2 Good

Autograph books were popular with girls when I was eight or nine. They had fancy gold writing on decorative leather covers and were probably designed to collect actual autographs of famous or semi-famous people — but where I lived, the best known person was the man who had caught the biggest fish that year, and we didn’t care about his autograph. So we handed these little books around at school and our friends wrote poems in them.  There was the ever popular “Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, Sugar is Sweet and So are You” and variations on that.  Another was set up like a sample of an addition problem:  “2 nice + 2 be = 4 gotten”  but my favorite was:  “Yours, Till Spain Gets Grease to Fry Turkey”.  We thought we were such clever children.