Learning to Love
I have been learning all my life. Or I presume that is how I got to be so smart. Oh yeah! I started out in Kindergarten at the age of five in a school in South St. Louis, MO. I really learned a lot in Kindergarten.
First I learned how to get a vaccination.
Ouch!!
Then I learned how to watch movies. I had never watched movies before.
It was something new. Of course, being only five, I don’t recall a
single movie I watched.
I learned also Recess. WOW! That was fun. I could run around on the
playground, and play on the teeter totter or see saw, which ever you
call it. I could play on the swings and swing as high as I could. That
was really fun.
Unfortunately, we moved from South St. Louis, MO, back to our home
town in the middle of the year. There they didn’t have a Kindergarten,
so my schooling was interrupted till the following year when I began
first grade. That was at Deal Town School District out in the country
near Poplar Bluff, MO our home town.
After reading, I began learning to write. Ooooh! Writing was the
neatest thing. I got gold stars for writing. I practiced writing
circles over and over and over till I was really good at writing
circles. Then I began practicing the alphabet, I practiced and
practiced, A B C D. I loved to write. That was my most favorite
subject.
When I was in the seventh grade, my father died and my brother had
just gotten married. I lived with my brother’s new wife for awhile.
Then we moved; my brother and I moved to St. Louis where he got a job
in a glass factory, Mississippi Glass. I was still in seventh grade
till they got my school records from Poplar Bluff and they put me up
in eighth grade. At the end of the school year I graduated from Clay
School in North St. Louis.
The next year I was in the ninth grade; I was a freshman in high
school. I really felt grown-up going to high school. But I was so
terribly shy; I could not make friends very well.
I did finally make a couple of friends and we met at the Library
almost every night. That is where I met my future husband. He was tall
with blonde wavy hair. I thought he was so cute and he was funny;
funny meaning he was very amusing. We began dating after that, just
going to the local movie theater. The first movie we went to he
borrowed a dime from me to pay for the movie. He never did pay me back
either. I think I will collect now.
Graduation day from High School came all too soon. We were married a
week after graduation and here it is fifty-five years later. We now
have four grown children and nine grandchildren and two great
granddaughters.
We have come full circle, I guess you could say. Time marches on and
we are still going strong. My husband will soon be 75 years old and I
was 74 in Feb. of 2005.
We have one son who is a carpenter and ordained preacher and one who
is a doctor. Our oldest daughter just retired this year from her job
as President of the company she worked for. She has two daughters; one
graduated from nursing school and got married and moved to Australia
where her husband came from. Her other daughter will be getting
married next year. She and her fiancé are in the process of building a
new home.
My other daughter works for a firm in St. Louis, MO. She is my baby;
she was just 41 years old.
It is really strange how we learn all our lives and sometimes do not
even realize, maybe never, how much we have learned till we begin to
ruminate about our growing up years; a whole lifetime of learning,
hopefully many beneficial things as well as a lot of trivia. I have
learned mostly that love is not only the universal language, but
without love we have nothing. Love is the most essential emotion we
can have and we sometimes have to learn to love. If we are not given
love when we are babies and in our growing up years, we must learn how
to give love.
"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not
love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal . . . And
now abide faith, hope, charity,(love) these three; but the greatest of
these is charity(love)." (I Cor. 13:1, 13)
That’s what I have learned in my lifetime.
Nell Berry