Reading

Children remember things in funny ways. A lot of what we think we remember is actually a second hand story that has been impressed on our memories through photos and the stories of our elders. I understand that I have such false memories, we all have them. But I have two particular memories that I know are my own, and I know they are real.

I remember being four years old, at our cottage in Ontario. I was the oldest of the three grandkids, and books were always a big deal. There were many picture books, but even though we had all seen them a hundred times before, we all climbed in to our grandparents' laps when the books came out.

I remember, oh like it was yesterday, one hot night in the Kids' Bedroom, a night spent arguing over who got the single bed and which two kids had to share the double bed, a night when the sinister perfume of the mosquito coil under the bed scented the air, and the lamp spilled it's ugly orange glare over the pine walls. I was the victor that night, securing the single bed for myself, while my grandfather tried to wrestle my brother and my cousin Lisa in to the big bed. And while that was going on, I opened our pressed-board copy of Thumbelina, one of my favourites. And I looked at those weird letter things. And I understood them.

I remember stopping in my tracks, panicking, as I stared at the page. I GOT IT. Good God, I was four, I knew my LETTERS for heaven's sake. But on this night, I saw the letters and the letters made words. Adding to the chaos of getting a two, three, and four year old to bed, I cried, "Papa! I can read! I can read, Papa!"

To be fair, Papa immediately stopped wrestling with the other kids, and dropped down next to me. "Show me, Jennifer." So I flipped back to the beginning of the book, and began to read aloud to him.

"Oh, Jennifer, you have only memorized what you have heard a thousand times..."

He didn't believe me. The most important moment of my life, the moment my light came on to ever burn brightly, and he didn't believe me. I was devastated. I flipped ahead in the book, and read that page. He paused, then took the book away from me and gave me another. He opened it randomly and said in a whisper, "Read that."

And I did.

Four years old and reading. This became, as early as the next day, an undisputed fact: Jennifer can read. But I remember that initially no one believed me.

The other memory: the Christmas just after I turned eight, Mum bought me the Little House books. I remember that those lovely yellow volumes came, from the fine folks at Readers Digest, in a yellow cardboard case, and at the top there was a spot to write "These books belong to..." I remember very clearly getting out a black pen to write, "Jennifer."

It was the seventies, and Little House was a very popular TV series to which I was addicted. I knew that Laura Ingalls was a real person, and I had accepted the TV series as the literal truth. And so when I began to read her stories as she wrote them, I finally saw the poetic licence the show had taken. (We can discuss the poetic licence Laura took in her books another time.)

A few days after Christmas, after I had drank my fill of my toys, my Bionic Woman action figure, my Cyndi dollhouse, I started reading the books one evening. We were well brought up kids who understood BedTime, so my exhausted parents went to bed while I was still reading in the living room, no worries that I would put myself to bed.

I remember Mum was the first one up the next day, around 6 am. She found me still on the rust-coloured velour couch, with the seventh volume of Little House in my hands.

"Jennifer, why are you up already?"

I looked up, actually a bit surprised. "I haven't been to bed yet, what time is it?"

Long story short, she refused to believe that her eight year old step-daughter had stayed up reading all night, and CERTAINLY refused to believe that the eight year old had read almost seven novels over night.

Well....she soon learned not to doubt that.


When I was a child, my obsession with reading clearly hit my family hard. How could a child so young... Well, I don't know the answers to that, either. My point to this long post is simply that, at the two strongest literary moments of my young life, no one believed me. Lord knows they all know NOW, but when I was a child, experiencing the written word, the Word which would shape my life, no one believed me. I remember that betrayal.