It was a glorious sunny day at the opening ceremony for the Steve Preston Peer Connection Center at the Veterans Outreach Center in Rochester on May 30. Watching the presentation of colors by six members of the Vietnam Veterans Chapter 20 Honor Guard was like watching a living legacy.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Mark Christian Ngoma, a wonderful man who came to Rochester to visit sites related to Frederick Douglass. I am happy to share his pending and past book publications.

In the name of the downsizing books, I’m adding a few to the let-go pile. Celtic folk and fairy talks edited by Eric and Nancy Protter (1966) was a mixed bag. Some of the stories were inventive and original, others, clever, but overall I wasn’t fond of them. There is something to be said of the repetitive pattern of such and such happened once, twice and three times and then the surprise, but the lowly peasant boy getting the king’s daughter’s hand as a prize wore thin.

Despite the difficulty of reading small print in the Spring 24 edition of RH Rochester History, a joint venture of Rochester Public Library and RIT College of Liberal Arts Department of History, the content was excellent. Michael J. Brown’s article, “Revisiting the Mid-Sized American City” spoke well to the dilemma of places like Rochester. Reading “Bringing the Past into Conversation with the Present” by Rebecca Edwards, and “The State of the City: Past, Present, Future” facilitated by Erica Bryant was right on target about current issues.

 Because I know her and of some of the hurdles she has faced as a wheelchair user, it was a mixed pleasure to read Luticha Andre Doucette’s book review of This Brain Had a Mouth by James M. Odato. Luticha addressed how racially segregated the disability-rights movement has been and told of Lucy Gwin who suffered a brain injury after a car accident and coined the term “dislabeled.” Well done.

 At first I wondered why the 2006 Newbery award winner Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins, had won. Its take on smalltown life unfolded slowly as a group of siblings, neighbors and classmates figured out what to do with themselves. One of their activities was for three of them to sit in the front seat of a pickup truck parked in a driveway and listen to a radio show. Eventually one teen taught another how to drive it, and that skill played a key part in a crisis. The story came together well in the end.

I was captivated by the big-screen wonder of the movie Cabrini, got a biography of Francesca Xavier Cabrini (1850 – 1917), and read through it in a week. Pietro Di Donato’s biography, Immigrant Saint: The Life of Mother Cabrini (1960), was surprisingly different from the movie which went out of its way not to clobber people over the head with Mother Cabrini’s strong Catholic faith.

Many thanks to Jessica Damiano of the Associated Press for the surprising article in Saturday’s Real Estate section on women trailblazers in horticulture. I don’t think I’d ever heard of Jane Colden, the first female American botanist in the 1750s. Nor had I heard of Beatrix Farrand, the first lady of American landscape architecture in the early 1900s. I’d heard of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, but not as founder of the Freedom Farm Cooperative in Sunflower County, Mississippi in the late 1960s.

I sorted through another box of books and found so many favorites. Sigh! I had to remind myself that others will enjoy them too. Women, Heroes and a Frog: Human Situations in pictures by Nina Leen (1970) fell open to a softened image of a couple tucked in bed. The saying by Herman Melville ended with “. . . and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning.” So tender.

Richard Peck’s A Year Down Yonder (2001 Newbery winner) returned us to Grandma Dowdel’s small town in 1937, still hit hard by the Depression. Such fascinating characters and plot! I had absolutely loved his A Long Way from Chicago, the 1999 Newbery honoree, and while not as powerful as that, the down-home adventures in Down Yonder still hit the spot.

I picked up two Newbery award winners at the library last week, and started Bud, Not Buddy (2000) by Christopher Paul Curtis. What a stunning story of an orphaned ten-year-old Black boy in Flint, in the 1930s. Curtis’s word choices are wonderful. The story’s pace and the plot deliver one surprise after the next. Can’t wait to find out how it ends. I have not yet started Holes (1999 winner) by Louis Sachar.

E. L. Konigsburg’s The View from Saturday, (1997 Newbery Award) showed four sixth graders from the fictional town of Epiphany, NY who became best friends despite different cultures, divorce, split parenting, racism and bullying.

In Walk Two Moons, the 1995 Newbery-Award winner, author Sharon Creech told the “extensively strange story” of Phoebe Winterbottom as shared by 13-year-old “Chickabiddy” Salamanca Tree Hiddle on a cross-country trip with her doddering grandparents. They went to every location from which Sal’s absent mother had sent her a postcard. This is a layered story, full of unusual names, characters and connections. I never predicted the outcome.

Last year I read many remarkable books with outstanding characters, settings and plots. Many thanks to: Marguerite deAngeli for Young Robin, who survived the bubonic plague in England, in The Door in the Wall (1950); to Meindert DeJong for Lina, set in a Dutch hamlet that no longer had storks, in The Wheel on the School (1955); to Harold Keith for 16-year-old Jefferson Davis Bussey and his mishaps during the Civil War in Rifles for Waitie (1958).

Lately the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle’s sports section has had a number of satisfying articles. One was the feature with photos about Najiah Knight, a 17 year-old from Oregon, who plans to champion in professional bull riding. Knight has had her eye on winning since she was 3 . Thank you to AP reporter Anne M. Peterson and others for this engaging story.

It was worth the price of a subscription to read the article in Sunday’s Rochester Democrat and Chronicle on how wrongfully-imprisoned Michael Rhynes not only endured 37 years in prison, but touched many people’s lives for the better. Rhynes studied holy books before finding redemption from his living nightmare. Thank you to Justin Murphy for local reporting that made reading the newspaper worthwhile.

I usually have a to-do list. Now that my husband and I are downsizing, my list has grown if not exploded making it harder to stay on top of my goal of reading all the Newbery Award winners. I have about 30 to go, but I’ve been sidelined by books that I plan to let go of, like two of Shel Silverstein’s: A Light in the Attic (1981) and Falling Up (1996). They brought back fond memories from our children’s school days.

After reading the “Your Turn” article in Sunday’s Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, “Support the Rights of All to Grieve and Protest” by Mical Raz and Nora Rubal, my husband handed it to me to read, saying it was good. I agreed, it was.

Saturday, while sitting by my card table at Boulder Coffee Café, one of the first people to stop by was former city photographer Ira Srole. Ira pointed to the top of the cover of my third book, Historic Genesee Country, and said he took that picture. I told him that was the first picture I ever saved on what turned out to be many long dark winter evenings scrolling through the Rochester Public Library’s online images and I still had it in my photos files. Wow. After retiring from the city a few years ago, Ira now works full time at the George Eastman Museum. He also writes plays and has one pending about the upcoming solar eclipse this coming spring.