My First Experience With Literature

My literacy had two beginnings: the pretend beginning, and the real beginning.


There's this picture of me in my old house, when I was maybe two years old. Our kitchen has one of those half-walls and on the other side was a bookshelf. My mom used to leave me sitting in my baby chair while she cooked dinner, right on the other side so she could keep an eye on me. In the picture I’m looking intently at the book in my lap. My face is ridiculously serious. It’s starting to get dark so I’m squinting in this exaggerated way that was the reason my mom took out the camera in the first place. I’m holding one corner of the page in my chubby hand, super delicately. I already know how important this is going to be. And if you look carefully, you can even see the title of this book I’m "reading": the Home Depot Home Improvement Guide: revised second edition.


I should clarify. I wasn’t actually reading at age two. But I so wanted to be! I had seen my older brother leafing through workbooks and I had seen my mother squinting at old recipes, written in big, loopy cursive. I began to watch intently as their pencils scratched across the pages, hoping that if I stared long enough I would magically understand. Much to my annoyance, this didn’t happen. When I got a little older I picked up a few simple words here and there, but it wouldn’t be until much later that I would read in earnest.


For a while I put reading out of my mind. Then, in second grade, my teacher pulled a dusty box out from behind her desk. She passed out red-dot easy readers, the first in a series of color-coded levels of books. I was positively jazzed. I ran home and slapped it down on the kitchen counter, giving my mother the most serious look I could muster in a ladybug hat. "Mom”, I remember asking urgently, tugging at her skirt. "Can you please teach me how to read now?"


The aforementioned photograph was not the first experience I had with reading. My parents read to me all the time when I was young. I know, because I still have crates upon crates of books, full of vibrant watercolor illustrations and personified animals. They practically overflow from my attic, and I’m constantly stepping around them. But this picture by the bookshelf shows one of my very earliest memories, maybe even my first. It also calls to mind a specific literary device. (Can you guess which one, Ms. Diana?) Foreshadowing.


Now that I’m older, I read and write constantly. A book or four can always be found on my bedside table. There is a beaten-up copy of Pride and Prejudice in the backseat of my car, my own poems scrawled in the margins. And no, the Home Depot Three-Step Home Improvement Guide probably has nothing to do with it But, then again, it has everything to do with it.