Last week Barry and I went to Washington, D.C. to tour the Holocaust Museum. The trip was planned for Thursday, which was Holocaust Remembrance Day, and our group – a Reading Public Museum tour – was privileged to be able to watch in the museum theater,live via satellite, the national Remebrance Ceremony that took in a chamber at the Capitol. It was most sobering and very impressive. To me the most impressive part was the singing of the Prayer for the Dead by a young cantor from Oregon who had one of the most beautiful and mournfully expressive voices I’ve ever heard. Following the ceremony, we toured the museum. Strangely, and probably unbelievably to most, I knew nothing about the Holocaust until a month before my graduation from Penn State. My date and I went to see The Longest Day, and in it was included actual footage of the liberation of the death camps. I was shocked beyond anything words could express. My date was Jewish. He knew! And he patiently explained what had happened in Europe while he and I were growing up safely in the United States. Since that time I have read probably 500 books about the Holocaust, WWII, the various European ghettos, the death camps, the way European countires helped and hid their Jews – or didn’t. So there was nothing new for me at the museum, but the exhibits are …beyond words I can find to describe.
After the museum tour, our bus driver gave us a tour of the monuments in D.C. We stopped and walked around the new Martin Luther King, Jr. monument, and that lifted my spirits. It’s a wonderful memorial, and reading some of MLK,Jr’s quotes that are carved into the walls around the huge statue of him, helped me to find some optimism in some of the positive things that have happened in my lifetime. We’ve made some great strides in our acceptance and celebration of our differences as people – and finding the stuff to celebrate our common humanity. But, as Frost says, we’ve “miles to go” before we sleep!
On Saturday, we went to NYC to see an all star cast perform Gore Vidal’s play The Best Man. It’s about a national political convention, set in 1960, before the time when primaries made politcal conventions almost unnecessary. It’s a great play – could have easilly been written about national (and local) politics today. A dirty business – politics!
It’s been a great week! Sorry for the “preachiness” of this blog!

My children are addictive readers. They are third generation addicts through my mother and then through me. All of us panic if we finish a book, but don’t have another one ready to begin. As I thought about this wonderful addiction, I remembered what exciting joy there was for me as a little girl when I read books my mother was reading or had read, but didn’t want me to read. She belonged to the Book of the Month Club, and I wasn’t very old before I realized that the books she didn’t want me to read were placed on the top shelf of the linen closet where I couldn’t reach them. They were mostly books by authors like Daphne duMaurier (is that spelled correctly?), and certainly by today’s standards, not much to hide from a child. But I was a protected “only,” and also very curious. I easily learned to stand on a stool to get to that top shelf, and I loved reading the books as I lay across my bed and listened for my mother to come upstairs. When I heard our staircase creak, I’d slide the book between my mattress and boxspring, and pull out a Nancy Drew mystery (that I’d been pretending to read for months and months!)
My mother was a registered nurse and operating room supervisor before she married my father and was forced, by hospital policy, to resign her position. In my further explorations, I discoverd her old ob-gyn textbooks in the bottom drawer of an old bureau that was stored in our guest/storage room. I credit those books with teaching me the real facts about sex and childbirth and women’s bodies!
But last evening I was thinking about the NOOK Color I use and the Kindle Fire my son uses to read. I bought my NOOK because I am not a good library patron – never remember to return books – and my house was getting too full of my book purchases. My son, who vowed he’d never read anything but a real book because he loved the smell of a new book, is a Kindle Fire convert. Only my daughter still buys her books, in spite of having an IPAD. We all share titles of things we’ve read, and my children’s reading tastes have greatly expanded my view of the world! Ebooks are wonderful. No more panic that I’ve run out of reading material. I can simply download several books at a time and have them ready to read whenever I want to. Ebooks make travel easier and lighter! Actually, they’re easier on my eyes because I can adjust the background and print color, the type size, and font. But there’s downside….no more books on the top shelf of the linen closet to read surreptitiously as a young girld lies across her bed, listening for her mother’s footsteps. No more hiding in the guest room reading about how her body really works (because nurse that she was, her mother was not able to find the courage to explain it herself!) Did I become an addictive reader because in addition to the enjoyment of the books, I enjoyed doing something that my mother didn’t want me to do? Probably, but that bad motivation that led to a wonderful lifelong habit! Let’s hear it for books on top shelves of linen closets and rarely opnend drawers in antique bureaus in guest rooms! Am presently reading Sacre Bleu by Christopher Moore – and loving it.

I was just getting ready to leave for campus when I remembered that it’s “blog day for Martha.” I’m so glad I remembered because I planned what I wanted to blog about after a wonderful Friday last week. Barry and I decided to put our work aside so we could take advantage of the lovely day and “do West Reading.” It had been far too long since we had just strolled along the avenue, wandered into all the lovely shops, and enjoyed a wonderful lunch at Bistro 614, one of our favorite local eateries.
In the time that had lapsed since our last exploration, a number of enticing new shops have joined some of the already established places we’ve patronized in the past.
If you haven’t been to West Reading – it’s SO much better a place to shop than any of our local malls – you must visit Kira Apple’s The Wise Owl Book Store. It’s just a wonderful place with lots of great books, as well as cozy chairs and couches you can curl up on and read. Independent book stores have a tough time competing with the giant retailers that have actually begun to tell us what we should be reading. Go to visit Kira! I guarantee you’ll love her and the store, and you’ll make The Wise Owl a habit.
What a joy to go into a store and have someone recognize me from our television show and this blog. (I’ve been wondering if anyone other that my daughter reads our blogs. Kira does! Hooray! )
I’m very excited about our next television show on 16 May! Hope Kira and a lot of others will be watching us.
Visit West Reading. View locally and shop locally!

Whatever happened last Wednesday to make me forget about blogging, I’ve no idea! For all of you who await these blogs with great anticipation – mea culpa! I hate making excuses, but I think I might have been distracted because last week I started teaching a new course. The first half is taught by a young, brilliant, PH.D. in anthropology candidate, and I was VERY nervous about taking over the class…for a number of reasons. Well, first of all, for the obvious reason that I am NOT a very young, brilliant, Ph.D. anthropology candidate. I’m a “woman of a certain age” (insert “old” between those last two words) and I have a masters degree in education. This amazing young woman has three VERY young children, travels periodically to Samoa to conduct reserach, and also teaches part time at Temple U. She DOES do it all! So her half of the course was all about anthropological research concerning family structure in different cultures. My segment is the practical side of the course – getting the students (all of them plan to become elementary teachers) to understand how important it is to get parents involved in their children’s education – regardless of how much or how little the parents have, what language they speak, how busy they are, etc., etc. Teachers have finally discovered that it truly does take a village to educate a child.
My other concern was that this class of 27 students is taught in one of those awful science lecture hall/amphitheater type classrooms that seat a hundred kids and the professor stands at the bottom on this bowl-like room. I AM not a teacher who teaches well in a “lecture hall.” I want to reach out and touch my students.
Well, the class is filled with really neat kids who seemed quite happy to see me. I moved them all down to the first three rows, and we’re doing just fine. (“This is really intimate,” said one young man when he realized that I honestly could reach out and touch him.)
So, there you have it. My elaborate excuse and far more information than you needed.
I am celebrating the fact that our show has been picked up, and we’ll be aired again on Wed., May 16. Hooray! (My semester ends two weeks before that!!!! Double “hooray!”)