by Anne Newins

Due to the interest in the current display featuring books about the Olympics and Paris (July in the Library: PARIS!), our next display won’t begin until mid-August and will run through September. As in previous years we are going to have summer reruns, featuring up to the top 200 most popular books of the past year. Whether we will be able to display all 200 depends on how quickly the books circulate.

It is highly likely that the five most popular books will fly off the table. These include:

#1 Resurrection Walk, by Michael Connelly
Connelly’s perpetual favorites, defense attorney Mickey Heller and retired LAPD
Detective Harry Bosch, get entangled in a case about a woman who may have been
wrongly convicted and imprisoned for murder.

#2 The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride
This book has been a big hit with RVM book groups. A richly written novel, it examines
the relationships and secrets of a neighborhood of Jews and African Americans living in
Chicken Hill, a dilapidated neighborhood in Pottstown, PA.

#3 Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett
This novel revolves around three daughters and their mother. Both a romance and an
examination of family relationships, it considers “what it means to be happy even
when the world is falling apart.”

#4 The Exchange, by John Grisham
Fans of The Firm may remember attorneys Mitch and Abby McDeere, now removed
from Memphis to Manhattan. In this thriller, Mitch becomes involved in a plot with
global implications. Mitch must stay on his toes to avoid endangering himself,
colleagues, friends and family.

#5 The Wager, by David Grann
This extraordinary non-fiction book is the history of The Wager, shipwrecked off the
coast of Patagonia in 1742. It vividly recounts the travails and dangers of maritime
exploration and the crew’s efforts to survive. Amazingly, some of the crew and the
captain make it back to England despite attacks on their lives, starvation, and being lost
in a remote and inhospitable part of the world. On top of it all, the captain may be
court martialed.

All of the books are available in both regular and large fiction formats. Thanks to Liz
Caldwell for compiling and calculating the list.

Needlework and text by Mary Jane Morrison, photos by Reina Lopez

As a child I simply could not sit still – I always had to be doing something, anything…  I learned to knit squares when I was 7 years old.  I made a few simple things, but didn’t do much with it for several years.  As a teenager, I wanted to start knitting more complicated things (like a sweater), but yarn was too expensive and my family couldn’t afford it.  Then I discovered a pattern for knitted lace and found that it could be done with inexpensive crochet cotton – for a number of years all family members received gifts of lace knit doilies!   As a bonus, finishing off the lace knitting pieces required me to learn how to crochet, a useful skill as well.

(Note: There is a display of lace knitting hanging in the 7^th floor hallway of the Manor through the month of August.)

But lace knitting is too complex to mix with studying, so in college and medical school I turned to needlepoint as a way of relaxing and worked many forms of that.  The violin, mandolin, and tea plantation at left are examples.    A few years later I joined the Army with a first assignment in Germany.  There I was introduced to counted cross-stitch, a much more portable craft.   I picked up a few kits (ref. couple in round frame), but was much too busy working and traveling in Europe to do much crafting.   However, 2½ years into my assignment at Landstuhl, back in Connecticut my mother became critically ill and I was hastily reassigned back to the States to be with her (late 1979).  Counted cross-stitch was the perfect way to spend quality bedside time with her without going stir-crazy – it was small, compact and you could put down the piece immediately when necessary and go back to it later without losing your place – a definite advantage.  And, that’s what I’ve mostly done since then.

The rest of the pictures (at right and below) are of counted-cross stitch works I’ve done over the years.  The size of the work depends on the number of squares per inch in the material used.  The more squares, the tighter and smaller the work.  Most were done on 14 sq/inch material.  The 2 pieces (Autumn Scene and Woodsy Waterfall) which hang opposite my apartment door (#701) are worked on 16 sq/inch material.  Interestingly, I first worked both of these pieces (as wedding gifts for favorite nephews back in CT) on 14 sq/inch material – and liked them so much that, during Covid I decided to use up some 16 sq/inch material I had on hand and make a set for me so that I too could enjoy them.  These are the largest pieces I’ve ever done (each with 50+ different colors and 16 pages of detailed charts – each page taking 3-4 weeks to complete).

1943

by Eleanor Lippman

I was just a little kid, not even four years old. What did I know about things?!  All I remember about that day is that it must have been a murderously miserable heat wave in Philadelphia that summer.

My older brother Milton and I woke up expecting to get dressed, have breakfast, and go outside to play, just what little kids did all summer long. We expected it to be another typical day in Philadelphia. After enough neighborhood kids showed up we organized games like Rover, Red Rover. If someone had a length of old clothesline rope, we jumped rope until we were bored. With the appearance of a pink rubber ball, we moved to the apartments at the end of the block to play ball against the wall and when that got boring, we attached roller skates to our Buster Brown shoes and raced around the block on wheels, wearing the skate key on a shoelace around our necks. Around lunch time, all of the neighborhood kids disappeared into their houses for lunch and reappeared later to regroup and find new things to keep us occupied.

On really hot summer days, if Harry Small, the plumber, was around, he’d use his big wrench to open the fire hydrant, thereby attracting even more children trying to keep cool in the delicious flood of cold water.

The sound of the ice cream truck was one reliable bright highlight of the day, and we raced home for nickels to buy creamsicles or ice cream sandwiches or fudgsicles or ice pops and hope they wouldn’t melt before they were gone. Hot, sweaty, and sticky, the afternoons faded into early evening and as fathers began returning home from work, we heard our names called out, and one by one our play group got smaller and smaller. Even those kids whose names weren’t called, reluctantly headed for home until the streets were once again empty.

After dinner, the streets once again filled with noisy, curious, busy children looking for friends, for something to do until bedtime. Sometimes as the sun began to set, we just sat on the stairs leading up to our houses and talked and told stories to each other. By that time, we were tired, no energy left for more games and we appreciated the possible coolness of evening. If we were lucky, black clouds would appear and a summer thunder storm would arrive, sending us scattering back home before it started pouring rain.

On soft summer nights when it slowly became dark, the fireflies showed up. We sat and watched for them, first one or two, and then as the street lights came on, the world became magically dark with hundreds of them dancing in the night, glowing their lights on, lights off. I am ashamed to say we caught them and with a fingernail, separated the glowing part of their torso from the rest and watched as the tiny speck of fluorescent light slowly disappeared.

But one morning, I remember when I was approaching four years old and my brother was five and a half, after we got up and out of bed, we were told not to get dressed, just to stay in our underwear. When we came downstairs for breakfast, the house was dark with the venetian blinds tightly drawn to keep out the light. We were told it was too hot to go outside, that we had to stay inside to play. Somehow, we managed to keep busy, and I don’t remember being affected by the heat at all. It was just another day to me, although strange to play in our darkened living room. I watched my mother spend the day at her treadle sewing machine, and I can still hear the cluck, cluck, cluck of it if I imagine hard enough. Our woolen floor rugs spent the summer in our basement, and on the floor was a coarse-textured covering that took nearly all summer for the bottoms of our bare feet to get used to. How clearly I remember all that.

My dad, to avoid the military, was still working extra shifts at Cramp’s ship yard welding World War II Liberty Ships, so it was just the three of us at home that day.

As dinner time approached, I suppose it was too hot for my mother even to consider cooking a proper meal for us. Instead, she improvised. When I think back to my childhood, I try to remember what we ate. I remember cream of tomato soup by Campbell and grilled cheese sandwiches, but I am sure there was much more variety. But the one meal I remember was the dinner my mother prepared for us the night of the great heatwave. It was the only thing she could think of making without using the stove and making the kitchen even hotter.

She made waffles! Waffle sandwiches to be exact. Between two steaming hot waffles, she scooped vanilla ice cream, a wonderful marriage of hot and cold. It was the most wonderful thing I tasted. Dessert for dinner! What an amazing meal to have during a heat wave.

I never have had waffles and ice cream for dinner again. At the New York World’s Fair in 1964, I enjoyed Belgian waffles, a deep pocket waffle with strawberries and whipped cream and have had Belgian waffles many times since. Yum. When I prepare waffles, I serve them with unsweetened applesauce and honey, my favorite. But never plain waffles topped with vanilla ice cream because I don’t want to damage that delicious memory from my childhood.