I WENT

That was the message I wrote one day in purple crayon about 77 years ago.  I hadn’t yet learned to spell all the words I wanted to or put them together in a sentence.  I was 5 years old.

I saw my mother leave notes for my dad when she left with me to go shopping so I thought I should leave a note for her.

It was the first time I ran away from home.  Well, not exactly “ran”.  We lived in a flat on Addison Street in Chicago. And sometimes Mommy went over to visit with the neighbor next door when I was taking a nap. I woke up when she was still gone and decided to go down to the candy store which was in the same building, but down two flights of stairs and out through the courtyard and about 20 feet out to the store on Addison. They sold groceries there as well, but I was only interested in the candy counter.  I had two pennies that I found in Mommy’s purse and that would buy four bulls-eyes, my favorite candy of all the many they had in the big case.

My mother returned home just seconds after I wrote my note on the flap of a cake box on the kitchen counter. She finally found the note I’d written and panicked.  She thought I’d run away from home.  She called her mother, Grandma Hilda, who only lived a couple of blocks away.  No, she hadn’t seen me.  Nor had any of the neighbors in the building. She was getting ready to call the police when she looked out the window and saw her little girl, skipping up the sidewalk toward the front door of the apartment house.  She ran downstairs just as I was beginning to climb the short flight of steps to the porch and grabbed me up in her arms.

“Oh, Rosie, I thought you had run away! Where did you go? “

I explained that I had these two pennies and then had to confess that I had stolen them from her purse.  Mother was so glad to see that I was okay she forgave me on the spot.  And then she asked why I said just two words: “I went” in my note. I felt bad again and started to cry. I hadn’t learned how to write big words yet and if I’d known how to spell out “candy store” I would have.

Mom held me in her arms and told me that was okay. She would help me to write more words and so will my teachers when I start first grade in a few weeks. She was right of course. I learned to write a lot of words, like…Bull's Eyes, Walnettos, JuJubes, all the good stuff in the candy boxes!

Sweet memories.