Learning to Read

If you have a garden and a library,

 you have everything you need.

                                             — Marcus Tullius Cicero

 

When I think about learning to read, I remember skipping down the alley from my grand-father’s house on my first day of school. Now I would be a first grader — and first graders were taught to decipher the squiggly black marks on the pages. I was so excited! I endured months of See Mac run. See Dick run, See Jane run  and whatever Muff was doing — even though nobody talked that way. Nor was it how the stories went in the books I so treasured.

However, my learning to read began far earlier in my life. Not words, but with the visual images in picture books. I did not come from a family of readers and there were few books in our home. My parents were not readers. I never saw my father read anything but the weekly local paper. And my mother never read while I was growing up. She was too busy washing, ironing, and cooking — the things girls were supposed learn to do.

It was my grandfather, who regularly brought me to the town library even before I was old enough to go to school. Reading was important to him. He must have believed a library card was a passport to the world beyond our small town. He taught my grandmother to read before they married — she was indentured out at age eleven and never had a formal education. And I remember my grandfather drilling my brother on words hour after hour, because reading came hard for my brother.

My grandfather’s sole library was his Bible and a two volume set of Audubon Bird Guides. When the King James Bible was re-translated into the Revised Standard Version, my grandfather eagerly waited for his copy to arrive. He used to quote often mangled versions of Scripture to suit the occasion.  “There is no rest for the wicked” was a favorite saying of his.

He never checked books out from the library for himself, but he saw to it that I would come home each time with a new boxful of books. I would pour over their pictures and imagine what their stories were about. After I learned to read, my voracious appetite for books continued. To my parent’s credit as I grew older, I could read whatever I wanted to read — despite the town librarian trying to persuade them to stop me from checking out “adult books,” which I was reading by the time I was in seventh grade.

Even earlier than first grade, I learned to read people — their expressions and their moods. My “illiteracy” was no different from prehistoric people, who had no written language. Yet they communicated with each other. Ancient people wrote messages in the caves of France and South Africa or on rock walls in the Southwest.

 

 

[images from CONVERSATIONS • Images and Poetry,

my colleague-husband and my newest book, to be released the end of September.

The above photos were taken near Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah.] 

In northern Italy in a region called Valcamonica, is the world’s largest collection of petroglyphs in the world — including elaborate maps.  Just like thes early records of human communication, I continually used my crayons to draw what I saw in my mind.

These early people evolved into cultures that transmitted their stories from generation to generation — by repeating word for word what they had been taught by their ancestors. You were accepted as a story-teller when you could replicate tribal stories with infinite perfection. No changing one word of a story to suit your particular purpose for telling it, depending on what happened during your day!

The Hmong people are a contemporary example of the passage from an oral tradition to a written one. When they first fled from the hill-country of Southeast Asia to escape the wars raged by Cambodia and in Vietnam to Thailand refugee camps and then to this country, they had no written language. Since their arrival in this country, people painstakingly have  translated their words into written form. And their grandchildren have become poets and writers, telling their stories of the tension between the traditional ways and the contemporary culture in which they now live.

Americans who depend on written words are poor transmitters of oral stories! I remember teaching group processes to graduate students. One of the exercises I used was similar to the game of telephone, where a message is passed down a row of people. In the teaching exercise I used, everyone but two students left the room. One student read a short paragraph to the other student — about a farmer whose roof had blown down the road in a wind storm. The listener then brought another student into the room and related what he or she had heard.

The process was repeated, one student at a time, until everyone was back in the room. Then the paragraph was read aloud to everyone. The results were always hilarious — because the final story-telling would bear no resemblance to the original! Each person made omissions and additions so that they had a coherent story to repeat to the listener.

In this country with such an emphasis on literacy, it is not necessary to accurately preserve our stories orally — because we can read. And we have learned that our memories are not video camera vignettes, stored away intact. Rather, our “memories” shift and change over time, colored by past and current experiences.

Further, we have learned that people observing the same event (or reading the same words) remember very differently. It can be called the car-crash phenomena. Ask people who observe an accident at an intersection and you get as many versions of the event as there are witnesses. When a car ran a red light in front of my car, even the police officer, supposedly trained for some degree of accuracy, got the color of my car wrong. She said it was dark green — while my poor damaged car was a light mauve-grey.

To be continued