The act of READING is such a pleasure to me that I simply cannot understand that others don’t or won’t do it, especially when their reasons fall into categories like, “I haven’t the time” or, “I never got into the habit.” Today, without their thinking, the excuses may sound like this: “Well, you can get all the information you need from (name the social network).” Am I too much the old Whatzit to voice concern about the apparent tendency of the younger ones to read less and stare more at screens plugged into headphones?
A teacher I knew well told me of the trouble she was having in getting her husband to read. When she returned to our school in the Fall, she was eager to inform me that she had bought him “books on tape” and, “This Summer he READ three books!”
Beyond the simple and sensual pleasures of it, reading is so essential to my physical and mental well-being that the mere suggestion that it is NOT, sets my teeth to chattering. Humans would not have remained on the road to becoming human had we not happened upon, recognized the importance of, and stuck with the invention called reading. I’m still shuddering at humanity’s near-miss
If you are reading this, you are involved in a complicated act – you are seeing symbols and, without effort, instantly translating those into sounds and images, and you are connecting them and visualizing them quicker than your eye can move or my fingers can type. In fact, recent studies suggest that I could remove many of the words I have typed and will type and you would still be able to READ it and receive full understanding.
Reading has been so important to my life and overall well being that I cannot imagine not reading, nor can I imagine one not liking, indeed loving, to read.
But, over the past few years there are vague murmurings about teaching the “Subject” of reading – about whether or not the latest innovations, coming faster than the patents filed for them, has resulted in reading being perceived as needed but not essential to the future. This suggests a belief that the tech world will solve problems and make connections once made by those who know and those seeking to learn THROUGH printed matter, and by those needing the pleasure of reading.
Today, relatively few of us still subscribe to the local newspaper. Without my early morning delivery of the San Francisco Chronicle, I would not get up. If I could not have a good cup of coffee, sit in my comfortable chair, and slowly devour every word they have chosen to print on a particular day, work all the puzzles and cryptoquips, life would not be as dear. Right now, my paper is delivered unwaveringly, early and in good shape, no matter the weather.
Let me explain why I believe so strongly in the essential need to put mind to print and engage in that lovely and mystical act of READING. My personal journey may be different, but I sense that it is not entirely unique.
My stepfather, like many of his time and circumstances, could not read, because he
and his family lived back in the marshes of coastal Georgia and they were never sent to school and that fact never discovered by authorities. Each generation of his family continued the toils and tasks of the previous ones. He went to work at a very young age in the pine forests, tapping the sap, collecting it and taking it to the turpentine stills. Later, he remained in the woods, working with crosscut saw and axe for the small sawmills, which peppered the backwoods. Later in his working life, he increased his salary and status by learning to operate a Caterpillar in those same woods.
I don’t know had badly he wished to read, being too young at the time to ask him, but I am certain he wanted to. The four or five years of schooling that my Mother managed to secure were so important to her in her years of semi-isolation in rural Georgia. In her few hours of spare time, she would lean back against a wall in her wooden chair and read from her folded “True Romance” novels.
My mother was a reader, and was happy to have me prove it when I reported, early in my kindergarten career, that I could read. She believed, but few others do today, that I could recall the very second I KNEW that I was reading! It was in a rural kindergarten class and I was nearly five years old.
The book was one of those “Dick and Jane and Spot” readers found in most schools of the time, and the narrative covered a perfect family living up in New England somewhere (there was snow). I was reading along with the teacher but then discovered that I was reading AHEAD OF HER! It was an awakening from which I have never returned.
I never looked back.
Yet, all through those early years, except for school books, which were not always good sources of reading pleasure, I found it difficult to get interesting reading material. There simply were few sources out in the deep woods of Georgia in the 1930s.
(I remember clearly: I was about seven years old and at breakfast one day, I was reading one of those ads for Five Minute Cream of Wheat on the pages of a tattered magazine my Mother had secured from somewhere. “Lil Abner” saw something evil was coming and would be at his location in six minutes. He quickly prepared and devoured his Cream of Wheat and then went out, now strong enough to conquer (I think it was) a bully.
That’s how desperate I was!
Things looked up when we moved to Brunswick, because I discovered that most wonderful invention called a LIBRARY! Actually, it was a barely adequate facility on the first floor of City Hall, but it had hundreds of books, and many were what I needed at the time. I found and consumed the entire Hardy Boys collection, and the Tarzan collections….and lots of other good stuff for a ten-year old boy.
In Brunswick on Monday, December 8, 1941, I learned of Pearl Harbor. Afterwards, at the library, I read the newspaper most every day for news of the War
Later, three years in Savannah provided me with a true bounty! The libraries were there, but what I discovered in the trash bins in an alley off Bay Street dwarfed everything before or after.
We lived one block above River Street, and between our house and Bay Street was an alley where a magazine distribution service fronting Bay Street discarded all magazines with damaged covers, and there were quite a few. Nearly every day, I took home pulp fiction, true detective, horror, science fiction, Bluebook, and the greatest of treasures – comic books!
There in Savannah, I learned how Billy Batson transformed into Captain Marvel and why Clark Kent dodged Lois Lane by jumping into a phone booth. I was never sure about the why or business of The Green Lantern and never understood Flash Gordon.
From those bins, I secured an endless trove of printed treasures, and, although I had a bicycle delivery job, transporting false teeth from the lab to dentists and casts from the dentists to labs, I had lots of time to read.
Later, my high school years in Liberty County were fairly lean, reading-wise. My high school had no library (nor did it have a cafeteria, auditorium, gymnasium, science lab or sports teams (except basketball, with practice on outdoor courts home games in the abandoned Camp Steward Military Reservation Gym). The teachers did stock a few books in a cloakroom and would sign them out if you could catch them. I read something titled “Secret of the Sun God’s Cave” a couple of times, and there was a Jack London novel and a couple of Dickens. I read them all.
When, in late summer of 1949, I enlisted in the Army and discovered the wonders of three meals a day and sixty dollars a month to spend, I found there was also plenty of reading in “Day Rooms” in each Company and in post libraries. The drought was over.
But, to this very moment, I have not forgotten the privilege of being allowed so early into worlds I could not have imagined, and that that lovely privilege was mine through what is still to me, the magic of reading.
I couldn’t let you go without a revelation involving my second son.
When our three were young, we visited libraries as a family, and it always heartened me to see that they were selective within their particular tastes and that they always checked out lots of book, realizing even at those early years that they would not like everything. As soon as the libraries allowed, we made sure that the kids had their own prized library cards.
At a beautifully stocked library on a US military facility in Germany, our youngest son took his arm full of Dr Seuss books to the desk where he informed the librarian that, “I always go by the author.”
I am reminded of all this every day because our youngest, our daughter Kate, is a Librarian in Tyler, Texas. She is great at her job where she is well loved, where she shares her enthusiasm and where she is considered by the city fathers to be an invaluable community asset!
RANCH ROMANCES
In her ritual silence a heavy woman sits
high in her straight chair, tipped back
against the central wall of our kitchen.
She wears yellow print cotton, made
last week on her foot-pedal Singer.
She is my Mother at her daily rest.
Wooden shutters, open in late April,
let sunlight spread across the planks.
Afternoon winds have stayed silent.
Outside, in the open front yard trees,
Bluejays scream at the circling crows.
They will fly when the men come home.
Now she fights hard to read quickly,
sounding out, her lips moving silently
like her teacher at Claxton Grade School.
She reads of virgins buying romance
on Arizona dude ranches, of yachts
and men in white suits from Panama.
Her pulp magazine folds into soft rolls
exactly one column wide, to anticipate
first kisses, to delay happy endings.
She sits heavy in her hide-bottom chair
made of new oak, bent wet then dried
and shaped by my hands after school.
This is her one hour alone, and I love her.
As she reads with her lips curved up
I know how the dialogue is going:
“Crystal sits breathless in her English saddle,
tended by vaqueros at her grand Hacienda.
Her new husband with the accent adores her.”
As I bring in wood for her cast iron stove
I am always carefully quiet, mindful of
her maids and Chinese cooks in white hats.
Charles Brady
