Books

There was a happy time—Mother wasn’t slapping me; Grandmother was dressing and petting me; and Pop was playing with Jerry and me at night. Pop and Mother sang and whistled around the house. Grandmother knew a good note when she heard it, but she couldn’t sing on key to save her life. She taught me songs by singing them as best she could, and when I tried to reproduce them, she’d urge me to sing this note higher, that note lower until I landed on the right sounds. Pop taught me to whistle.

The big entertainment in the house was reading. There was a radio, but it was rarely turned on. Television hadn’t been invented. A new book would show up, and the grown-ups would read it in turns and then chat about it. I remember Grandmother trying to cook dinner when she had reached such an exciting part of her book that she couldn’t put it down—it sat beside the cutting board as she chopped vegetables—she held it in her hand  as she stood at the stove stirring a pot. We had stew that night. Mother, reading, mowed down a card table with the vacuum cleaner because she couldn’t look where she was going.

Pop often quoted favorite lines. One, from Life with Father, he admitted, he repeated just to get my grandmother’s goat: “Why did God make so many damn fools and Democrats?” Grandmother was the lone Democrat in the house and didn’t believe in swearing; she puffed up, pressed her lips into a hard, thin line, and glared every time he said it.

All three of them would recall favorite parts and then laugh over them. The adults would be clearing the table after dinner; it was almost time to get back to their books, and they’d be chuckling over their favorite scenes. I’d be looking way up at one after the other of them, trying to figure out what they were talking about.

“It was a wonderful scene near the end of the book,” Mother said.

“What book? What happened in it? Tell me! I want to laugh too.”

“You wouldn’t understand it. You would have to have read the whole book.”

And finally, “Well, teach me to read!”

My next song was the alphabet song, and then a toy showed up that let me push letters around until they made words. I clearly remember sitting on the floor with Mother that first time and learning: at, bat, cat, fat, hat…. Every moment of learning was a joy.

I learned phonics without noticing, and then—a Little Golden Book for me, my very first book. With it came the end of my lessons. Mother figured I had the alphabet and phonics, what else did I need? Besides, there was a new book in the house for her to read.

I worked at my book until I had it memorized. A tug at the nearest skirt, and “What does this word say?”

“I’m busy. I can’t look right now. Read the letters to me.”

“I don’t remember the name of the first letter.”

“Well, draw it in the air—that’s a W.”

“Oh. The word is w•h•a•t.”

“What.”

“Thank you.”

I made it through that book and then read it again and again until I didn’t need to ask for help with any of the words. Grandmother started reading to me a bit at night, then too, and let me read over her shoulder. My favorite was Uncle Wiggily who had a bundle of baby bunnies to care for and was always being attacked by the Skeezicks.

There were two more Golden Books and then a real book, Black Beauty. My soul sighed with satisfaction. And I discovered another wonderful gift—both my Mother and my Grandmother knew words and wanted me to know them too. I could ask what a word meant, and either of them would tell me. Whenever Mother had a hard time with a definition, she would stop what she was doing and look up the word in a dictionary. My first read of Black Beauty took a while, but I’d read it twice more by the time I was four.

I could read—just like a grown-up. Whole new worlds opened for me.