To Kill A Mockingbird (or Cardinal... whatever)

As a child, I had trouble going to sleep at night - Mommy called me her "night owl" - so, I spent many a late night watching the Late Movie (the last show on TV before the channel signed-off for the night, at midnight). Once I saw the movie version of To Kill A Mockingbird, I knew I had to read the book, as well. I don't know if at that moment I knew that I was beginning a lifelong relationship with the story and it's characters, but I knew I had been touched by it, the way in which it was told, and by what I knew was fundamentally right.

Soon after I was born, the Air Force transferred us from Oklahoma to Prattville, Alabama. I was too young to remember anything of Oklahoma, but I remember many of my first memories, and the house in which we lived in Prattville, vividly.
I remember lying in bed, in the bedroom I shared with my sister, Marty, and looking up at the craft project Marty had made at Sunday school. It was the classic paper plate with another half a paper plate glued together - or was it stitched with yarn? - to make a vessel in which she placed cut-out, colored paper flowers on Popsicle stick stems . We were supposed to be taking a nap, but we just stayed on our beds, whispering to each other, and awaiting nap time to be over.
The house's ceilings were high, and there seemed to be a fireplace in every room, and our long picnic table served as our dining room table. In order to access the upstairs rooms, one had to go outside onto the wrap-around porch, and up the stairs. My brothers' bedroom was on the left, and Linda's room was on the right. Straight ahead, between the rooms, was a door to the attic. The house was a rental, and the maid told mother that the trunk in the attic held old Colonel Moncrief's whiskey bottles, and at night you could hear his ghost rattling them. Once, while the boys were at school, I ventured upstairs (unaware of the ghost stories) to visit the bird (I think it was a cardinal) the boys had found injured and were nursing back to health. I'm told that I reported to mother that I "held the birdie until it went to sleep", then laid it back in the cage... permanently, asleep.
Outside, there was a greenhouse that was partially underground. I didn't like the toads that hopped around in there. In a field behind the house the boys dug a "tiger trap", ala Swiss Family Robinson, and part of the route they walked to and from school they referred to as "Dead Dog Gulch" because there had been a dead dog there, once - I imagine for all the time it took for it to decay.
There was a neighbor boy, mother remembered his name as Bobby, who would come by early in the morning, peering in the windows, and hollering, "Y'all up yet?" He, and the other white kids would walk past the house to school, some barefooted and in overalls. The black children who passed the house in the other direction, headed to the colored school, were dressed nicely - starched dresses, white socks and shoes.
The town must have had an active KKK chapter, or some miscreants who would sound a claxon - a rope soaked in rosin and drug through a hole in a steel barrel - to make a terrible sound to frighten the black people.

I have decided that I will not read "Go Set A Watchman". I don't want my beloved characters and what I know of them to be spoiled by reading a sequel/prequel. Harper Lee's editor had the sense, when first given the manuscript, to suggest that the flashbacks into Jean Louise Finch's childhood were the real story worth telling. I don't need to know what became of them, afterward. I need "my" Scout to remain the sensitive, inquisitive girl, and Jem to remain the sometimes impatient, but protective brother; Calpurnia to remain the loving, cook, housekeeper and mother-figure; and Atticus to remain their fair-minded, untarnished gentleman, and loving father. Everything I need to know about them, I already know.
"Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough."
For me, just reading "To Kill A Mockingbird" is enough.