Family Secrets

Our family is really strange where reading material is concerned. One daughter subscribes to many magazines and a few she picks up at the magazine stands. I have watched her do this and she always picks one from the back. He reason for this is that she likes to be the very first one to leaf through it. That little bend in the front page that we make as we snap the pages over takes a little of the bloom off for her.

If I want to look at one of her magazines before she does, I do it surreptitiously, lifting the pages carefully so there will be no tell-tale bends.

One day I didn’t feel well. She handed me one of her new magazines saying, “You may look at it first.” That meant a lot.

My other daughter doesn’t like to return books. If you lend her one, be sure your name is written in it or she might think it belongs to her. Some times I think I have loaned her a books and she thinks I have not.

I have solved this little problem rather well, I think. I pick out a nice book that I really like and give it to her for Christmas. Then I visit her for a couple weeks and read the book.

I want to be fair. My memory is none too good, so it may be that I haven’t lent her the books and that they are just laying around somewhere I can’t find them, but this is true:

I do remember one book I loaned her. I had just read “Australia Felix” and thought she might enjoy it. Twelve years later I asked her for it. She said, “But I haven’t read it yet!