How I Learned To Read

I can recall the day my mother walked me to school and entered me into first grade. It was a sullen Boston morning and I felt a tug at my stomach when we approached the somber brick institution planted on a miserable expanse of blacktop lacking a single blade of grass and demarcated by a tall black wrought iron fence that felt cold to the touch. I was eventually led by a stranger down halls that smelled of oil soaked wood floors and into a room with wooden desks bolted to those floors in perfectly symmetrical rows. The seat I was assigned, I soon learned, was to be my personal prison. We could only leave for ten minutes a day for recess, lunch was taken at our desks, and the rest of the time was devoted to the labor of learning.

Around the perimeter of the room at about the height of an adult were large white cards, each with a letter of the alphabet in black cursive. These were to be our models during those times we took out our pens, dipped them in those enigmatic ink pots recessed into the top right corner of our desks, and practiced penmanship. They were also meant to be a model of some sort for our reading lessons, but I was a little confused about this part. We read about a couple of kids much happier than I named Dick and Jane, and I got the sense that there was supposed to be a connection between those large black letters that stared down at me from the wall and the cadres of letters that somehow could be translated into a language that was quite peculiar compared to my own. I liked the pictures-- the dog looked friendly enough -- but I thought it odd that everyone spoke the way they did, and I didn't understand the repetitive emphasis of excitement every time Spot decided to run.

I thought I was doing okay. That winter, however, something arrived from school in the mail. It was like a form letter except that it was a postcard with a picture of a snowman on one side, and a "Merry Christmas..." printed on the other, expectantly followed by a white rectangular blank. "Your son has failed reading," was penned in that rectangle. I recall my parents looking very concerned as they showed it to me and all I could decipher was that it was the type of handwriting an adult used who must have practiced with an inkwell a lot at some time, but who wasn't too concerned about symmetry because the line was a little out of parallel with the border of the card and inexplicably placed a little toward the upper right corner, leaving an awkward space in that rectangle without anything else offered to fill it. Of course, I couldn't read any of it.

My parents could, however, and that summer I spent most of my days in my room with books they had borrowed from school. They would give me help when I needed it, but most of the time I spent hours on my own with these books and by the time school started again I had read the first, second and third grade reading books and was beginning the one for fourth grade. I felt good about myself again. Unfortunately, my second grade teacher worked very slowly with our book and I loathed sitting at those desks reading a book I knew from memory. This may have something to do with the next four years of problems with school, including the trips to the school psychologist, the consultations with the school board, etc., etc.

It wasn't until the sixth grade that I discovered science fiction and I quickly exhausted my local library's supply of the genre. After that it was stories of explorers, then historical novels, then detective mysteries, so that by the time I entered high school I was deeply absorbed in Greek tragedies and T. S. Elliot. I loved literature and dreamed about teaching Yeats for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to finish college (1968 was a year of distractions for many people) but I often look back to those days when I willingly spent hours trying to squeeze every subtle meaning out of a poem. They were better days than Boston.

S. Brown