My mother read to us. To my sister and me. We had a set of books called The How and Why Books, which I don’t think they do anymore. It’s like an encyclopedia. And Mommy had bought those, and so we read the poetry there “How would you like to go up in the sky, up in the sky so high?” I always loved Robert Louis Stevenson: “In winter, I get up at night and dress by yellow candlelight. In summer, quite the other way. I have to go to bed by day.” And we used to just read those, and, of course, there’s a point that you memorize them: “Boats sail on the river, ships sail on the sea, but the clouds that sail across the sky are prettier far than these. There are bridges on the river, as pretty as you please, but the bow that bridges heaven and over tops the trees and builds the road from earth to sky are prettier far than these.”
