MEMORIES OF STORIES: READING, WRITING AND CHOCOLATE
If I were to pick a significant factor in my literacy history, I must give preference for the shapers of my reading and writing, my family. My mother and father as avid readers and storytellers’ standout as role models for developing reading skills as essential to living the good life. My dad would often read into the wee hours of the night with a big bar of chocolate beside him; with me in his lap of course. In addition, my parents share a love of genealogy-based storytelling, which inspired me to pursue writing skills to complement my reading skills. My sister read to me before I could read for myself, and she continues to offer reading materials as do my brothers and parents, in what has become an on-going familial literature circle full of family stories, reading and writing and the occasional chocolate.
One of my earliest memories is being securely snuggled beneath layers of blankets with my head on my sister’s shoulder as she read passages from The Annotated Illustrated Bible to me. It was a big book, and our pre-bedtime habit eventually included my reading passages to her. At first, she would have me read a sentence, then I progressed to a paragraph, and eventually I read whole chapters aloud to her. From there, we moved into my telling her about what book I was currently reading and why I liked the book; and then, to her recommending books for me to read, and why she thought I would enjoy a specific book. When she started college, her book choices were often the same books she was studying in her classes, and so I came to read B.F. Skinners Walden Two, and Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf—at age twelve. By then, my reading selections had already come under the scrutiny of wide-eyed librarians in my elementary school's library.
Without the skills to choose books by genre or by author, I adopted a linear approach to my reading materials. I started with the “A” in the fiction section of the school library and systematically worked my way through the alphabet. Along the way, I came to recognize some similarities in what I was reading and I could determine what to discard before making my final selection. After a few years of this method, the school librarians started to look askance at my choices, and I remember one encounter that included a call to mother to report on my selection for the week. My mother responded, “If she picked it out she can read it, and I know my daughter, she will ask questions about what she doesn't understand."
Mom and Dad, as avid readers, thought books were the best way for their children to explore options and to gain experience without suffering any undo harm. They also used books as a means to teach life lessons. “You can’t read a book by its cover,” echoed through the house throughout the years of the civil rights movement. Stereotypes were equal to the promotional quips on the outside of books (always suspect in our house). Thus, they taught their children to base their personal decisions on a thorough investigation of all available information. Dashiell Hammett and Agatha Christie were two of the tutors my parents provided along with a few surprises.
Dad liked throwing in surprises, like Ron L. Hubbard and Isaac Asimov. I have always thought Pops was a little suspect of current information, and thought that we needed to learn to wait for some of the facts to arrive. Poppa's affection for nature and the sciences spilled over to his children. So, we learned to read text for what they could tell us about rocks, and bugs as well as reading about the things that go bump in the night. Yes, Steven King came through our door too. All three of my brothers cut their reading teeth on King, and around the circle from one hand to the next Carrie burned, Christine purred, Cujo bit; and Firestarter was It before The Long Walk on the Night Shift led us through the Pet Sematary. And along the way our wisdom teeth grew and our eyeteeth developed fanglike propensity thanks to Anne Rice.
I must mention that because of that linear approach to choosing reading materials I was exposed to “Literature.” My family’s reading interest remains firmly embedded in modern reading choices; and although my sister gave me a complete set of Jane Austen novels, I discovered the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain on my own. Years later my secret desire to write would send me back to school where I would meet Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Jack London, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Kurt Vonnegut, Leslie Marmon Silko, and shoot me now if I should be so thoughtless as to forget Shirley Jackson. Oh, wait, that is more reading and I meant to discuss writing.
My studies bought close encounters with the parts of speech. Later my introduction to the verb, the noun, the pronoun, the adjective, the adverb, the preposition, the conjunction, and the interjection brought me into a series of dark alleyways with prepositions, conjunction-do not forget those coordinating conjunctions, and my friends subject and predicate. Subject and predicate brought me into contact with simple sentences, compound sentences, and complex sentences, who provided more help in the form of their two friends the adjective clause and the adverb clause. I had a few daring duels with commas, periods, semicolons, colons, and dashes before I came out the other end of the halls of learning with the writing skills I wanted. Fortunately, I left unscathed by critical theories or methodologies. Self-preservation led me to start reading comic books. Death is one of my favorite; of course, I turned my sister onto the series. So, the circle continues.
Decades ago, my family turned Christmas into a book swap with food: and now paperbacks overflowing brown paper sacks lay amid the ruins of honey sliced ham, and Mom’s Moist Chocolate cake. Through books we continue to explore our culture, our history, a few life mysteries, and a few recurring nightmares. While we do not pretend to gourmet appetites, we tend to agree that books are the brain food we all need to fill up on—and as you know reading goes well with chocolate.