One of my earliest memories was that of sitting on my mother's lap listening to the words from Robert Louis Stevenson's My Shadow . She read it from the armchair of the living room in the old house on our little farm in Iowa. I remember still that it was in the morning after my three older brothers had climbed on board the yellow country school bus - that was in 1954 and I was five years old. It was only then that I had my mother to myself. Later, I memorized the poem because my mother had told me how, when she was a little girl, her mother had read it to her and she had committed it to memory. I felt it was in some way my duty to follow suit. The poem still occasionally surfaces in my thoughts and did so again last week when my daughter Sara sent me the photo she snapped at the family cabin in Pine, Arizona. "Look at the shadow's Dad", were the words in her text. I did so and once again I was on my mother's lap in the armchair of the living room in...
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