Learning To Read
I loved books even before I could read. Before I could read, I would demand that my mother read the same book over and over until I’d memorized it. She got so frustrated that she bought me a tape recorder and began recording the books I loved so that I could just play them back with the tapes. I don’t think it was a big surprise to anyone that I was reading on my own when I was still in preschool. By the time I was in second grade I was often given the task of reading picture books to my younger siblings. I’d also been given permission to check out the real chapter books from the “secondary” section of the school library, an area that was usually off limits until you were in fourth grade.
It was my second-grade teacher, Ms. Loveless who really introduced me to poetry. I had memorized nursery rhymes as many children do. I still remember my favorite-” There was an old woman, went up in a basket, ninety-nine times as high as the moon…” I could recite the well-known poem about never seeing a purple cow. The nursery rhymes, the purple cow, those were poems I’d learned by listening. Written words would take on a whole new dimension for me in second grade because of a book Ms. Loveless had it in her classroom library.
Ms. Loveless’s library contained a copy of Shel Silverstein’s “Where the Sidewalk Ends.”
Learning to Read Poetry
I remember how big the book felt in my hands. The silky feeling of the shiny black and white dust jacket. I held it carefully, as if it were a fragile piece of china—after all, it wasn’t mine, it was someone else’s precious hardcover book. Carefully I opened it, and read the first poem, “Invitation.” “Come in! Come in!” beckoned the poem, and I did, reading page after page of rhymes about chores and magic and what exists in the dark–all things that are very important to seven- and eight-year-olds.
There were poems about school and siblings and rules; the day-to-day burdens of a second grader learning to navigate the world. The book made me think. It made me laugh. Like cheese-covered-broccoli, the poems were full of important messages wrapped in something delightful. I read poems that were silly and rebellious. Poems that were subversive. And sometimes it felt like a grown up looked right into the soul of a child and wrote a poem that knew exactly how to speak to the emotions that were there but that a child has not yet developed the vocabulary to explain.
Something else happened. I learned how to read poetry. I learned that despite all the poems I’d been given to read before, and all the poems I’d memorized and the ones I’d been told to write for school, poems didn’t have to rhyme! I discovered that for me, poetry is a multisensory experience. When I read a poem, it’s like being wrapped in a blanket; it’s so much more than just the words on the page. It’s the way it sounds when I read aloud and the way it feels in my mouth as I read it. I can see and feel the shape the poem takes on the page and the way a poet chooses to do things like use line breaks. I began to see all the poet’s tools for the first time because I was reading the poems instead of listening to them.
The poems created pictures in my head and on the page.
I brought the book home. It made my backpack so much heavier, but I had to read more of it. I showed it to my mother, who read a little bit of it. Later that night as he did every night, my father read aloud to my siblings, who chose that book for reading time.
My whole family found something that drew them into the book, something they needed. My sister and brother and I laughed. My mother was glad that we had something to entertain ourselves. My father, who always struggled to connect with young children, was able to share poetry with us, something that I think felt so much more accessible to him than the usual picture books. It helped my father and me form a connection which would eventually lead to him introducing me to writers like Robert Service and Henry James – writers my father loved much more than I do, but whose work gave me a unique bond with my father that none of my other siblings share.
My own Copy
I was heartbroken when the book had to go back to the classroom library, desperately wanting to read it again and again, to go back to favorite pages, reading them again and again until I could recite the words from memory. I would have to wait my turn to check the book out again, and it was unlikely that I would get a second change with the book. But in the spring of 1983, on the day I turned eight years old, I was given my very own copy of Where the Sidewalk Ends, along with a copy of A Light in the Attic, both shrouded in the same shiny white and black book jackets, slick and untouched by other hands. Even better? The only people I’d have to share with were my siblings who couldn’t read them yet anyway.
My favorite poems were now really mine to read whenever I wanted! As I grew older and moved on from reading the book for myself, it was a book I continued to read aloud, first to my siblings, and then to children I babysat for, and eventually to children I taught. Even when I thought I’d reached an age where I thought I didn’t need the book anymore I still reached for it to share with others, remembering warmly my own amusement and my own joy as I read about Hector the Collector and about Sarah Cynthia Silvia Stout and the garbage.
As I Grew Up
Years passed. Suddenly, without warning, I was a grown up, busy discovering some of the scariest things about being a grown up. Being a grown up doesn’t mean you have answers. People making fun of you is still a real fear and it still hurts when it happens. Grown-ups still search for things like love, hope and security just like kids do. Those lessons were all in the poems. The poems were also a reminder that some of the gross things that are funny when you’re a child don’t stop being funny just because you’ve grown up. You just learn when it’s okay to laugh at them and when it isn’t.
As I grew up, each time I’d passed on books in my collection, my mother encouraged me to hold onto a few special ones from each stage. I packed away my favorite picture books, my entire collection of Bobbsey Twin mystery books, my treasured copy of Little Women. My Shel Silverstein books were included in those special books I clung to. Long ago, they had lost their dust jackets, and their pages had been stained by messy fingers, but those books were loved, and they were special. They were Velveteen-Rabbit-Real.
My Children Learning to Read
When my own children were born, my mother began sending my old books to me. Childhood treasures of my own to share with them. Before long, my battered copy of Where the Sidewalk Ends was included in one of those boxes, with its worn corners and split spine. I unpacked the box and embraced the book like a long-lost friend. I took the book to bed that night with a cup of tea, curling up under my blankets and reading the whole thing from cover to cover. When they were old enough, I read it to my own children, reciting “Listen to the Musn’ts” and hoping fervently that they would cling to their belief in the need to fight for what’s right, and “Hug o’War” wishing that they would always know they are surrounded by love and that they have the power to create peace.
I read to them hoping that they too, would fall in love with poetry the way I did when I first read “Invitation.”
I was overjoyed to see my oldest child laughed at Captain Hook picking his nose just the way I had. My youngest, who was a precocious reader, just as I had been, quickly tried to combine her love of animals and her natural ability as a storyteller to try and imitate the silliness of the poems with her own words and illustrations. Watching her, I was overcome with a sense of familiarity. The poems in Shel Silverstein’s books were the lines that guided me to write my first real poem. Not one I had to write for school. Not one where I followed the rules and rubric set out by someone else. My own poem with my own vision and my own words.
My own children are older now, and they are now at an in-between place in their lives. They don’t need me to read to them. They don’t babysit for other children as I did when I was their age. They don’t have younger siblings around to read to. Where the Sidewalk Ends now sits forlornly and gathers dust on the shelf except when I reach for it. I still do reach for it–to remind me about the lessons of love, hope and laughter. The same lessons I first discovered at seven, and still needed at seventeen, are the lessons which I taught to other children at twenty-seven, and to my own children at thirty-seven. Now, as I near forty-seven, those lessons are just as important as ever. And between the battered blue covers of a book, the title long since faded from the spine, I can still find them.
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