I give my mother due credit and admiration for her many left-handed creative ways, including her method for keeping tabs on her children in our late 1960’s Hewitt Parkway neighborhood.
Betsy did not know how to whistle nor did she opt to own one, and she certainly wasn’t a screamer. Nonetheless, she needed a method to get her three children home for dinner.
So she invented The Nine-Wu chant. Betsy would step out the side door from the kitchen and while standing on the driveway, facing the large rectangular neighborhood beyond, she would loudly and quickly chant – Wu, Wu, Wu, Wu, Wu, Wu, Wu, Wu, Wu. Always 9 Wu’s, with the last one elongated as the note lowered.
Anyone – man, woman, or child – and usually it was one of the neighbor kids – who heard the telltale, distinctive Nine-Wu chant would immediately alert the closest Morrow child that it was high time for us to go home for dinner. And we did, knowing that if we did, tomorrow we would again squeeze the most out of our neighborhood free time, awaiting the next Nine-Wu Chant.