Page 72 - LiveOnProjectlori with front cover

The Live-On Project

something new, a new beginning, be nice and friendly
with others, focus on your studies, everyone else is
nervous too even if it doesn’t seem that way, what you
wear is not important--who you are is important.
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Dear Jonathan,

Now that your vocabulary has reached the extensive proportions of
many words and varied intonations, and the expression in your
wonderful eyes so filled with your own particular meanings, I think it
time we started to correspond with one another. I’ll write the first
letter and you don’t, unless you wish to, have to answer until you’re off
and away to college. And even then, should the press of higher learning
consume too much of your time, I won’t mind if you don’t write me as
much as I might wish, just so long as you still smile as you do now, and
so long as you leap about the world with the joy of living, of discovering
new things, of experimenting with your mind through the exciting maze
of the world’s way. The important thing for both of us, Jonny, is to
keep the spirit you now possess turned toward making the best of what
we find around us, not by acquiescing to all things as they are because
it is too difficult to mold them closer to our own desire, but by seeing
our life as a constant struggle with complacency everywhere.
-Civil Engineer and Poet Bobby Goodman, Letter to his toddler in 1942
TheWhyNot100.blogspot.com (May 22, 2015) 3 Letters from Authors to
their Kids [Blog Post]. Retrieved from
http://thewhynot100.blogspot.com/2015/05/3-letters-from-authors-to-
their-kids.html.

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