In first grade at Holy Child School there was a box of cards, each had a single word printed on it. We used them to form sentences across our desks and the teacher walked around to compliment or guide each of us on our achievement.
At the same time we we learning cursive writing by the Palmer Method. The Palmer cards were always around the room above the blackboards demonstrating the alphabet in upper and lower case. We did exercises of overlapping O's and slanted up and down strokes to get the smoothness essential to legible script. I was totally lousy at it. My handwriting all through the grades was best characterized by my teachers who had to suffer trying to decipher my cuneiform scribbles as 'hen-scratching'. That was probably kind.
But, reading became an obsession once its wonders became apparent to me. On the first day of each new grade we were loaned the entire set of books we would use. We had to take them home and cover each one with the paper from brown paper bags. One of the books was a 'reader' with a collection of stories which we would read together in class over the coming months. But the temptation was always too much for me so that night I read the entire book. It was great but, that left me suffering through the slowwww reading aloud by other students as each story was read in class.
I was never courageous enough to sneak a different book in front of the reader during this torture because we were called on randomly to continue the reading and you could be reprimanded if you didn't know where they had gotten to. But, outside of class I experienced to joy of freely reading whatever I found; the comics, the label of the cereal box at breakfast, and then real books like fairy tales, knights and dragons, cowboys and Indians, Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, and OH! the wonder of them all! The sheer joy of reading. The discovery of the public library, that most wonderful free treasury! That gift to all readers! That most wonderful creation of civilization!
We had very few interesting (to me) books at home... a bio of Paderewski, The Pickwick papers, and Cornelia Otis Skinner's When We Were Young and Gay. My parents read mainly detective novels from the library.
But, Aunt Mae had a set of fifteen or twenty classical books which many people of the time apparently bought and seldom read but their gold-embossed titles made a nice decoration for the home. While visiting one day I discovered these treasures in pristine condition even evidencing the occasional uncut pages. I dared to open the bookcase which protected these beauties from gathering dust or ever being touched by alien fingers. In it I found such wonders as the Man In the Iron Mask, The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Three Musketeers. What a discovery! I asked if I could borrow one and over the next weeks got to read most of the collection. I remember I started reading and then gave up on Les Miserables for some reason.
Around age 11 or 12. I developed an interest in snakes and had to take the trolley to the regional library to find more books about boa constrictors, pythons, green mambas, black mambas, coral snakes, timber rattlesnakes, diamond-back rattlesnakes, and a whole variety of cobras. I read about harvesting serum to create anti-venom vaccines, the effects of snakebite, everything and anything about our legless cousins.
Next I was onto anything about sharks; tiger sharks, mako sharks, great white sharks, nurse sharks. I was thrilled/repulsed by photos of human body parts retrieved from captured tiger sharks, pictures of packs of sharks attacking a whale, photographers being lowered in shark-proof cages. I thoroughly scared myself to the point that I became convinced that someday I would die in the teeth of a shark. Of course, that never stopped me from ocean swimming, fishing in salt water, flying over vast stretches of ocean. (At this point in my life, I feel quite safe from shark molestation.)
In my teen years, I started reading about medical heroes, starting with Paul DeKruif's Microbe Hunters, followed by lives of Pasteur, Koch, Lister, Jenner, Semmelweiz, I decided that I was going to become a doctor.
After Pearl Harbor, books starting flowing out of early battles and heroes: They Were Expendable, 30 Seconds over Tokyo The fighting over Wake Island, Bataan, Corregidor, and Guam were depicted in books and film. I read every one I could find in the library.
What a tremendous gift is the ability to read: to be able to harvest the stories, the record of men and women changing the world, the beauty of language, both fictional and non-fictional. I still wonder at it.
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