by MarianBeaman | Jun 4, 2014 | Coming of Age, Family / Nostalgia, Memory, Mennonite Lore, Nostalgia, Uncategorized
“In the Good Old Summer Time” shares nostalgic space with another old, familiar tune of the season: “Summer time and the livin’ is easy.” Summertime for the Longenecker family may not have been easy in the 1950s what with tomato field...
by MarianBeaman | May 28, 2014 | Coming of Age, Conflict, Family / Nostalgia, Mennonite Lore, Nostalgia, Uncategorized
“Mare – yun,” my mother calls (yells, actually), “It’s time to lick the green stamps again. The books are on top of the kitchen table.” Mom likes to interrupt my reading. To me time with my books is serious business but to her it’s play. Not working. Wasting...
by MarianBeaman | May 10, 2014 | Coming of Age, Conflict, Family / Nostalgia, Mennonite History, Mennonite Lore, Nostalgia, Uncategorized
This is the family I grew up in: my parents Ray and Ruth with my two sisters and one brother. But after I left home and eventually married, my parents had more children. No, my mother was not a modern-day Sarah. She didn’t have babies in old age. But in their early...
by MarianBeaman | May 7, 2014 | Coming of Age, Conflict, Family / Nostalgia, Memory, Mennonite Lore, Purple Passage, Uncategorized
It’s spring concert time and I’m making my fingers fly fast over the strings of my violin pizzicato style, trying to keep up with the syncopated rhythms of The Typewriter Song. Noah Klauss, the director of our Elizabethtown High School Orchestra, is a fan of Leroy...
by MarianBeaman | May 3, 2014 | Coming of Age, Conflict, Education, Family / Nostalgia, Mennonite Lore, Nostalgia, Uncategorized
My mother saved all my report cards. When I retrieved them from the attic, only grade 8 was missing. They are tall documents, sheathed in a coarse, brown envelope. And they speak for me as a student: mostly A’s with a smattering of Bs. Once I got a C- on a...
by MarianBeaman | Apr 26, 2014 | Coming of Age, Conflict, Education, Literature, Mennonite History, Quotations, Uncategorized
Is a family graduation on your calendar this year? As a faculty member at Florida State College at Jacksonville (then Florida Community College), I attended graduation every year in full regalia with hundreds of ecstatic grads, joyful families, and proud faculty and...
