Poem of the Week, by Phebe Hanson

Somewhere I’ll Find You

- Phebe Hanson

So we moved from my small town in western Minnesota

to St. Paul where I had to go to Murray High, a school

with more people than in the entire town of Sacred Heart,

and I had to walk two and a half miles every day because

there were no school buses, but it turned out to be not so

bad after all because I met a boy in confirmation class who

let me ride on the handlebars of his bike on the way home from

school and one Sunday my dad even let this boy pick me up

to go for a walk in Como Park, since after all the paths were

safe, filled with many families swarming with children, and

even though my dad knew the devil went about the city like a

roaring lion seeking whom he might devour, he let me go

with this boy because after all he was a Luther Leaguer and

we had sung together sitting side by side in church, “Yield not to

temptation, for yielding is sin / each vict’ry will help you,

some other to win / fight manfully onward, dark passions subdue /

look only to Jesus, He’ll carry you through,” but as soon as we

left my house this boy said he was going to take me some other

place I’d like very much and it was going to be a surprise so

off we went on the streetcar and new to the city I had no idea where

we were going until we got off and were standing in front of a

movie marquee and I said, “I can’t go in. You know my father

doesn’t let me go to movies. It’s a sin,” but he gently guided me

with his seductive hands, saying “Just come into the lobby to talk.”

There below the sign “Somewhere I’ll Find You,” starring Clark Gable

and Lana Turner in a “torrid tale of love between two people caught

in the chaos of war,” he persuaded me at least to go inside and sit

down and watch part of the movie and if I didn’t like it, we could get

right back on the streetcar and go to Como Park, so I decided since

I already was in this lobby den of iniquity surrounded by posters of

Jezebel movie queens and devilish leading men, I was doomed anyway,

so I might as well go into the darkness with him and even let him put

his arm around me and hold my hand and that’s the way it’s been ever since.

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For more information on Phebe Hanson, please click here: http://www.rusoffagency.com/authors/hanson_p/phebe_hanson.htm

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