I have very clear memories of learning to read. I remember it being difficult. I remember it being frustrating. I remember not wanting to do it. And then, I remember it being like breathing. It was just there, like air.
It was summer time and we were borrowing a family friend’s cabin for the weekend. My parents, my brother, and I, all deep in the woods with no television, no proper kitchen and just each other for company. My parents, as always, brought reading materials. As the sun came up the first morning, and the blueberry pancakes had already been consumed, I observed my mom and dad enjoying the newspaper. I picked up a section they tossed aside and was delighted to see an illustration of a dinosaur. I was quite young. Four, maybe? And obsessed with dinosaurs.
I held up the newspaper at my mother, pointing to the article. I asked her to read it to me. “No,” she said. “You can read it yourself.” I decided perhaps I was not all that interested in dinosaurs after all. I put the newspaper down and began to slink away. “Wait,” my mother called out after me. Caught! She beckoned me back to the paper, told me to spread it out on the floor and requested that I read the article out loud to her. She had never been so interested in dinosaurs before.
I remember the feel of the words in my mouth. They were too big. Unchewable. By the time I reached the end of a word, I had forgotten the beginning. “Start over,” she would say. I wanted to stop. She wouldn’t let me. I was a bit mad. After an eternity, I reached the end of a sentence. “Now, what did that mean?” she asked. Oh no, not that, too. Over and over again I sounded my way through the words and reasoned my way through the sentences. Every syllable was excruciating.
I remember learning to read music. My father went to the music store and purchased two plastic recorders. He bought a rickety wire music stand and a series of primers. He set up in the living room, raising the music stand so it was my eye level. We stood in front of it together. I would practice tapping my foot along with his, counting the notes, counting the rests and playing our duets. “No, you played during the rest,” he said. “No, you’re rushing, stay with me.” I wanted to stop, but we did not. We played on. Weekend after weekend. I practiced even more on my own. Staring at the fingering charts like the dinosaur paper.
When my mother would pick me up from school, she would play classical music in the car. Anytime there was a solo instrument, she would say, “Which one is that?” And I would triumphantly call out, “Trumpet!” or “Clarinet!” or maybe even my favorite, “Oboe!”
In grade school, my father bought an organ. And more primers.
In fourth grade my mother brought home a Word-A-Day calendar. Each morning, before I walked out the door for the bus, we pulled the old page off the calendar, exposing the fresh word below. I would read out loud the word and definition. I remember “triskaidekaphobia.” At the end of the school day, when I walked back in the front door, the first thing I did was greet my mother with the day’s word, spelling it out, and using it in a complete sentence.
I enjoyed the Word-A-Day calendar. I enjoyed it when I became the school spelling bee champ. I enjoyed playing the organ, even when my father was no longer over my shoulder. I enjoyed playing the oboe even more. I had wanted to stop. I thought they were mean. They didn’t need to play recorder. They didn’t care about dinosaurs.
And they didn’t really, at all. They just cared about me. They cared about giving me a language. They cared about teaching me to learn. And perhaps momentarily during the years of scales, etudes, and sour notes, even they themselves might have wished for me to stop for just a momentary reprieve. I do remember my mother saying to me as a teenager, “I actually really enjoy listening to you play now.”
I remember learning. I remember the pain of it all. I can feel the feeling of not knowing. And yet, it is like it was never not there. The words and the music, like air.
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