{thanksfully 2.0: reading}

I do not remember not being able to read.

My earliest memory of me and books is… um… reading MARVIN K. MOONEY. I was reading it aloud, acting it out in that half-memorized, half-reading kind of way, and I was about five. So, I must have learned before that.

SALLY, THE RUNAWAY MONKEY? POKEY, THE RUNAWAY BEAR? My books about the famed Fleishhacker Zoo – which was the SF Zoo’s original name, for those local peeps who were born there a million years ago – always had runaway animals. Which should have hinted something about the nature of zoos. But, I was clueless. And, about three and a half, or four.

I don’t remember learning how to read, or not knowing how, but I do remember teaching others. Teaching phonics was actually kind of hard, because it seemed I could only hear all of the exceptions to the rules I was spouting. “I-before-e-except-after-c-or-when-sounding-an-a-as-in-neighbor-or-weigh“ is a useful phase, but inside my head, I was adding, “Unless you’re British, or Canadian, and then, all bets are off.” Still – somehow – my students managed to learn. The spotlight of comprehension would go off in their heads, their eyes would round, and they would exclaim, “Oh! I got it!”

Oh, yes.

In the homes of the literate, they multiply, you know. Judging the Cybils, writing reviews; in my house, there are stacks of books I weed through each year, give away, and still manage to find in nests and piles around the house, in drifts and eddies in the stairwell. They’re EVERYWHERE.

I watched my younger siblings struggle with reading. I watched as they learned that it meant freedom – a ticket to understanding the outside world without a parental interpreter. I watched them work harder for that mastery, with that understanding that it was the key to independence. There is an incalculable value to literacy – not to mention books, stories, the fragile crafts which set us to sailing on the sea of imagination. But, being able to read your rental agreement, your driver’s license exam, your job application – these are the sorts of liberties which pave our streets with gold, and which we too often take for granted.

For literacy. For learning. For freedom. For this, I give thanks.