My mother started me on books before I learned how to read--her favorite selections at bookstores were from the crafts, gardening, and children's literature sections. She was picky about her literature, too, and most of it was in verse until I started to read for myself. There was a lot of A.A. Milne, Dr. Seuss, and Shel Silverstein. There were even anthologies of children's verse by various poets. There was no mention of Shakespeare (I didn't fall in love with the Bard until my third year of college) but there was the Song of Solomon and the Song of Hiawatha.
Because of where my birthday fell (late in the year), I started school late. Since I was raised in rural Ohio in the late seventies, there no opportunity for public preschool--I had to wait my turn to join kindergarten. I was 6 years old when I started, only two months from turning 7, and my memory tells me that I could read before I started school. (There's a chance that I couldn't, but one of my earliest memories is words dawning on the page in my mother's company, not with a roomful of other kids and a teacher.) My first books were the Little House books, with lengthy descriptions of farms (I could relate to that) and food. Despite the intense poverty that I later discovered between the lines of these books, my early readings of them were nearly magical in the history and exotic nature of having taken place nearly 100 years prior to my reading of them. As a little girl I drifted to loving sunbonnets, horses, and the well-formed sentence from this start in literature.
My parents saw potential problems instead of potential in that last-listed passion, and set out to correct my tendency toward precociousness by purposely mis-pronouncing words. Looking back, I don't know why this would have been the way to go in my development--I could have been expert at language and stood out that way (regardless of what my classmates thought of me), or been the laughing stock instead because I didn't know how to correctly pronounce words. Perhaps it was a lesson in humility and lightening up--not only was I precocious with reading and words, but I was startlingly neat (my mother had to command me to stop organizing my toys and to play with them on several occasions). Until my first year at school I thought the long, string-like pasta was called SPAG-etti (emphasis on the first syllable, not the second, so I could offend English and Italian speakers), a negotiation was another word for com-PROM-iss (compromise, *sigh*), and one of the words didn't get corrected until I turned 19 and was living in a different state: YOZE-mite for Yo-sem-it-ee. While this tactic was a humbling and entertaining experience for everyone else, it also served to keep me a very quiet child, since I appeared not to know English.
I didn't really have a whole lot of friends until about the fifth grade or so--I talked funny by my parents design or by reading too much, was poor, painfully shy, and was made fun of for knowing about how things worked on the farm. I was an easy target. After long days at school of being bullied or isolated by kids who didn't read much of anything, I would go home, open a book of literature, and found myself back with my language. The closest thing I can compare it to was moving to California years later and encountering people who spoke English as a second language--their primary languages being Spanish, Cantonese, or Korean. Other mono-linguistic speakers would often ask me, "Doesn't it drive you crazy when people speak a foreign language around you when they could speak English?" I would usually shrug--it didn't, actually. A Spanish speaker once told me that he spoke Spanish when he could find another Spanish speaker, and he didn't care if English-only speakers heard it, because he was just relieved that he could speak Spanish with someone. I understood--I am the same way with the language of literature, whether it's Shakespearean English, Faulkner-ian English, Forrester-ian English of India, translated English of the Chilean literature of Isabel Allende, etc. The language of literature is different, it sings in my ears, and, if I'm alone, tastes in my mouth. I relish the time I get to speak it.
Are there books that don't speak my language, even written in English? Oh, yes. But then there are English speakers who don't speak my language, peppering their sentences with "like" or going to the other extreme and correcting my grammar. I will say one thing that my parents' game created, and that was an empathy for slips in grammar. Despite the fact that I'm a writer, I do not walk around with a red pen correcting speech, letters, e-mails, or texts. People stop writing around those who do that, and that turns people into the judgmental person my parents thought I would end up being before they screwed with my English. My philosophy is simple--love words, love playing with their possibilities, and don't slip into laziness by trying to sound like, you know, a valley girl, or like, that. If I live by love of words and love of language possibility, I continue to speak literature as language.
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This post is the last in a series of my thoughts on reading, so I wanted to make a couple of program notes. Starting next Thursday, Notes will feature my thoughts on writing in a three-part series, and starting next Monday I will begin a series on my occupational situation. About a week or so ago a friend of mine made a suggestion for my blog, and while I normally don't take writing requests (the tendency is that I end up writing a piece someone else could have written, instead of one that rings true for me), I felt that this request might come from my heart more than from anyone else's. So...that post starts Monday.
In the meantime...onward, dear reader.
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