For HUMN 6341 SMU Fall 2018 - on the first memory of being read to...
At
forty-eight, I am losing a lot of things, my hearing, my eyesight, glasses and
car keys, and on some occasions, I think I may be losing my mind. It is a sure
bet though, the older I get and the more I learn, the less I understand and the
less I recollect. Supposedly the stuff of long-term memory, even the deep imprints
riddled throughout my gray matter have over the years become scars hard fought to
move past. This is a good thing - for the most part. I am truly happy with my
imperfect self, with my imperfect life, although an imperfect mate would be
nice. Sadly though, a large part of my story feels lost. Once I buried my
brother, my sister, my mother, I’m unsure of the validity of my youth. Only
when I stop to wonder why I am the way I am do mourn the loss of recollections.
More often I mourn the loss of knowing I had family out in the world. There is just so much left where I may have shut
it away. Most of the intentional erasure has finally faded.
My youth was not sweet, my older
sister saw to that as much as my mother, although she had her moments. At four
and a half years older, my sister was beautiful, wild and unintentionally
hell-bent on destroying anyone in her path in order to do what she pleased when
she pleased. In a rare moment of sisterly grace, she taught me to cook. I was
about nine or so and my love for food and it’s connection to family has
never waned. I think perhaps she taught me to read, but this is less a memory
as a guess based on practical elimination. Someone had to have taught me the alphabet;
the syllabic utterance brought me to meaning and cognitive awareness. Someone
had to, hadn’t they? I’m told we had a
nanny of sorts during my early years who doted on my sister, perhaps it was she
who taught me to read while mother slept.
Recollections fade, but I still own
those first few books, Puppies are Like
That and Andrew Henry’s Meadow, primers
that moved me quickly to chapters and worlds found on my father’s shelf; Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, Down
Below Station, and To Kill a
Mockingbird. Too young was I when Jem and Scout, terrified, ran through the
dark and questions rose about life and living. Questions found later in other
books on other shelves. Worn and tattered from too many readings though, Atticus
holds steady in my box of gatherings from a past life. But still, who spurred
me to read and how? My father’s the only one left to ask I suppose, but at
seventy-four, he’s unreliable at best. Far from senility, we’re just two peas
in a pod. He’s set aside more decades of recollections than I’ve been alive. We
both seemed to have had the need to cope with what was in the same, similar
way.
My mother, people liked her. She was
the kindest, most giving woman imaginable unless you were her children or her first
or second husband. My stepfather swore he’d never marry again after my mother,
but Jude’s story would take a lifetime to write and bit more anguish than I’m
prepared to relive or express. I would say she had her moments as well, I’d
really like to, but she didn’t. I will say the one good thing my mother did for
me was to instill a love for reading, albeit in a roundabout way. As children
mimic adults, so I thought the escape into my room with a book for hours on end
was part of life. And when she’d announce she was going to the library, it was
the best thing in the world except for being a “get in the damn car or I’m
leaving your ass at home” sort of thing. Scrawny, I could run and dodge and get
places quick-like and was always there ready to go. No one really encouraged us
to read, but no book was denied us. My brother and I would accumulate more than
we could carry, but always the full number librarians would allow. Arms
weighted heavy, we’d leave with books stacked up to our chins, tottering out in
anticipation, ready to get home and retreat to our respective corners of the
house.
I’m not sure who taught me the
alphabet or taught me to read, or who may have even read aloud to me, but I have
spent most of my life with my nose in a book, the smell of pages unturned for
some time or the crispness of freshly printed ink a lure to fingers grazing their
spine and cover with relish and a mind ready to go wherever they would take me.
