I am a lover of words. Some of my earliest memories are of playing word games with my mother at the kitchen table. I can remember playing a game called Perquackey with her as early as 5 years old. (I remember this, Mom, because I can clearly picture sitting at the table in the kitchen of that tiny house in Wells. The one with the tuck-under garage on the back. Remember that house?) Anyway, that’s the first time I can remember learning to build words. I remember my mother showing me how to change word endings and beginnings to make new words. I remember what it felt like when I came up with a word she missed. (Probably she missed on purpose, but at the time I felt a grand sense of accomplishment.)
My mom made me a reader. We didn’t have a lot of money growing up; my dad was a teacher, and we moved around quite a bit in my younger years. I don’t remember having vacations, or new furniture, or expensive toys. In fact, we were a one-car family until my third year of college. But I do remember going to the library and visiting the Bookmobile on a very regular basis. I remember that my parents would bring home 4-5 novels each, and I would get to bring home 1-3, depending on the size of the book. We were always reading to each other, reading to ourselves, talking about what we read, and then reading some more.
I got lost in the worlds of Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden and Laura Ingalls Wilder. In junior high, it was the Girls of Canby Hall and Sweet Valley High. The book series’ were fun; they gave me great insight into character development, and taught superficial life lessons in gentle ways.
But once I read Bridge to Terabithia, I was changed forever. You cannot possibly read that book and be the same person afterward. I can remember finishing it, setting it on my nightstand, and being overwhelmed and bewildered by the sheer magnitude of my sorrow. My 10 year old self had never felt something that powerful before, and while it was largely unsettling, it also made me even more voracious in my reading selections. I came to see that shiny Newberry Medal imprinted on the corner of a book as a billboard shouting “Read This!”
I read every Newberry Award Winner I could get my hands on. I remember exhausting the section of the library reserved for elementary students, and surreptitiously moving over into the Young Adult section long before I was “supposed” to be there. I also remember my mother coming up to turn my light off when I was in 5th grade and finding me reading Flowers in the Attic. (Thinking about that now, I cringe…I had NO business checking that book out of the school library in 5th grade!) But I will hand it to my mother: she didn’t make me stop reading it. She simply told me that it contained themes that were beyond my years, and that we should talk about it when I finished. Seriously! She actually said that!
My parents encouraged me to read absolutely anything I showed an interest in, from romance novels to Stephen King and back again. When I got to high school, I landed in the Humanities class of one Rita Vondracek, who opened up Shakespeare and Alexander Pope and Machiavelli to me. I was now navigating the waters of a multitude of genres, and marveling in their differences and similarities, and all the while feeling like I had some secret knowledge about the world that other people were missing.
Through all of that, I viewed reading as a hobby. I never considered making it my profession…it was something I just liked to do.
I went to college to be a Social Studies teacher like my dad. That was the original plan. I remember slogging through Poli Sci classes, feeling disgust over the politics of a particular teacher, and missing terribly the methods my father had always used to keep me interested. Growing up with a father who talks current events with you on a daily basis, and presents both sides of an issue, and asks me to offer an opinion because he genuinely cares about what I think, and then argues with me just to make sure I can defend a position and also see the other side…well, that spoiled me. It was painful to take notes in lecture halls all day from professors who were, in my opinion, biased and boring and probably delusional. I started sneaking Lit courses into my schedule, just for the fun of them.
[Side Note: No, it never occurred to me that I was PAYING for those extra classes. I kind of thought of school in terms of “semesters” and simply tried to fill up a full time schedule with stuff I needed and a couple of things I just liked. I was perhaps a little uninformed, financially, but it was a providential mistake.]
Because that is how I met Teresa Brown. Faced with a schedule full of Economics and Civics courses taught by my least favorite professors, I signed up for a Women in Literature class from Dr. Brown during my sophomore year, and it changed the course of my life dramatically. She introduced me to Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and suddenly every single minute of time my mother gave to me made sense. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Dr. Brown opened the shutters and threw up the sash on a window to a world I didn’t even know I’d been missing.
All those precious minutes my mother spent “forgetting” to spell MAT and RAT, and those wonderful hours spent lazing around the local libraries and her willingness to let me look through windows into lives I could not possibly live, added up to a momentous change in the way I viewed the world. In the way I was ABLE to view the world, actually. Some of the most profound truths are buried in language beyond simple conversation, and only with practice do you have access to the hidden meanings cleverly disguised with archaic words. The world becomes richer, deeper, more vibrant and more meaningful when you can connect to the all the places you’ve never been.
I realized at 21 years old, that the key to higher thinking came not from school, and not from my teachers, but from the ways I connected to the words on a page. I changed my college major immediately to English; I decided my purpose in life would be to offer that experience to as many people as possible.
I thought I should teach high school; I thought I should be that teacher who is passionately connected to works no high-schooler would dream of opening, who strikes you as slightly crazy but somehow makes it possible for you find meaning buried among the words of old, dead, white guys. That was the plan.
But you can’t get to the point of appreciation if you don’t have access to the words.
That is why I teach middle school.
I sometimes sorely miss the fact that I’m not the one watching students be devastated by Of Mice and Men. But I know that you can’t be devastated by it if you can’t read it. Or understand the words on the page. And I have come to see the tools of the trade need to be purchased long before you know you need them.
Thus begins my struggle. Despite my passion and conviction, at 8th grade they don’t really thank you for trying to push them to a higher plane. Then again, when I was crying profusely over Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye, it did not occur to me to call my mother and thank her. And when I was angrily throwing Bastard Out of Carolina at the wall in my apartment, it did not occur to me to call my mother and thank her. And when I was relishing in the triumph of The Awakening, it did not occur to me to call my mother and thank her.
October is my birthday month. Every year I get some lovely things that I need, some things that I want, and always I’m surrounded by people I love. But as I write these words, I can tell you that the gift of greatest value was given to me 33 years ago at a kitchen table in a tiny house with 6 lettered dice, a pad of paper, a pencil, and my mother. Humbly, Mom, thanks.
