She Who Taught Me to Read

A wee tribute to my bookish late mother as we bid farewell to the month of May

Honestly, I’m not sure this is true, that my mother taught me to read. I recall lying belly-down on one of her thick-piled Persian rugs, sounding out words to match the kitschy photos in The Little Engine That Could, my preferred text of the pre-school era. But the rug in question graces the floor of what my siblings and I called our father’s library, the closest thing he had to a man cave, a corner room painted a dusky shade of blue that smelled of the leather-bound classics shelved along the back wall. And it was my father, crunching numbers at the desk above me, who most often came to my aid when phonetics failed and I struggled to get our brave l-o-c-o-m-o-t-i-v-e up the hill.

The thing is, “learning to read” involves more than figuring out a diphthong (“bl” plus “UE” equals blue?!?), or understanding that “th” ends up sounding like whatever it is (“I think I can, I think I can …”). Learning to read means learning to love the smell of an old paperback and the grainy touch of a hardcover’s spine. It means learning to hear the voices both lyrical and rational that speak from the book’s pages. Learning to read means finding your proper reading posture. For my mother, this meant perched with straight back, ankles crossed and feet up, whether tucked, tickly, behind me on the couch or buried under her bedcovers. Learning to read means losing yourself to the story at hand, soaking it in through your pores so deeply that reaching the satisfying conclusion to a well-crafted tale feels not unlike discovering that someone you’ve long loved from afar loves you in return. And it means that at story’s end, when you surrender the characters and plot twists and precise lovely language back to the well-thumbed pages, you may feel as sweet a sorrow as love lost.

As for my father—it’s not that he didn’t read. Daily reading was part of the routine that sustained him. His day at the office complete, the dinner dishes rinsed and racked, he carried his Wall Street Journal and the Atlanta papers to his armchair in our family room and settled in. He read those papers pretty much cover to cover, but he wasn’t much into fiction. At one point in late middle age he became enamored with Ferrol Sams, a Georgia novelist whose most successful book, Run with the Horsemen, told a coming-of-age story about a young boy growing up during the Depression, much as my father did. Other than that, I don’t remember a single fictional title in Dad’s lifetime bibliography. He may have shored me up with the fundamentals, provided the scaffolding for the life in words I would build, but it was my mother who proved true the adage, Children Do What You Do, Not What You Say.

“Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.” —Eudora Welty, On Writing

She read everything, everywhere, my mother: den, kitchen, bedroom; trains, planes, automobiles; mountain cabins, hotel rooms, beach. While others may have fond memories of mother-daughter afternoons making macaroni necklaces or finger painting, I hold tight the image of an elegant, silver-haired woman (she birthed me, the last of six, at forty-one) stepping into my fifth grade classroom to lead a “Great Books for Young People” group. I remember feeling a touch queasy, somehow both proud and embarrassed. My classmates (maybe four, five at most) whose equally bookwormish mothers had signed them on for this after-school enrichment group, squirmed politely, but most of us had yet to buy into the notion that spending long hours reading for pleasure was an acceptable pastime. Had my mother been the type to shoot hoops or kick a soccer ball around with my tomboy friends, I would have cheered her on, my cool kid status spiking through the roof.

A few of my old faves, exhumed from my mother’s attic

Let’s just say my mother didn’t have the proper shoes for sports, her thin-soled white Keds notwithstanding. But she read to me, and she sat me on a wicker rocker on the slow steamy porch of my grandparents’ home in north Florida so I could listen to the Southern small town yarns spun by my aunt and uncle and older cousins, yarns not unlike those I would discover later between the pages of favorites like Flannery O’Connor, Clyde Edgerton, Lee Smith, yarns that now inform my own writing.

My mother was a devourer of print, and eventually I racked my basketball and became one, too. A case of successful parenting-by-trickle-down, I suppose. After Mom passed away, I struggled to give away even the most dog-eared volumes she left behind. The home where she’d lived over half a century spilled over with books, and as long as they stayed put, moldering or not, I could feel her reading over my shoulder, her spirit wafting up from the pages of everything from James Joyce to John LeCarré. Books upstairs, downstairs, filling up secretaries, piled in tattered boxes under attic eaves, hidden under chairs and tables. There were hardcover and paperback; literary fiction and biographies, mysteries, and spy novels; first editions and worthless mass markets; cookbooks, travel guides, books on architecture and politics, Bibles (one dated 1827, from my Dad’s side of the family), and Catholic How-to Manuals (wouldn’t Pope Leo be proud?). Among these were Birth Control for Catholics (rather brief, that one) and the Catholic’s Guide to Expectant Motherhood. There were so many books that finally, I ran out of time to decide if this one would go to the public library, that one to my sister, or the lot of them to Goodwill.

Marie Kondo be damned, I brought far too many home. I suppose one day my sons and daughter will be forced to sift through them all again, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing. I like to think they too will surrender to their weighty magic. They like to read, my children (the youngest has a knack for writing fiction), and my one-year-old granddaughter adores those picture books with the flaps that open to reveal the punch line. Actually, she likes best to tear off the flaps, but it’s a start. As she and my newborn grandson grow, I’ll be channeling she-who-introduced-me to the Great Books of the World. If I’m lucky, they’ll catch the reading bug, too.

Some of my children’s favorites—displayed on one of my mother’s book cabinets—poised to capture the imagination of the next generation