5.16 Instruction - My Reading Journey

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Each day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the sixteenth day of the month is "Instruction."

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Birchie wrote a post about her reading journey and I thought it was fascinating and super interesting how our reading lives wax and wane. I'm going to share mine because I want all parents of young children out there to know that who your child is when they are young is not necessarily who they will become as they get older.

I was really bad at academics when I was young. I was almost held back to do another year of kindergarten and again in first grade because I couldn't figure out how to tie my shoes and I couldn't memorize my phone number and address. I couldn't figure out how to tie my shoes because I was spatially unaware AND I just didn't have the fine motor skills. Neither of those things has changed. The reason I couldn't memorize things, though, was because I was really struggling with reading and writing.

As a child who desperately wanted to please, I did all the things asked of me. I completed the worksheets, I sang the songs, I listened to my older sister and my parents read me stories. I colored, I watched far more of The Letter People than was necessary, and I tried. But I never could understand why we were learning individual letters because writing wasn't made up of individual letters. I struggled with reading. My mom started me on sight words long before it was popular (the emphasis on phonics was strong at my school), but it was not until second grade that I truly understood "the cat sat on a mat" meant that a four-legged creature was sitting on a rug.  It truly was not until halfway through my second grade year that I started to actually comprehend the words that I was reading.

But once I figured it out, I never stopped reading. 

A random bookshelf in our house. This is what happens when you live with a Catholic, I guess.

I drove my parents crazy by always reading at the table and on car rides and staying up late to read under the covers. I was a teenager who didn't want to go out on dates, but wanted to read Harlequin romance novels and dream about the day I met a rich, handsome banker/business owner/engineer who would save me from my life of boring drudgery and my terrible flat in London. Just one more chapter. Just one more book. 

Part of the reason I read was just escapism. My life wasn't great and it was wonderful to be able to immerse myself in these faraway places with people doing exotic things, never worrying about how the bills were going to be paid, whether the car would break down, or if the school bus would make it down the road without getting stuck. 

But even when I left home and started making my own choices, I still dove into books because it's one of the few times I can force myself to sit still and concentrate. I tend to have a million billion thoughts racing through my head and my anxiety manifests itself in a tendency to shake my legs and pull at my hair and pace, but when I'm reading a book, I'm still. 

I hear that a lot of people stop reading for pleasure in college and grad school, but that was not true for me. As soon as I stopped reading my textbooks or journal articles, I would reach for something completely different to read to give my brain respite from the "hard stuff" by reading light, fluffy romance novels or young adult books.

And here we are. I don't watch television much or movies really at all. I spend my spare time reading. Even on a day when I'm crazy busy, I'll read for twenty minutes first thing in the morning before I get out of bed and twenty minutes before I go to bed. 

Tell me something about your reading journey. Were you a late reader? Did you only read books about dinosaurs until you were fifteen?  

Sweet Summer Scent

We pile in the Caravan, dad driving, mom knitting in the passenger seat, sister way in the back, me sandwiched in the middle. He turns on the radio, AM radio. It is the 1990s and you would think we could have at least used an FM station, but no. There's a Cubs game on, wait, no, it's the Cubs pre-game. I stifle a groan, knowing we would listen to the pre-game show, the actual game, and then the post-game. This would take us through to almost the middle of Wisconsin, and I am already bored.

Sister rolls her eyes at me, knowing, as I do, that we will be hearing intermittent cheering and/or cursing for the next five to six hours. She puts her headphones on and I know she is all but gone to me until the car stops again.

Then, as now, I will fall asleep if I don't find something to do to occupy myself. Mom used to make up silly games for us, occasionally even pack a travel board game or two, but for the last couple of road trips, she has simply packed her yarn and needles and left us to our own devices. I start counting out-of-state license plates, reveling in tractor-trailers and U-Hauls. I try to spot signs with all the letters of the alphabet: A in Grand Rapids 15 miles, B in Benton Harbor 70 miles, C in McDonalds next exit. I write them down on a piece of paper. Around the letter R I am done with this game. No one will ever see this list and what is its purpose?

The voices drone on and on about ERAs. I was pretty sure it wasn't in reference to the equal rights amendment.

I pull out a book. I have packed about a dozen books for this trip, knowing I will read them all multiple times. A few are old favorites: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables, and Black Beauty. Frances Nolan's life in Brooklyn is far removed from mine, but she reads and is smart and finds a way to succeed. I want to be her. Mary Lennox is unpopular and shy and sometimes sarcastic and always misunderstood and I know I am her. Anne Shirley is the anti-Mary Lennox and I marvel and her ability to overcome obstacles, to fit in, and to be everything I am not.

The car slows and the parents are consulting on which fast food place we should eat dinner. Sister votes for Wendy's in the backseat. If she could eat at Wendy's every day, she would. I, as usual, say nothing, knowing that in the pecking order of our family, my desires mean nothing.

As we get out, Wendy's it is, the smell of a newly tarred road is overwhelming. Sister makes a comment about how we should get in the restaurant as soon as possible. I inhale the scent, loving its sharpness, knowing that it is a fresh beginning for the road, and appreciating that this new road will take many travelers, just like us, to new places.

Later, after dinner, we stop for gas. I stand next to the car as the adults pump and wash the windshield, breathing deeply, loving the gasoline and fresh tar smell, vowing that someday I'll stop and enjoy the smell for as long as I want to.

On our first road trip together, as a newly dating couple, Biker Boy and I stood at a gas station, both of us inhaling the tang of gasoline and freshly poured tar. We stood there for several minutes. We had, oddly enough, come from a Wendy's, and this memory came flooding back. I could stand here and smell this as long as I wanted to and this man would let me do so. Already a tiny part of my heart belonged to him, but right then, a large chunk became his.

The Sound of Silence

When I was a child, I never shut up. My mother and my sister are both quiet, shy, reticent - the kind of people I see as a personal mission to make laugh and/or explode in anger. My father is a natural salesperson - garrulous and rambling, at times, but in the face of the ice-cold silence that greets him around my mother and my sister, he shuts down. I remember that every weekend the family would go out to eat (I suppose, looking back, this was an expense that my parents could ill-afford, but that insured we would always eat one meal a week together) and on the car trip there and back and the entire time we sat down, I talked. It was my DUTY to make sure that there was no quiet. I talked about school, how I was doing, classes I hated, classes I liked, people my family had never met, changes in the landscape, what we were eating, what the news was, what books I was reading, the color of the leaves, how crappy the weather was, or whatever I could think of. There was no topic too insignificant for me to turn into a fifteen minute monologue. Yesterday, with the exception of a four minute phone conversation with the Bearded One and a request for my landlords to shovel the sidewalk, I didn't talk to anyone. The city was quiet, muffled by a recent snowfall, and I didn't feel like I should intrude on that sound - or that lack of sound. It's difficult to reconcile the two different people at different places and times in the world. Am I a chatterbox? Or am I the girl who is happy with my books and my silence? The Bearded One and I have oft been accused of a somewhat solitary existence. We would much rather walk around the lake than attend a social gathering where small talk might be required (at least I would, maybe I shouldn't make such claims for him). But I force myself to attend social gatherings because I like people and I want to be around. But sometimes I want to be around people who were a little less brash, a little less loud, a little less like people. And that's my personal failing. People are people and I should learn to live with them they way that they are with all their little faults. But I will keep my quiet Fridays where I can be with myself and my thoughts with no intrusions.

Turn, Turn, Turn

Growing up where I did in the middle of a cornfield, I was on the school bus for a long time each day. An hour to school and an hour back. I remember fifth grade as an especially painful, long time on the bus. Once the kids who lived within the township limits were let off, there were only a handful of us left on the bus. Some of them were Matt K., a guy who chewed tobacco in fifth grade and sat in the back of the bus with all the bad asses so obviously I had a tremendous crush on; Jeremy C., a kid with Coke bottle classes and a farmer's attitude about crop dusting and deer hunting TO PROTECT THE CROPS; that annoying kid who always wore suspenders and whose father owned a huge farm in the middle of fucking nowhere and was the reason our bus had to go ten minutes out of the way in both directions just to drop his ass off; a small girl in first grade who was scared to death of being late and the bruises she frequently had on her arms led me to assume her father beat her when his schedule was thrown off; Micah A., a super smart, quiet kid that I later had a crush on in high school; and his baby sister, Becky, who was in first or second grade at the time with her bright pink snow pants and gap-toothed smile.

We were the kids on the bus. One day, we were sent home from school two hours early because of the snow that was falling. On east/west roads, it was like nothing had happened. But on north/south roads the wind was whipping the snow around and it was impossible in spots to determine where ROAD was and where BIG DITCH YOU WILL DRIVE THE BUS INTO was. And, because we had to drop off the annoying kid with suspenders, we had to drive onto one of the worst maintained dirt roads running north and south that existed in the county. But Pam handled it with the grace one expects from a school bus driver who drives kids in rural Michigan. I can't picture Pam in my head without her in the driver's seat of the bus. She always had that black jacket on with her name embroidered in the upper left of the front. On the back of this jacket, the side that faced us kids on the bus, was a big picture of a school bus with the slogan TRI COUNTY TRANSPORTATION written in yellow below it. I sat towards the back, in the seat with the heater, which was also the seat with the wheel well. I figured it didn't bother me to have my feet up and I was always warm, which was more than I could say for the fools in the rest of the bus. Of course, my knees were usually propped up on the seat in front of me so I could peruse the book I was reading, trying to avoid eye contact with any of the other kids who would undoubtedly mock me for any number of my annoying know-it-all mannerisms and statements. On this day, however, I was anxiously looking outside, aware that all I could see on any side of me was white. I heard Pam radio in the condition of the road. The bus garage head lady, Mary, told Pam that she had to drop off the annoying suspenders kid. Pam sighed and gunned it. Right into the ditch. The annoying suspenders kid gave this superior look to Pam and said he would walk home and get his father to get the big tractor to pull us out. Pam couldn't let the kid go because she was in charge of his well being and if he died in the snow, she would be held responsible. After much radioing back and forth to the bus garage, the little girl with the abusive father crying incoherently, and me trying to be invisible from the boys, the suspenders boy sneaks out, gets his father and the tractor, and we are saved. I remembered this day vividly one day when I was home over Christmas. The unrelenting white, the abusive parents we all took for granted, and the sort of mentality that allowed us to think that a fancy tractor could save us from the evils of the world. I was walking the dog and all I could think about was getting away from the white. Being home for Christmas is a mixed bag, you know. I realize that I'm glad I'm out of that environment, I realize that my life now is as happy and fulfilled as it has ever been, but it reminds me that I hate that place, the memories, and the open fields of relentless white that will drive you crazy and slowly convince you that the world will eventually get the better of you and there's nothing you can do to prevent it. But I also realize that I am happy here. Happy, kind of, with my job, happy with where I live, happy with my roommates and their adorable cats, happy with my boyfriend, happy with the sun that was shining today, and happy with the idea that I can come and go as I please and that the white doesn't follow me.