Free Woman Who Could Not Forget by Richard Rhodes Page A

No wonder the cat just sat outside of our back sliding door and waited patiently in the evening. Iris begged us to adopt the cat and finally I gave in, but with the condition that the cat should live outside, not in the house. She named the cat Cat, short for Catherine, but she later renamed her Tash, although the cat always remained Cat to me.
    In many of the stories and poems that Iris wrote, she mentioned cats. It was Cat who was her best companion after school. She took many pictures of Cat. When she did her homework or read a book, Cat was always beside her, even though I told her that Cat should not be in the house. She managed to smuggle Cat into her room behind my back. She was no longer allergic to cats at age ten; at least not this Cat. One day, when I opened Iris’s bedroom door, I found Cat sleeping on her bed! This cat became one of our family members and lived until 1999, twenty-two or twenty-three years.
    Our interest in reading Iris’s writings had given her a sense of achievement and encouraged her even more onto the path of literary writing. The impact of parents’ attitudes on their children is unbelievably significant, which we sometimes did not realize.
    Iris’s love of writing was even more apparent in a note she wrote in class in 1979: “Writing is one of my favorite pastimes. It improves my English. It makes me think, and I understand more about things. I never think of it as work. I always think of writing as something enjoyable, because it is something that I really like to do.”
    From 1978 to 1979, she wrote many poems and recorded them in several booklets that she made. When Iris was in fifth grade, Yankee Ridge School held their first Young Author writing competition. Since I had read many of Iris’s poems and other writings, I encouraged her to enter the competition. I also volunteered to type her work for her. Iris submitted a collection of her poems and a short story titled “The Mouse Family.” The poems were selected from her writings and titled “Where the Lilies Bloom” (which was the title of one of the poems in the collection).
    Both submissions won the Yankee Ridge School competition. Then her two pieces represented Yankee Ridge School to compete in the Urbana School District. Again, her collection of poems and the short story won and were chosen to participate in the Central Illinois Regional Young Author Conference in Bloomington.
    “The Mouse Family” described a mouse family of seven; Father Mouse, Mother Mouse, and five children mice. The most elaborate part of the story was a newspaper published in Mouseville called The Mouseville Gazette, in which Iris was able, on one page of the “newspaper,” to give readers the news that “Mr. Mouse wins a house-building contest,” “Mouseville Bank robbed,” and, of course, Letters to the Editor and the Dear Anne Gerbil Column.
    In the fall of 1978, when we had just moved to our new house in the Yankee Ridge Subdivision, Iris had developed a strong interest in newspapers. She not only read the local newspaper of Champaign-Urbana, The News-Gazette , but also “published” her own homemade newspaper. She and her good friend Elaine, who shared her fascination, often spent hours after school working on their newspaper. They used the back of Shau-Jin’s discarded physics computer printouts to make a sophisticated “newspaper” layout. The newspaper “The Mouseville Gazette” in Iris’s story “The Mouse Family” must have derived from these homemade newspapers. It’s particularly interesting to see that Iris had such passion for solving others’ problems, which were shown in the Dear Anne Gerbil Column’s question-and-answer section. These must have been inspired by the “Dear Abby” column of The News-Gazette of Champaign-Urbana.
    In the spring of 1979, a man came to Iris’s school and talked about his idea to publish a newspaper for children called That Newspaper, and tried to collect writings from the students.