When Time Was Young by Laura Scandalis Cross

About the book

In a happy land of primary colors, the jolly yellow circles, smiling red squares and laughing blue lines play in perfect harmony. But their simple games soon become lifeless and boring. They begin to hurl insults. Hostilities escalate. A showdown is planned. Each team of colored shapes chooses one contender to lead them to victory.

In game-show style, the three contestants gather on stage. They open a sealed evelope that holds their challenge: to find the magic word that will bring back harmony.

Armed with pencil and paper, the three angry players gasp as they discover their respective alphabets are limited to only letters that mirror their shapes. Blue Line nervously scrawls E, R, A and T. Worried Yellow Circle prints out O's a C and a rounded P, while frusted Red Square writes simply the box-shaped letter E.

Suddenly a teach "spirit" mysteriously arranges their lifeless scribbles into COOP--E--RATE. The on-looking crowd sees the three joined as one; together they solved the riddle! The landscape erupts with vibrant new shapes and shades. Red Square opens her arms to Blue Line and their friendly hug creates a purple pentagon, and then a hexagon. When Yellow Circle joins in, an orange soccer ball rolls out

Their combinations explode into every possible color and form, until...

Exhausted when the day is done,
They sleep and dream of future fun.
While out upon a distant hill
Three simple forms are playing still.
A yellow circle, not in bed,
Is playing with a square of red.
And laughing by their side is who?
You're right! It's Line, dressed all in blue.

About the author

Laura Scandalis Cross was born in 1945 to an orthopedist and a nurse/anthropologiest. In 1978, she founded the Cross Speech Rehabilitation Agency, which she developed into California's largest private speech pathology practice, extending from Beverly Hills to San Francisco. Her contributions towards treating adult and children's communication disorders have been recognized nationally, regionally and locally. In 1996 she was presented with California's "Most Outstanding Speech Pathologist" award. She has given over one hundred public speeches on therapies, business management and motivation.

In 1999 she sold her 23-year-old practice to devote herself to studying and trading in the stock market, writing, constructing houses for the needy, playing musical instruments, foreign travel and wilderness hiking with her husband and visiting their two daughters who attend college in San Francisco. Currently she has two works in progress: Bed of Ash, a wilderness/adventure novel based on her solo hiking experiences in the Peruvian Andes, Rockies and Sierra Nevada mountains, and Rare Patients, a non-fiction collection of her poignant and peculiar house calls as a speech pathologist.

Laura's husband of thirty-three years, Russell, is a school pyschologist. Their greatest accomplishments are their daughter Jessica, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa and is a graduate student in industrial pyschology and their daughter Rebecca who attends the Academy of Art College and is the illustrator for this work.