksgiving. We had regular feasts then.

My brother and I grew up as the first children in this family. Later, more cousins came into it, but as time passed we all began to grow apart.