Listen To Your Grandmother

Literacy in my family… is sort of like breathing and eating in other families.  We didn’t always have everything we needed.  I went to school in dirty clothes more times that I can possibly count, and more than one night I went hungry, or had no where to go.  All things considered, it surprising that my family had clean clothes and food as often as we did.  But we always had books.  When I was young I had stacks of Mercer Meyer Critters books, The Bearnstein Bears, Clifford, and Spot.  We had animated bibles and CS Lewis stories.  Every night I stayed with my father, he read to us from whatever he had.  Sometimes from children’s books, sometimes from The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, and even a few times from Douglas Adam’s Hitchhikers Guide to the galaxy.  With stories for us, it was less about reading and more about the stories.  My father made voices for all of the characters and put on accents each time he read to us from James Herriot.

But that’s not what I want to talk about in this blog, because my own literacy is so known to me, and probably to you.  There was nothing especially great about my childhood when it came to books.  We read when we could and we were read to when there was someone there to read to us.  Our teachers encouraged us to read while simultaneously telling us we were “allowed” to read and what we weren’t.  My story is so much like everyone else’s, that there doesn’t seem to be much point in telling you about it.  My grandmother’s story, however, is something truly unique.  Since I was sick, and unable to turn this blog in on time, I went the extra mile and decided to find out everything she remembered about her literacy practices when she was young, when her children were young, and finally when my sisters and I were young.

During out talk, we went through each generation, beginning with her when she was young.  Marsha was five years old when she went to first grade.  There was no kindergarten in her small country town, so she went straight to first grade, and she couldn’t read at all.  Strange to think of a first grader who can’t read when children are often expected to enter kindergarten nowadays and already know the basics.  Regardless, it didn’t take her long to learn.  By the time she was entering second grade, she was able to read more than just the basics, and was already progressing to children’s books.  Every sunday, she would lay on the floor of the living room with the comic page of the newspaper, reading Dagwood and Blondie, and any others that she was able to decipher.  A bad ear infection during the summer between first and second grades put her in the hospital, and her parents came to her in the hospital with two new books, one for her sister, and one for her.  There was a poetry book by Robert Louis Stevenson, and also an illustrated bible.  Though she was excited about it, she was not  yet able to read at such an advanced level.  Thus, upon her release from hospital, a tradition began in their household.  Every night, her parents would read her and her sister one bible story and one poem.  When they would reach the end of the book, they simply started over again until they had read the illustrated bible three times through.  She was then given a copy of the new testament which her parents began reading to her.

Unfortunately, at this point the war was getting started.  That christmas, they were given a collection of around a dozen anthologies containing segments and excerpts from classical literature grouped together by genres.  Fantasy, Mystery, Adventure, and Schools Days, with pieces from books such as Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain.  She was put into the advanced reading class for the duration of the year, but life was about to get much more tumultous for the family.

During what would have been the spring of her second grade year, her father joined the army and they made a harsh transition to Texas on a train ride that lasted seven days from California.  Neither she, nor her sisters had anything but clothing with them, not even toys, let alone reading material.  For the time, the two sisters old enough to be in school were given light home schooling by their mother.  She occasionally gave them arithmetic problems or spelling sheets, and Marsha was given a Websters dictionary.  They jumped in and out of schools for the next year and a half as they traveled from Texas to Illinois to Nebraska, mostly reciving only the “light home schooling” that her mother was able to give them.

Upon their arrival home, my Great Great Grandmother, and her grandmother Nani, had managed to collect three cardboard boxes filled with books from her job at The Goodwill Store.  The boxes had everything, from classics to little unheard of mystery collections to Louisa May Alcott, they were the true beginning of her library.  And she loved them.  She read them all indiscriminately with no taste whatsoever.  If she could read it, she loved it and she gobbled them up by the pageful.  Even to this day she remembers that there was a great deal of literature she read from those boxes that was highly inappropriate for an eight year old girl.  But that didn’t stop her.

By the time she was entering third grade, her school had placed her in a sixth grade level reading class, and first grade level penmanship class.  A life dedicated to reading had begun, and there was no stopping her.

She only had one thing to say about raising children and introducing literature to them.  Her children were all relatively strong readers, there was never any problem with that.  She read to them a bit, and every christmas she bought them a few more books for their collection, but they never had much in the way of money. Then one year, their television broke.  Without the money to get it fixed, they began a new tradition of sitting in my mother’s room with my aunt on the bed across from my mom, their brother on the floor in the middle, and my grandmother in a rocking chair in front of him.  And she would read them anything they could find.  Bambi, Little Women, Little Men, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, poetry, anything and everything and she loved it.  Every night David would fall asleep on the carpet and the three of them, my grandmother and her two daughters, would have to lug him back into his own bedroom, as he weighed about as much as the three of them combined.  They kept the tradition up for a year and half, until my grandfather got their television fixed, and the tradition died.  It was, she claims, her greatest failing.  She wishes she had never fixed that stupid television.

(I have tried to describe this as closely as my grandmother described it to me.  Somehow, it seems important that it is in her voice.)