Born Readers and Writers

Q: What stories did your parents tell you about their own efforts to learn to read and write?  What kinds of values did they place on reading and writing?

A: I don’t remember any stories about efforts to learn to read and write, but both were clearly very important to my parents.  Our house was filled with books ~ one of my mother’s greatest treasures was a very old volume (“Gerard’s Herbal”?) that my father had given her.  We (my brothers and sisters) were always given books as gifts on birthdays or Christmas.  It was always assumed that we would be readers and writers.