Read Me A Riddle

 

   Life is a riddle. We figure it out by reading. Not necessarily in a book. It could be on TV. The best way is by looking around and reading the environment the way babies do all their waking hours. But babies forget, so we need to write things down, and that requires being able to read.

   Before I learned to read to read, I admired my father's bookcase which towered above me, though it was less than four feet tall.. The few pictures in these books were of ships and boats. There were only two picture books: one showed the company insignia on the smokestacks of ships of the world and the other was a world atlas.

   My father told me I'd be able to read once I got to school. But we weren't given books in kindergarten. I envied the older kids carrying their books home from school, sometimes abandoning them on a snowbank when a snowball fight broke out.

   The Sunday funnies was the first book I took seriously. I could figure out what Mutt and Jeff were doing without being able to read. The children's books that came into my hands were out of the fast fading Victorian era. The illustrations were interesting but melancholy. 

   Once I started first grade, my father tried to help me sound out the word bubbles in the funnies. It was agony. "M-I-L-E: mill?" "No. Sound it out." It was a fine way to ruin a fun time. It wasn't till eighth grade or so that I internalized  the fact that an 'e' at the end of a word makes the preceding vowel long. Was that ever pointed out previously?

   They say reading to kids develops a love of reading in them. Maybe. I don't remember being read to regularly as a kid. The first book I owned was A Christmas Carol, sent to me by my Aunt Mary for my first Christmas. When I was around seven, my father attempted to read this to my brother and me as a bedtime story. "Old Marley was dead as a doornail." It was way over our heads. As we refused to stop giggling, our father got mad and quit.

   This did not affect my own love of reading. I always carry a little library with me, and if I settle in one place, it grows and colonizes my lodgings. The reason I used to read so assiduously to my own kids was that it gave me a chance to do some extra reading. Once we got past the kiddie stuff, I fed them rougher fare. 

   When Joey was in third grade he was asked to write a timeline of the major events of his life on an index card. There were only about seven items, one of them being "I am born." The two others I remember are "Camping trip to Yellowstone," and "Dad read Robinson Crusoe to us."

   If I had a tiring day at work, I'd try to beg off reading for that night, but I'd feel guilty and tramp upstairs and start reading where I had left off the previous night. Many a time the kids would have to wake me so I could finish the chapter. 

   I remember Ned telling me once his classmates scoffed at him when they learned his father read to him at night. High school can be so cruel. But Ned blew it off. He has always been impervious to ridicule. It's not thanks to being read to. It's just who he is.