The Whale

The selection for this month's book club reading is The Giver, by Lois Lowry. I finished it yesterday and found it to be a highly discussable, good read.

Perhaps it is because of this book, much of which has to do with how important memories are, this morning an ancient memory came back to me and I thought I'd write it down rather than chance forgetting it for ever.

My father's occupation provided our household with what seemed to be a never-ending supply of legal-size paper, plain white on one side, with typewritten lot descriptions (he was a title examiner) on the other. This was long before copying machines, and he also taught me about carbon paper, but that's not part of this memory. This vast supply of paper was probably of interest only to me. "Can I have some coloring paper, Daddy?" I'd ask, and the drawer would open. Sometimes I would ask him what I should draw.

One day he said, "There's a line from a song: 'From the jail came the wail of a down-hearted frail.' Why don't you draw that?" I didn't know what a "frail" was, so I asked, and he told me, "Oh, that's another word for a woman."

So off I went to draw, and because I hadn't read the words, but just heard them, my picture of a skinny, standing woman sharing a barred cell with a great big fish was quite a hit! Google Images doesn't have such a picture, but it doesn't matter, because I can still see that drawing in my memory.