A thought occurred to me this morning that as we become what we experience, and what immediate choice we make (accept-reject-modify) in response to each sensory stimulus, one of the most powerful resources offered us as babes is story as read to us by parents or nurturers.
I can still hear my father’s voice and feel it as well, as I sit on his lap curled to his chest in the red rocking chair in the kitchen. He read to us the Golden Books which we each received several of every Christmas. (Until Santa brought Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.) And my mother would read those same books, or make up stories of her own, and though I don’t remember the stories (except the ones spoken in Polish, and that’s for the following reason) I remember the lilting voice, the drama, the mood she put into the story through the tones she used. There was a sense of adventure in each reading, or solemnity with moralistic sequences, or the lightness in silliness that spilled from her lips as she read aloud.
I think we learn to read, as well as face life in a manner formed a bit by how we are taught to face dragons and pumpkins and poisoned apples and mirrors and seven strange little men. You know, the things we don’t always meet at the mall.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
A lovely, evocative image of you in the red rocker and your mother’s Polish voice reading Golden
Books. I have no memory of either parent reading to me. I do remember having piles of those books that I looked at forever until I learned to read.
Loretta, your writing tells of reading much and reading well. How odd it was a self-instilled habit formed of desire.