And Everything Shines
"You only have to read the lines/of scribbly black and everything shines." -Syd Barrett
I don’t know exactly how the miracle occurred, but when I was about four or five years old, random marks began to organize themselves into meaningful shapes, and I became a reader. My two older brothers had guided me, sharing the workbook pages that they brought home from school. Decades later and much too late, I see the love and patience in this fact.
We would work together on the floor in the room with a clown’s face painted on the wall, a middle car in a railroad flat on Coney Island Avenue, lamp-lit and warm at such times. Once I circled “money” for “monkey” and was angry and embarrassed to have fallen for a trick so mean and petty. Why put words together that resemble each other so closely if not to trip up fledgling readers like myself? Mostly I felt excited and proud of this new skill I was attaining, the defining ability, it seemed, of being grown-up.
My first grade teacher at P.S. 179 was a tall severe lady with white hair cut mannishly short. Even her name sounded stern: Mrs. Monarch. In her class, I began more systematically copying letters on special lined paper and reading from those deadly repetitious readers that have since fallen mercifully out of favor.
I skipped third grade, but I had been led to believe one learned nothing important that year except how to write in script. I spent the entire summer after second grade obsessed with cursive handwriting, begging my father to reveal its secrets, and practicing religiously. I was convinced that I could never fully close the gap, that I would be immediately recognized as an imposter by the real fourth graders. Fortunately, cards with cursive letters, in all their loopy elegance, were mounted above the blackboard, and I never had to revert to printing.
In those days we wrote compositions. No matter how indifferent we might be to the topic, we were expected to produce at least three or four paragraphs about it. Grammar, spelling, and neatness counted. From my father, who possessed the gift of natural eloquence, I inherited a love of words. From those daily school compositions I learned the discipline and the rules.
As for reading, if the truth be told, I read comics far more avidly than real books as a kid. Fifteen cents would buy a comic and a candy bar -- in other words, heaven. I was a big fan of Superman, but if I was feeling high brow, I went for the Classics Illustrated, even though they cost a nickel more. Sometimes you could read a whole comic at the newstand and never have to buy it, but usually you'd be hustled out if you lingered too long.
When I went to the library, I had a terrible time choosing books – I was overwhelmed to paralysis by all the possibilities, a problem I still have sometimes. Occasionally I’d settle on something really wrong for me. I remember one peculiar book about a family of dolls who got lost on an island. I hated that book! It was dark and disturbing, and I felt almost a physical sensation in my stomach as I read, a nervous, I-want-to-go-home feeling. I forced myself to finish it nevertheless, emerging from its shadows and jungles with my first realization of the mysterious power books held.
There is one memory with which I close. It is the summer that I am twelve, perhaps thirteen. I am sitting under an oak tree, the very oak tree that I could see from my bedroom window, and I am reading Jane Eyre. I have never before been so gloriously lost in the pages of a book. The sounds and fragrances of that tender summer wrap around me like a cloak. I am still a kid, and all possibilities await me. How wise I was to linger there – just a skinny girl reading a book.