Fifty

Looking fifty is great - if you're sixty.

- Joan Rivers

The Midnight Ride

Paul Revere's Ride

Listen, my children, and you shall hear,

Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,

On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;

Hardly a man is now alive

Who remembers that famous day and year

By,

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Not when I was in school, but when my mother was in school, they were expected to know the whole poem, all 14 stanzas of it. All my mother could remember when she was an adult was the first stanza, and the one line "One, if by land, and two, if by sea," which she did with the appropriate arm thrust into the sky. About that time, I was glad that I hadn't gone to school with her.

Today would be a good day to look up this poem in it's entirety, and share it with your children. And to me, an added bonus is that the poem rhymes. That is important to me!