When my grandparents renovated their house, my grandmother insisted upon an office/living room with floor to ceiling bookshelves on either side of a fireplace. On the shelves nearest her reading chair, my grandmother kept all her mystery and detective fiction. On the top shelf were the books I’d later learn were called bodice-rippers—you know, the ones whose covers showed buxom women falling out of their blouses as they ran from a handsome man in a flowing white shirt. If the cover was really inappropriate, my grandmother covered it with aluminum foil. I used to have a hard time getting the foil back on the books and the books back on the top shelf.
In time, my grandmother cleared off the lower shelves for me and filled them with kids’ books. I also had my own books on that shelf, the ones I wrote and illustrated on blue-lined note cards. I’d construct them at my grandfather’s rolltop desk, which was along the back wall just beyond the far set of shelves. I distinctly remember one I wrote about a pet turtle that had died.
I began elementary school in 1974. Ridge Hill School was new and reflected the prevailing philosophies of the day, with open classrooms and mixed age groupings. Even in first grade we changed teachers for subjects. Mostly I was grouped with second and even third graders. So it was a surprise to my mother when we moved to the shoreline and I was placed in a remedial class. My mother was told that I had been placed there according to standardized test scores. Being a first grade teacher herself, my mother demanded to see the test results. As soon as the eksekutif pulled out the answer sheet, all the adults could see the problem. I had made geometric patterns on the bubble-in sheet. Apparently, the teachers had made me take the test with the older kids, and told me I could join the first graders at recess as soon as I had finished.
Once I was re-tested and re-tracked, I excelled in school, and I loved my teacher, Mr. Brucker. On Fridays, students took turns bringing a book from home to read to our classmates. At Christmas time, I brought in my copy of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which I had just gotten as a gift and had read the weekend before. Mr. Brucker had to stop me before I got any further than the title, and told me privately that I could read it to him during sustained silent reading time.
The following year I had a teacher that I didn’t like. One time, Mrs. Morasky gave us an assignment to write a short story. I wrote one about a race car driver named Spider. I began the story in the past tense, and then at one point wrote about an actual race Spider had been in, and said, “And this is how it sounded on that day.†From there I proceeded to narrate my story in the present tense. When I got my illustrated story back, it was littered with red marks from Mrs. Morasky’s pen. She had changed all my present tense verbs to past tense verbs. I had to go to her desk and show her that she had missed the spot where I had used a flashback, which explained the shift in verb tense. Mrs. Morasky was neither impressed nor amused. Damn teacher’s kid!
By sixth grade I was riding a bus with high school students, and I would look to see what they were reading in their English classes. I had a really pretty neighbor named Jen. One day I saw she was carrying The Red Badge of Courage, so I went and found it in the school library and read it. Several weeks later she was carrying A Tale of Two Cities, so I got that next, and struggled to finish it. I was just as good in math as I was in English, but I found math boring, so I would carry a book or two with me at all times, and in pre-algebra class the following year I would sit in the back and surreptitiously read novels under my desk. Mrs. Dommers never stopped me because I did fine on my tests.
I always loved books, I guess because I was always surrounded by them and by adults who were reading them. I didn’t even have to be reading a book to derive pleasure. I used to get excited just being in a library or book store. I had an aunt in New York. She was a school librarian and the widow of a lawyer. My bedroom during the six summers I lived with her was across the hall from my deceased uncle’s library. Most of his books were too sophisticated for me, but I liked to sit in there on a couch along the back wall. I would get a feeling of nervous excitement just being among all those books.
It’s fun now to watch my son and daughter develop a similar love of books and writing and stories. We have a library with floor to ceiling shelves, and kids’ books on all the low shelves. We created book nooks in corners of each kid’s room where they can sit and read quietly, and they do. Next year is first grade for Cormac, and I hope he gets a teacher he loves.
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