Author Betty Smith was beautiful
As students read silently for 30 minutes as a part of Teacher’s College Readers/ Writers workshop, I opened an old favorite: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I was struck by the beauty of the following passages and hope you are too. xo, m
“Oh, what a wonderful day was Saturday in Brooklyn! Oh, how wonderful anywhere. People were paid on Saturday and it was a holiday without the rigidness of a Sunday. People had money to go out and buy things. They ate well for once, got drunk, had dates, made love and stayed up until all hours; singing, playing music, fighting and dancing because the morrow was their own free day. They could sleep late– until mass anyhow.”
“But, then, so many things seemed like dreams to her. That man in the hallway that day: Surely that had been a dream! The way McShane had been waiting for mother all those years– a dream. Papa dead. For a long time that had been a dream but now papa was like someone who had never been. The way Laurie seemed to come out of a dream – born the living child of a father five months dead. Brooklyn was a dream. All the things that happened there just couldn’t happen. It was all dream stuff. Or was it all real and true and was it that she, Francie, was the dreamer?”
“As she read, at peace with the world and happy as only a little girl could be with a fine book and a little bowl of candy, and all alone in the house, the leaf shadows shifted and the afternoon passed.”
My parents' old apartment building in Brooklyn. My older brother spent his early years living here. I took this photo during a very snowy winter at NYU.
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you should move to brooklyn, what with you being such a hipster and all.