It Takes A Lot Of Doing To

Oh, Magic Hour, When A Child First Knows She Can Read Printed Words.

And You Must Tell The Child The Legends I Told You - As My Mother Told Them To Me And Her Mother To Her. You Must Tell The Fairy Tales Of The Old Country. You Must Tell Of Those Not Of The Earth Who Live Forever In The Hearts Of The People.

You Took A Walk On A Sunday Afternoon And Came To A Nice Neighborhood, Very Refined. You Saw A Small One Of These Trees Through The Iron Gate Leading To Someone's Yard And You Knew That Soon That Section Of Brooklyn Would Get To Be A Tenement District. The Tree Knew. It Came There First. Afterwards, Poor Foreigners Seeped In And The Quiet Old Brownstone Houses Were Hacked Up Into Flats, Feather Beds Were Pushed Out On The Window Sills To Air And The Tree Of Heaven Flourished. That Was The Kind Of Tree It Was. It Liked Poor People.

And Always, There Was The Magic Of Learning Things.

She Was Made Up Of More, Too. She Was The Books She Read In The Library. She Was The Flower In The Brown Bowl. Part Of Her Life Was Made From The Tree Growing Rankly In The Yard. She Was The Bitter Quarrels She Had With Her Brother Whom She Loved Dearly. She Was Katie's Secret, Despairing Weeping. She Was The Shame Of Her Father Stumbling Home Drunk. She Was All Of These Things And Of Something More...it Was What God Or Whatever Is His Equivalent Puts Into Each Soul That Is Given Life - The One Different Thing Such As That Which Makes No Two Fingerprints On The Face Of The Earth Alike.