The Word World

so, how and when did you learn to read? Here’s my story – i was four years old and my mother was reading “Heidi” to me at bedtime which I greatly enjoyed. WHen she was done I asked her to start again from the beginning. She said no, or at least not right now immediately. so I went away and taught myself to read. All of this is hearsay from Sources as to the background of things but here’s a True Memory, the first one I know to be true, the first one I know to be real and mine. I walked into the kitchen where my mother was washing dishes, “heidi” in hand, and asked her if she wanted me to read to her. She of course saw the book and knew that I had asked for a repeat and she heard it as me asking her, again, to read to me So she said maybe later. At which point I picked up the book, opened it, and began to read it to her.

She dropped a plate.

But here’s the thing. I COMPLETELY skipped out on all the cutesy picture-heavy “children’s books” with scampering little anthropomorphised animals wearing sweet little outfits and sitting down to jam sandwiches in little houses furnished with little chairs and tables and chintz curtains. No talking squirrels or llamas or butterflies or birds for me. *I WENT STRAIGHT FOR THE WORDS*. The pages full of words. The stories. I cut my teeth on Heidi, but by the time I was six, the year before I started school, I had pretty much blown through the kids section of my local library. I went into first grade and they started with teaching us the flipping ABCs and i was bored out of my coconut – I  was already reading Louisa May Alcott, and before I was ten I would read three different Nobel Lit Prize winners (Henryk Sienkiewicz, Sigrid Undsett, and Pearl Buck) Before I was thirteen I would add more such laureates, and in a completely different language (I know I was thirteen when I read the full unabridged Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy. I have an inscribed book dated in that year, to prove it).

In the years that followed, I haven’t stopped. My house is stuffed with books, is bursting at the seams with books, books are piled on shelves and on any flat surface that will take them; I have two or three books on the go at any given time in different rooms on the house; piled under the pillows on the now unused side of the my bed are at least three or four books “to read next” so when I finish the one I am currently reading I can just reach out and pick the next one and keep going. The Word World has swallowed me whole.

The reason this rumination came to be is because I just watched a documentary on Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library project, whereby kids subscribed to the program receive a steady stream of books to be read to them, addressed to them by name, from birth to age 5 when they enter kindergarten. The cutesy kids books, of course, the kind that I never picked up – but lordy, what a thing. What a thing to be guaranteed books, access to books, all your own, WHEN YOU WERE A BABY. I mean, not everyone is a wordnerd freak like me and it’s probably just as well that some readers are eased into it the slow and steady way – the Little Engine That Could is on a track directly to talking animals and from there you will probably graduate to Narnia and Aslan, and from there on into bigger and better things all the time. Kudos, Dolly. You have done a grand and glorious thing. But I did say something about my own journey to one of my fellow attendees at the screening of the doco, and she said, in a completely warm and non-hostile and even admiring way, “You’re weird”.  Oh, I IZ. I iz weird indeed. I am twice born, once of human flesh and then again into the Word, and that’s utterly completely gloriously weird and I feel privileged to be me.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I probably have reading to do.