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

Reading to Diana

When my phone rang some weeks ago and I heard my friend, Diana, say, “I was just thinking of all those books and articles about apartheid you read to me,” I knew Nelson Mandela had died. I read the books to her because she is blind and it seemed to take forever for some titles to make it onto Library for the Blind cassettes.

But it was Diana who made apartheid something more than a problem that happened “over there” or the foreign policy concern that the Reagan administration met with “constructive engagement.” I read Donald Woods’ Biko and Asking for Trouble because she suggested them. I read Joseph Lelyveld’s Move Your Shadow and Breyten Breytenbach’s The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist to her because I could get my hands on them quickly. We also worked our way through articles about other movement figures like Joe Slovo and Ruth First. It made the horror more personal somehow and I remember our shared sadness when Donald Woods died.

For a number of years Diana and I lived next door to each other at Coles House and we clicked in the way that only readers can when we discovered a mutual love of all sorts of books. We started our shared reading with Gary Kinder’s Victim: The Other Side of Murder which, as its title suggests, looks at long term effects of a crime on victims and their families. The book was horrifying but very well written and I discovered how wonderful reading to someone could be. Rather than just recommending a book to a friend, I could read it to her and we could enjoy it at the same time. It was fabulous.

We had a weekly Sunday reading ritual that centered on the Sunday New York Times. We would skip the formal Coles House breakfast and Diana would bring back the paper, 4 large coffees and 4 donuts. Fueled on caffeine and sugar we began our reading in high spirits no matter how bad the news. We lingered over the Book Review, the Magazine and any especially unusual obituaries.

At Christmas time, the reading of the New York Times included a close perusal of the The Neediest Cases, an appeal to Times’ readers to give money to a number of social service agencies that supported vulnerable populations within the city. Today the profiles of families appear on a daily basis and there is a photograph of the family and the accompanying story suggests that no matter how deeply needy these people might be, there is hope that their lot will improve.

This is an honorable approach, but years ago, the neediest cases were presented in somewhat starker fashion. There was a whole section of the paper devoted to the needy. Illustrations were black and white pen and ink drawings and the stories that accompanied them were Dickensian in both detail and misery. I don’t remember if the writing was good or tinged with purple but the stories were amazingly compelling. Diana and I were riveted to every word.

Diana and I each left Coles House and, for a time, lived on separate floors of the same apartment building. So we continued The Times readings and I would read her things as they struck my fancy. It was at another Christmas that I read A Prayer for Owen Meany. As you will recall, it has a compelling opening line:

"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany."

I will confess that I usually avoid novels with religious themes but I loved that line and shared it immediately with Diana. Though I do little acting when I read, this book did compel me to come up with an Owen Meany voice, which I can still produce though years have passed. I didn’t read the whole novel to Diana but I read her large sections and we enjoyed his comments about Christmas carols (“‘Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying. VERY Christmasy’”), his defense of Liberace (“‘Well, he was very good to George’”) and his portrayal of the Ghost of Christmas Future—a performance so chilling that one of his classmates wets her pants. It’s not a book that either of us can read every year—the ending is very sad. But we remember that reading as a kind of milestone of our friendship and always talk about it at Christmas time.

Diana and live about 15 minutes from each other now. I still read to her occasionally but certainly not as much as I once did. Modern technology gives her many different ways to find the books she wants. But the intimacy of reading aloud has given our friendship a sort of literary history that no technology can replace.

© 2013 Stephanie Patterson

Some Time Among the Analysts

So I spent my weekend in a room listening to people speak of hate, rage and vengeance. Was I at some obscure mystery conference? Was I hanging out with the United States Congress?

No, I was at a psychoanalytic symposium. The cases being discussed had definite elements of noir. I should have been in heaven. Alas, I was frequently bored and my mind wandered. The tellers of tales at these symposia are very smart people and I’m sure they’re well aware of the drama inherent in these stories, but they read their papers and the drama is blunted by psychoanalytic lingo.

Never am I so aware of how badly most people read aloud. Of course, it’s hard to make phrases like “intrapsychic, interpersonal revitalization” and “dissociated, internalized introjects” come trippingly off the tongue. Sir Kenneth Branagh might manage to make the words sing but he’s busy rehearsing Macbeth.

The cases presented are works in progress so it is impossible to know if any of these tales will have a noir ending. People who can afford analysis several times a week are rarely standing on life’s margins (“Though he had won Nobel prizes in several disciplines he felt empty.”). If analysts can't alway achieve happy endings, they can at least aim for what Freud called "common unhappiness."

I go to these conferences on a yearly basis and always bring along a genuine piece of noir as an antidote to the obfuscating language and flat reading. This year’s selection was Cornell Woolrich’s Fright. I have the Hard Case Crime edition with a deliciously lurid cover. In Fright our schmuck is a young man who is being blackmailed by a woman he slept with after a night of drinking. He is engaged to a young woman with money and on his wedding day his one night stand comes for what she says will be her final payment. He murders her but gets to the church on time.

Married now and overwhelmed with guilt, he thinks he is being pursued by a plainclothes detective. His wife might find out. The law might close in. I'm betting on his superego to bring him down.

Stephanie Patterson