Sears Catalog

I think the Sears Catalog was my first picture book.  Do you remember the catalog?  It was huge.  Had to be 4+ inches thick and must have been 1000 pages.  I didn’t grow up with a lot so when the catalog came I would lose myself in those pages of shoes, dresses, toys and furniture.  I would ear mark the pages hoping my mother would get the hint.  (She didn’t.)

Speaking of my mother she, too, loved books.  I still have her 14 volume collection of the classics:  Jane Eyre, Emerson Essays, Les Miserables, Best Know Works of Hawthorne, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde.  Not sure how old they are but she signed her name in them in 1944.  Plus she also had Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck, For Whom the Bell Tolls and a Farewell to Arms by Hemingway.  And, of course, her favorite – Doctor Zhivago.  Toward the end of her life she read romance novels.  You know the kind…bare chested men with flowing hair named Fabio. I’d rather have a Sears Catalog.