The Lady Who Taught Me to Read

On the night table: Ten Second Staircase (Christopher Fowler)



I’m going to be unabashedly sentimental today. You are warned. 

Now, THIS is a reader's Christmas tree.
Courtesy Meredith Cole

I began learning to read when I was barely 4, which was unusual when I was a kid. When my sister, Barbara, went to kindergarten, she decided to take me with her. Just like that. Don't try to get between my sister and what she's set her mind to do.

She sat me next to her, and helped me with the exercises. She made sure I got a sticker star the same as she did, even when my attempts at printing letters were, well, free-form. At home, she would play teacher and read from her Dick & Jane reader, pointing out the words to me as she went. When I got sick, she'd sit by my bed and read to me. When she got sick, she’d listen to me while I sat with a book in my lap and made up stories because I couldn’t yet read all the words. But I knew there were stories in there, stories better than I was making up, because she'd read them to me. I knew they were there.  I wanted to be able to read them. 

Being able to read well got me through grade school, even though — with my dad in the army — we moved around a lot.

Barbara got me through high school. I firmly believe that. I became almost pathologically shy and found constant excuses to stay home. I never read the literature assignments. While the rest of the class was reading Wuthering Heights or Silas Marner, and I was supposed to be doing the same, I read Mary Stewart, John Steinbeck and Daphne du Maurier. (I was/am also certifiably stubborn.) Because the reading lists never changed year to year, Barbara could — and did — coach me for the tests. 

She loves grammar, and she taught it to me. She enjoyed diagramming sentences. Predicate nouns, adverbial clauses, genitive case, she taught them to me. She remembers that I wrote papers for her. I recall that I'd give her a couple of ideas, maybe an opening sentence. Meanwhile, I only passed English because of her. I was too busy reading books that weren't on the reading lists.

In a way, she’s responsible for my being published. An editor at McGraw-Hill was looking for someone to proofread an English-as-a-second-language project, to make sure there were no mistakes in the lessons.  She knew my sister through their church, and knew she was a grammar nut — uh, expert — and meticulous. Barbara was too busy at the time, running a theater company in New York City, and suggested Louise contact me, because she said I was almost as big an — uh — expert as her. I'd been laid off from my radio DJ job and had realized that, at my age, if I were going to stay in  New York, I'd have to find another line of work. I did. From McGraw-Hill, I went to another job, full time, as a copyeditor, then an editor, and that is where I met a woman who introduced me to my first agent. So, there you go.

Barbara is a drama teacher. She lives in what I consider my hometown, Clarksville, Tennessee, where my family settled when my father retired from the army when I was 12. I lived there till I finished college.

My sister and brother-in-law, David (yes, we both married Davids), returned to Clarksville in the mid-1990s from New York City. They went back to care for my parents. My father had advanced Parkinson’s and my mom was trying to care for him on her own. 

When my father died, in 1996, they stayed on, to be with her. They made new lives for themselves. She as a teacher, he as a minister. Gradually my mother developed dementia, but was able to live on her own in her own house. Because of them.

So today, I’d like to say thank you to my brother-in-law. And especially to my sister.

The lady who taught me to read.

Photo credit: Shane Martin

Sheila York
Copyright 2013

Favorite Typos of All Time

Some people come into this world nicely dominant in their left brains and therefore neurologically prepared to spell well and find typos at a glance.  I am not one of those.  I am right-handed and right-footed, but left-eyed: therefore stumped by spelling and blind to bumbled typing.

Sister Mary Catharine O’Connor, who taught me creative writing, had two PhD’s from Columbia University—one in English Literature and one in Education.  Her short stories were published in The New Yorker.  She was brilliant and uncompromising.  When we handed in a paper, she required us to write “Proofread” on the cover page and sign our names.  And if she found a fourth typo in the paper, she stopped reading, and no matter what it contained, the paper would never get an “A.”  She despaired of me.  I still have the dictionary she gave me in 1961, out of that desperation.  I revere her memory.  But nothing she did could unscramble my brain and make me good at seeing my own mistakes.

Those were the days of Olivetti portables and no spell check.

My most inconvenient mistake came, not in school, but in an article I wrote while working in the training department of a Wall Street bank.  I had devised a program to recruit women from the welfare rolls, to teach them skills that would qualify them for jobs in the bank, and to get them on their way to supporting themselves and their families.  The banking community took an interest in the work, and I was asked to write an article describing it for an industry newspaper.  As published the article contained only one wrong letter—a “w” instead of “t.”  What I meant to say was “This program is not available to the public.”   Except that it came out “now available.”  Thousands of phone calls later. . .

Writing on a computer with spell check has improved matters measurably, but perfection still escapes me, as regular readers of this blog have undoubtedly noticed, to my great embarrassment.

My consolation is that I am not alone in this impairment.  Typos have escaped into print in books.  My favorite is in the first edition of Bubbles, the autobiography of Beverly Sills.  Knowing how I loved the opera and admired Ms. Sills, my mother-in-law gave me a copy one Christmas.  The first line reads, “I was only three years old the first time I sang in pubic.”

This past week, I have been proofreading (with trepidation) the first pass pages of Blood Tango, set to launch on June 25^th.  I am probably missing some things, but luckily I caught a typo (not mine but the typesetters’ I am happy to say) that is potentially as embarrassing as the one in Beverly Sills’s book.  In this case an “r” has been substituted for an “s.”  Just one letter!  Near the bottom of page 15, a paragraph begins, “But Tulio Puglisi knew in his boner that stopping Evita. . .” 

These are my favorites.  Tell us yours.

Annamaria Alfieri