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    Dear Aunt Myrna
    Dear Aunt Myrna
    Dear Aunt Myrna
    Ebook144 pages2 hours

    Dear Aunt Myrna

    By Kit Duncan

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    About this ebook

    Insulated from the world, a self-assured precocious little girl believes that all she needs, all she will ever need, lies within the boundaries of her street and just barely beyond the property lines of her parents' home.

    Life is idyllic for Katie, a the six year old living in a suburb in Louisville Kentucky KY in the early sixties. Her neighborhood offers every imaginable pleasure: plenty of places for exploration, loyal friends, the occasional walk to Whirlies, bike rides and go-carts and cardboard sleds.

    When the racism snakes itself into her neighborhood, the little girl struggles to reconcile the illogic of this intruder with everything she knows and loves.

    The answer to her questions comes dressed up as an aloof old woman in dull baggy clothes driving an old pickup truck from Nebraska.

    You will be charmed as you come to know Katie Arlene Morgenstern, Mama and Papa, Danny Watson and his family, a small group of teaching nuns, Katie's neighbors, and just past the old barn at the end of Thistlewood Drive, the residents of the Rainbow Forrest.

    And, of course, dear Aunt Myrna.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKit Duncan
    Release dateSep 7, 2014
    ISBN9781310728372
    Dear Aunt Myrna
    Author

    Kit Duncan

    Kit Duncan is a licensed clinical social worker with over thirty years of experience in working with families, children, couples, groups, and individuals. She holds the Master of Science in Social Work degree from the University of Texas at Arlington and has done postgraduate work at the University of South Carolina at Columbia.Kit taught college for fifteen years and has been a presenter at numerous national and regional conferences and workshops. She has been the Clinical Director of Human Services Consultation since 1987. Besides writing and publishing numerous professionally technical articles she has written several novels. She has also been an editor for an international newsletter and is a freelance editor.Kit lives on a little speck of Paradise located in central Kentucky with her family. Her passions are gardening, hiking, making musical instruments (flutes and strings) and writing songs on them.

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      Book preview

      Dear Aunt Myrna - Kit Duncan

      Dear Aunt Myrna

      Kit Duncan

      ~~~

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright © 2007 by Kit Duncan

      All rights reserved.

      This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part by any means without express permission from its author.

      For additional information:

      Kit Duncan

      kitduncan56@yahoo.com

      Cover photo by Kenny Brown

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Other Books by Kit Duncan

      Corban

      Dandelions in Paradise

      Tea With Mrs Saunders

      Life’s Road Trip

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      my aunt

      Ruby Arlene Fisher

      1926 - 1996

      Some dreams come true.

      Table of Contents

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      Chapter 14

      Chapter 15

      Chapter 16

      Chapter 17

      Chapter 18

      Chapter 19

      Chapter 20

      Chapter 21

      About the Author

      CHAPTER 1

      In the summer of 1962 Jackie Robinson became the first black man inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, my favorite song on the radio was Soldier Boy by the Shirelles, and my passionate ambition was to beat Danny Watson in our daily bike races up to the corner of Thistlewood Drive and Birchwood Avenue. Danny was eight years old, and I was six, and we both rode second hand bicycles. Danny always won, and I always adamantly vowed to win, and he always laughed good-naturedly as he sped away.

      I had just finished first grade at St Leonard’s and felt certain I had learned all the really important things I needed to know in order to succeed in life. My mother was at the kitchen sink chopping carrots and potatoes for dinner when I announced the end of my academic career to her on the closing day of school that June. She laughed without looking at me and said, Yes, Sweetie. Now change out of your good clothes and go play outside until I call you for dinner.

      The turquoise phone hanging on the kitchen wall rang, as if often did at our house, and Mama reached for it. I raced down the hall to my room, and perhaps thirty seconds later, clothes appropriately changed, I sprinted past my mother’s phone conversation, out the back door that emptied onto a second story deck, hopped quickly down the steps, and went searching for Danny. I found him just inside the woods that grew thick behind the vacant lots next to my house.

      You pass? he asked.

      Yeah.

      Me, too. I’ve got Mrs Carlson next year. I hear she’s tough.

      I’ve got Sister Martha Louise. But I ain’t going. I’m done with school.

      Oh? he didn’t look over at me, just kept idly scratching in the dirt and dried leaves with a stick.

      That’s right, I said proudly. I’m all through with school. Jeannie’s sister Terry just finished up second grade, and she says Sister Martha Louise is mean. I’m not having any of that business!

      Uh huh, Danny said absently.

      It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy school. Quite the opposite. One’s teachers have has a great impact on how one experiences school I adored my first grade teacher. Sister Mary Frances was the only nun I ever knew who would jump rope, hoola hoop, and play hop scotch and jacks with us girls. She once had a bicycle race with four of the boys in our class and came in second. She was the hero of every kid in my first grade class.

      Sister Mary Frances’ only character flaw was her pathologically rigid intolerance for any of her young charges holding their jumbo sized light blue mechanical pencils in an unauthorized fashion. She’d rap the offender’s knuckles, and thought the rapping would help correct our young erring fingers.

      My fingers got rapped frequently.

      To this day I still have penmanship that could easily be recruited by the CIA for top secret code. It is deplorable and verges on the illegible, and I cannot look at my handwriting without disturbing memories of Sister Mary Frances and her ruler. But these memories are quickly pushed aside to allow images of a young nun spinning her hips around and around, trying to keep a pink and blue striped circle of plastic rotating in the air while a group of short people clap and squeal in delight.

      What are you writing? I asked Danny.

      Nothing, he answered. Just scribbling.

      Danny was a Baptist, and he and his younger brother Timmy, who was five months younger than I was, went to a public school. I didn’t know where it was. I only knew that in the morning they took a left from their front porch and walked past my house and I took a right from my front porch and walked past their house, and after we had each walked about half a mile we were at our respective schools. Danny didn’t know much about nuns and I didn’t know much about lady teachers.

      By virtue of his advanced age Danny was the unofficial leader of our neighborhood. Fortunately, he was a fair minded ruler, a kind hearted boy. Danny was the oldest of the four Watson children. He and Timmy comprised my main social group when we weren’t at school. Their sister Janey was only four, and PJ was not quite three yet. The two of them were too boring and dull for me to associate with unless circumstances demanded it.

      Our neatly trimmed neighborhood of brick ranch style houses was mostly occupied by middle aged or older couples. A boy, about my age, and his younger sister had lived across the street until the previous fall, but they had moved away. Steve Maynard lived on the opposite end of the block, just before you got to Birchwood. Safe from the little kids, I once overheard my mother tell my dad. He was ten or eleven years old, I don’t think any of us knew for sure. Bad seed, Mama had warned me, and she told me firmly I was not to play with him. Fortunately, Steve Maynard seldom found his way to our part of the neighborhood.

      There was no end to adventures in my world which, in the summer, spanned from the corner of Birchwood and Thistlewood, dipped down a low graded crest, and stretched down past our houses, over the three vacant lots next to us, and finally ended at the old barn. We could play on foot as far as Riedling, which intersected Thistlewood just before you got to Birchwood. But we could ride our bikes as far as Birchwood; we just couldn’t get off our bikes until we came back to this side of Riedling. If we ever saw Steve Maynard outside, both sets of our parents told us, we were not to ride pass Riedling.

      The southwest end of Thistlewood Drive ran into a small road, more like a path barely wide enough for a single car to drive through. The old unpainted barn was across the path, out of range to us. It was a stately structure. It leaned slightly and was missing a a few of its oak planks, but not so many that you could get a good look in it from our vantage point. The front of it was gaped wide where a door, long gone, once hung.

      In all the years I lived on Thistlewood, I never went past the point at which my street met that little road and the old barn. From my boundary, and through the heavy trees that sheltered them, I could see a few small clapboard houses, most of them painted in vibrant hues of blues and yellows, pinks and greens. The houses were exotically different from the brick ranches that lined Thistlewood.

      We called it the Rainbow Forrest. Our parents called it the Colored Neighborhood. For reasons I was too young to understand, for reasons that now, over forty years later, I am still too young to understand, I was restricted from entering this forbidden area.

      We kids seldom ventured too near the end of our world anyway; usually the furthest we got was the second vacant lot from my house. But each morning during the school year Danny and Timmy walked down that narrow little road, disappeared into its shadows, and re-emerged a few hours later. They never said what was there, and I never learned to ask.

      It was a mystery to me why Mr and Mrs Watson allowed their two sons to walk through the Rainbow Forrest on their way to school but forbid them from playing there afterwards. The only spanking I remember Danny Watson ever got from his dad was the day Timmy came home from school alone; Danny had remained behind to play pitch and catch with a couple of his friends. Danny’s friends, Timmy explained to me while we listened to the paddling in the bushes under their bedroom window, were the wrong color.

      In a hushed whisper I asked, What’s the right color? But Timmy just shrugged and said he didn’t know.

      There was a large hill behind our houses. It was nearly as long as Thistlewood, bordering Reidling on the northeast side and tapering off where it met the woods to the southeast. At the top of the hill were several new apartment buildings, and every now and then we’d meet a new kid who moved into one of them. They usually didn’t stay very long.

      The hill was the most wonderful playground we could ask for. In the wintertime we sledded down into the dried up creek bed at the bottom. In the summer time we slid down the hill on old discarded corrugated boxes. We destroyed the grass with our boxes, and finally someone cornered off a ten foot section to the side, where the hill met the woods.

      We could slide in that corridor only. At first I was disgruntled and aggravated about having my freedom curtailed. Timmy mirrored my sulk and pouted with me. But Danny told us at least we still had an area to slide, so why whine about it. I was reluctant to listen to reason, but Timmy saw his older brother’s wisdom immediately and his face brightened up.

      It’s difficult to pout alone. So, though I did not entirely espouse Danny’s rationale, for social convenience I abandoned my

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