Following this introduction, I read her novel In Country<\/em>, w Only pages into reading Clear Springs<\/em>, I discovered Bobbie Ann Mason and I share connections\u2014lots of them. We both are Kentucky natives. She arrived a bit before I, but in the same cultural time frame. My family\u2019s peripatetic lifestyle began early and took me from the state when I was a toddler. But it wasn\u2019t long until the family journeys landed me in a house on Highway 45, an asphalt ribbon connecting Bobbie Ann in Kentucky and me in Tennessee.<\/p>\r\n It was Highway 45 that Bobbie Ann followed from her house in Kentucky, past my house in Tennessee, and on to Tupelo, Mississippi, to find Elvis Presley\u2019s childhood home.<\/p>\r\n Hwy 45 was a death trap for Bobbie Ann\u2019s pets as well as for many of my cats that followed me the short distance along the highway from my house to the church next door where my father was pastor.<\/p>\r\n Reading was, and is, a way of life for both of us, but who knew we both had an affinity for the Bobbsey Twins? I still recall the opening lines to The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore.<\/em> Bobbie Ann\u2019s memoir pictures her grasping The Bobbsey Twins at School,<\/em> but she didn\u2019t stop there. She wrote about these adventurous brother and sister Girl Sleuth: A Feminist Guide<\/em>.<\/p>\r\n The Weekly Reader<\/em> was a game changer for me, and it seems so for Bobbie Ann. I loved getting this newspaper at school, being able to order my own books through WR and having them delivered to my classroom, a foreshadowing of today\u2019s book buying. As an adult, I found a copy of the first book I ever ordered, Blue Willow<\/em>. It is in my library.<\/p>\r\n Bobbie Ann and I picked strawberries, a product so popular in Highway 45 country that schools dismissed in early May so children could pick strawberries. Bobbie Ann writes that her crates contained six quart-boxes and she got a nickel for every quart. I recall pint boxes and a penny a pint. I should have picked with her.<\/p>\r\n We loved Fabian. He was soooooo cute and, by our teenage standards, had a wonderful voice.<\/p>\r\n Other connections found in Clear Springs<\/em>:<\/p>\r\n \u2022 The nearby town of Paducah. I have several dolls Santa found for me in Paducah.<\/p>\r\n \u2022 We were children of the \u201cgreat polio scare\u201d and that new-fangled television\u2019s Howdy Doody. I don\u2019t know about Bobbie Ann, but I got all my polio vaccines and watched a lot of Howdy Doody.<\/p>\r\n \u2022 Murray State College (now University). When my parents married at age 19, my father had only two years of high school. After earning his GED, he began his formal educational quest, which he completed when he was 37 and I was 15. Everywhere we lived, he enrolled in the nearest college. Murray State College was one.<\/p>\r\n \u2022 As first-born children, Bobbie Ann and I share burden to be perfect.<\/p>\r\n \u2022 We wrote for our college newspapers.<\/p>\r\n \u2022 As career newbies, we interviewed celebrities and famous people.<\/p>\r\n \u2022 We had a family member who \u201cwent to Memphis\u201d for mental health issues.<\/p>\r\n \u2022 She was 21 years younger than her mother. I was 22 years younger than mine, a short distance that weighed heavily on me when my mother died.<\/p>\r\n \u2022 Bobbie Ann\u2019s stories about grandparents on the farm mingle with mine. I didn\u2019t live on a farm but just went farther south on Hwy 45\u2014and closer to Elvis\u2014to my grandparents\u2019 farm, which turned into a kind of amusement park for my cousins and me.<\/p>\r\n \u2022 Our grandmothers made quilts for us. Mine began making a half-bed quilt for each grandchild as he\/she graduated from high school. I was Number 4. I still have my quilt, which was made from my dress scraps as well as those of my mother and my cousins. As and adult, I bought more quilts from my grandmother.<\/p>\r\n \u2022 Milk cans were integral to our grandfather’s work. I didn\u2019t wash my grandfather\u2019s milk cans as Bobbie Ann did, but I still see why grandfather rolling a wooden cart with two milk cans out to the road to be picked up.<\/p>\r\n \u2022 She shares the conflict of leaving the house on the farm, where she was born and grew up. I understand some of that because I spent so much time in my grandparents\u2019 house and around the place, pretending to be a farmer. So many of my memories, especially the good ones, center on that farm. I was in their house once after both had died. I could not stay. Memories filled every inch, but the most important ingredient was gone. When the house was demolished, I was given two bricks from the fireplace. They became bookends in my library.<\/p>\r\n \u2022 We share a period of mourning. Bobbie Ann and I had grandfathers who died the same month of the same year, the first immediate family member to die.<\/p>\r\n \u2022 We had an Aunt Hattie. Mine was a great aunt, but I knew her, and she is memorable because she helped \u201craise\u201d my father.<\/p>\r\n \u2022 We had relatives who \u201cran\u201d or managed the local county home. Mine was my great grandfather and great grandmother. They provided a place for people who had nowhere to go. My mother told stories of spending the night with her grandparents at the county home and being \u201cpaid\u201d ten cents for her help. The nursing home where my mother spent her last days is located on the site where that county home once stood, just a stone\u2019s throw from where my grandfather\u2019s farm used to be.<\/p>\r\n \u2022 The family stories from a time so hard on people. For me, it was when my grandmother was \u201cflat on her back\u201d for a year. Ida was hired to take care of the five children. The time when my grandparents\u2019 only two children had contracted diphtheria, taking their first-born, Lucille, and leaving their son with health life-long health issues for life. Their daughter\u2019s obituary breaks my heart for those young parents. Fittingly, one of Lucille\u2019s books is in my library.<\/p>\r\n \u2022 We had ancestors who died early and no one remembers or knew about that person. I grew up thinking one of my great grandfathers was an only child. But in the first census in which he was recorded, a younger sister is named. She appears nowhere else in official data or anyone\u2019s memory.<\/p>\r\n \u2022 In college, Bobbie Ann thought everyone was smarter than she. From first grade through graduate school, I felt the same way. Now, I always choose friends from the smart kids group.<\/p>\r\n \u2022 The best connection, however, is Bobbie Ann and I love words, the reading of them and the writing of them. And we have spent our lives doing just that. To get the full details of Mason\u2019s life on Highway 45, read Clear Springs<\/em>. Her life is way more interesting than mine!<\/p>\r\n \u201cGoogle\u201d Bobbie Ann Mason and you find a complete listing of her books as well as the other writers to whom she is compared. They, too, are some of my favorites.<\/em><\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Remember the blue back and orange back biographies that proliferated our library shelves in elementary school? I read every one of them. Hence the comments on my report card, \u201cJennifer reads too many library books.\u201d Presented as nonfiction, many of these biographies were doctored to present a more noble heritage. True or not, they did… Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[34,29,35,22,10,33,32,74,8,9],"class_list":["post-304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-agents","tag-biography","tag-books-vietnam","tag-creativity","tag-daily-life","tag-editors","tag-journalists","tag-women-writers","tag-writing","tag-memoir"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jbowrites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jbowrites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jbowrites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jbowrites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jbowrites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.jbowrites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":325,"href":"https:\/\/www.jbowrites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304\/revisions\/325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jbowrites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jbowrites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jbowrites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.jbowrites.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/IMG_2133-scaled-e1629145866533-300x259.jpeg\")
hich is about a Viet Nam veteran who returned home to Kentucky forever bearing the burden of that war. I\u2019ve been researching\/writing a biography of a Viet Nam war correspondent and thought I might learn something. I did. This led me to more of her writing.<\/p>\r\n
I suspect that if Bobbie Ann Mason and Jennifer Kay Bryon had lived closer on Highway 45, we might have become best friends.<\/p>\r\n