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100% written and illustrated by kids ages 6-13

September/October 2002


By

Allison

The airport was almost empty, with only a few solitary people wandering about the terminal. The silence echoed throughout the building, surrounding us in a hushed stillness. Mom and I stood by the baggage claim and waited for her friend to come. “Mom,” I whispered. “I do not want to do this.” “Shush, Lena,” she replied. “I’ve been promising Liza we’d visit for years now, ever since you were a baby.” “I didn’t want to come. I don’t want to spend the summer in the middle of nowhere.” “I’ve known Liza since grade school, you know. We’re old friends. We always planned to live next door to one another, but then she moved with her husband when the war started . . .” I stopped listening. Mom didn’t notice; she was completely wrapped up in memory. I was angry at her, anyhow, for dragging me to the middle of nowhere, to visit her friend and her friend’s children in Kentucky for the summer of 1981. A whole summer lost! I always spent summers at home in our upper-class Manhattan neighborhood, with my friends. “Susan!” I looked up in surprise. A large, red-faced woman was rushing toward my mother with her arms outstretched and a huge smile on her face. “Liza!” Mom squealed, returning the hug. The woman who was my mother’s best friend peered down at me. The Kentucky countryside was beautiful, with rolling green hills and grassy farmland “I do declare, Susie!” she said. “This sure can’t be the baby who you told me about, can it? Why, this girl is all but a young lady already!” Liza smiled at me. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. “Sure’s gonna be hot out today,” Liza said as we walked to her car, an ancient tan pickup truck. “Y’all is gonna be a mite hot in them skirts an’ tights you’re wearing. My kids’re all in shorts by mid- April, yep.” I looked down at my plaid skirt and white tights, noticing that I was already beginning to perspire. We drove along the road. It was already blistering hot outside, but the Kentucky countryside was beautiful, with rolling green hills and grassy farmland. We passed several crystal-clear streams and swimming holes. Liza’s farm was on a hillside. She grew tomatoes and corn and pumpkins, but she didn’t actually do the work herself. “I got me a few hired workers,” she told Mom and me. The house was wooden, but painted yellow on the outside. Inside, it was slightly messy but comfortable. Liza looked around as we entered. “My kids are all over the place these days,” she told Mom. “I’ve got four of them. My oldest, John, is at college. The others are Sam, Allison, and the littlest, Beth. Sam’s sixteen, Beth’s seven, and Allison is just about Lena’s age.” She didn’t mention her husband. Just then a girl ran through the back door, dressed in cut-off shorts and a yellow T-shirt. She was barefoot, and her golden hair streamed out behind her back. She was out of breath from running, her cheeks pink, hazel eyes sparkling. Liza smiled at her. “There you are, Allison. I was just telling Susan and Lena about you, I was.” She turned to me. “Lena, this is my daughter Allison.” Allison sized me up, then smiled. “I’ll show you your room,” she said, leading me up the stairs. “You’re in with me and Beth, and I guess your mom is on the couch.” She opened the door to a room, with twin beds and a cot on the floor. The room wasn’t painted, but there was a window looking out across the fields. “You can have the bed, I don’t mind the cot,” Allison told me. I put my suitcase on one of the beds. “Do you want to look around the farm?” she asked. I shrugged. “OK,” I agreed. Allison showed me the barn. “We’ve got horses, two of them. One’s brown, named Chocolate, and the other’s dappled. A real show horse, but we keep her for a pet really. Her name’s Moon Light. Beth named her that.” Allison led me around the property, over the grassy hills and to the woods. The land was beautiful, fertile, not at all like the city. I fell in love with it at once. Allison pointed out her favorite trees, and the patterns of a spider web, raccoon tracks and hawks. The sun cast a golden glow, shining its light on the wildflowers and the land. I felt freer than I had ever felt in my life. Allison smiled and laughed and sang little tunes. “I love this place,” she told me. “I already do, too,” I said. And I meant it. Allison smiled. *          *          * The days passed quickly in Kentucky. Allison showed me the swimming hole and her secret paths through the woods. She taught me how to ride Moon Light, the dappled horse. Soon I had traded my stiff skirts for a pair of cutoffs and T-shirts. Allison showed me the land, showed me how to whittle fishhooks and to build a fire. And she showed me sunrises. I had seen sunrises before, of course, at home in New York. I watched them idly, usually half-asleep, listening to Mom and Dad talking in the kitchen. Dad hadn’t come on the trip. He didn’t like travel. Allison never mentioned her father, but she asked me an awful lot about mine. We would be walking along a path, and out of the blue she would say, “Does your father like flowers? Or is that just mothers?” And I was never sure if she was talking in general or about my parents in particular. One of the first mornings there, I awoke in the soft bed, with the red-and-blue quilt pulled over me. Someone was shuffling around the room, opening the bureau drawers and putting on clothes. It wasn’t even light out yet, the sky a pale gray that let


By

America Ever After

I love to go to the library walk through stacks and rows of books, picking whatever I like, the books pull me in. I can go on any adventure. I can sit and read all day, worming through them, reading out the whole shelf I am at home and somewhere else at the same time. One morning, I saw spinning planes thud into tragedy, crumbling around the whole of America; everybody listened, hushed. We sipped up the sadness. Hurt. I know I am safe in my house with people I love. I hear the rushing water of the sighing waterfall. Mom clicks away on her computer. I can see my little sister sit silently, waiting for Dad. I grab my book so I can disappear into a world of happily ever after. I see ash and broken brick. I am worried. There are people under there, too. My heart drops. I would not want to be there. I do not want a war. I think about other kids my age in different countries. They must be scared. The war might come to them. I am lucky to live in America. Tae Kathleen Keller, 8Waihapu, Hawaii


By

Phone Call

I had been water-coloring when my mom poked her head through the classroom door. She made eye contact with my teacher Diane, who nodded and told me to get my things even though it wasn’t even lunchtime yet and I’d never been able to eat my peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, which was a shame because I liked peanut butter a lot. I was leaving school early. “Why, Mommy?” “Because you are going to receive a very special phone call.” Special. The word echoed. I didn’t know what receive meant, but whatever it had to do with a phone call it was going to be special. “Is the phone call for me?” My mom looked at me sideways through the rearview mirror. “Yes, of course it’s for you; you are the one receiving it.” A special phone call, for me! “Who’s calling, Mommy? Who’s calling! Who am I to receive from?” I said the word carefully. My mom smiled a little. “Her name is Kiria Eleni” (KEEREE e-LAY-nee—the “r” is rolled). “Kiria Eleni . . .” I liked the way her name rolled around in my mouth; it was quickness, light, a feather. I liked it. Delicious!—I was getting picked up early so that I could receive a special phone call that was all for me from Kiria Eleni. “Who is she?” I had seen plenty of wrinkled faces, but I’d never heard a wrinkled voice before “She was Daddy’s old nurse; When your grandmother, Yiayia (YI-ya) Theresa, got sick, she and your grandfather, Papou (pa-P00), wrote a letter to her village in Greece. The letter asked for a woman to come and take care of your daddy, who was only a baby then. And Kiria Eleni came.” “Why does she want to talk to me.” “Because you are the second Teresa.” I beamed. The Second Teresa. Many people I know now hate being second in things because it makes them feel subordinate, but for me, being The Second Teresa was a heavenly privilege. She had died, and then years later when I was born they put a pinch of her memory into me. It was an honor. My dad had come home early and was waiting for me. As soon as I walked in the door, he pulled a chair out from under my little table, seated it in the middle of the room, and then seated me on top of that. “Now Teresa,” he said, squatting down in order to look me in the face. “I want to tell you some things about Kiria Eleni. She doesn’t live in this country and doesn’t speak English; she will be talking to you from Greece, and she’ll be speaking Greek to you. She is also very old.” I frowned. “How can I talk with her if I don’t know any Greek?” It was going to be a problem. The only words of Greek I knew were pisino and pisinake, which both roughly translated to butt. It was the slang that I had picked up from my dad, and I was a bit embarrassed about using it with people outside of my family. “Your papou will be on the line, too. He will translate for you.” He turned to my mom and took a deep breath. “All right,” he said, “let’s call.” He picked up the phone and dialed, then started talking in words that I couldn’t understand. Then he talked in English a little, and then in gibberish again. I sat very still in my chair; the hard wood of the chair was beginning to hurt my pisino, but I was very good and sat still anyway. I watched my dad talk and talk as he was transferred from one place to the next, switching languages every so often as my mom paced back and forth. Then, my dad turned toward me and took the one, two, three long steps to where I had been waiting patiently. “Here you are,” he said, handing me the phone. I took it gingerly and held it away from my ear a little, afraid of getting bombarded with a torrent of Greek that would make me feel stupid. “Er . . . hello?” It was only Papou. “Hi, dahlin’,” he said. His loud Chicago voice was dampened by the stuffy connection. “How’s my favorite granddaughter?” I was his only granddaughter, at the time. “I’m good.” “How’s school?” “Good. I did some water-coloring today.” “That’s great. And what grade are you in again? First?” I giggled. “Second, Papou, second!” “Second grade! Wow, dahlin’! You’re becoming a young lady! So do you want to talk to Kiria Eleni now?” “Yeah. You in Greece?” “Yeah. It’s beautiful, dahlin’—I’ll take you when you’re thirteen, I promise. I’ll take you to Greek school so that you can learn Greek and then I’ll take you here. Boy, it’s beautiful . . . all right, dahlin’, I’m putting her on.” He said something in what I assumed was Greek, and then someone else got on. The voice was cracked and shriveled in an eerie way. I had seen plenty of wrinkled faces, but I’d never heard a wrinkled voice before because most of the old people I knew then were in surprisingly good shape. It was a stomach-jerking first. “0 ya, mumble jumble-o . . .” the words were like quick fingers on a piano key. She sprinted to the finish line of her sentence. A rustling, and the phone was transferred to Papou. “She said hello.” “Well. I say hello back.” Greek. She got the phone again. “Bla bla bla . . .” I listened intently, but she didn’t say anything about pisinos so I didn’t catch a word. “She asked if your father has been teaching you any Greek.” “No. The only words I know are pisino and pisinake.” Papou gave out his laugh, a wry-dry guffaw that rumbles down from deep inside. He told this to Kiria Eleni, and she in turn cackled hysterically. “Yada yada yada . . .”