Once upon a time, when Papa was just a little boy,
he sat in his first grade classroom holding his battered copy of The Little Red Book. Even when he couldn't read what it said inside the thing in his hands felt magical, as if it could take him places, as if it were the door to a new and strange land. He understood books very well, even if he could not read them as yet. His Mama read to him every day. Sometimes she would read him his favorite book There's a Nightmare in My Closet three or four times, or Where the Wild Things Are. It was hard to say which book was the best, because they both involved little boys almost exactly like Dougie, and both boys were very brave, and most importantly, the boys confronted...MONSTERS.
And now, he sat here holding The Little Red Book (there was a whole progression of books, such as The Little Blue Book, The Little Yellow Book, The Little Green Book, culminating in an amazingly fat HARDBACK book, The Little White House. He could hardly believe that he would be able to read a book that big.Mrs. Fowler, the teacher, displayed a massive chart on the wall. On it was the name of every child in the classroom, and she promised that each and every time a child finished reading a book, a big star would go onto their chart. But reading was supposed to be hard, everyone said so, and so Dougie didn't know how many stars he would get. But Mama said he would learn to read here, and then he could read all his favorite books whenever he wanted to. And just the idea sent shivers up and down his spine.For a few days they had memorized certain key words, such as "the" and "an" and "and" -- all of these words seemed simple enough. And now they were opening the covers of their The Little Red Book, and Mrs. Fowler stood up front and read out loud, and all the children were supposed to follow along in their books. Dougie stared at the words. Could they really make sense, the way they did when Mama read to him?He recognized the first word. "The." The next word was little, only three letters, and it started with a "b" -- the b, o, y. Buh-Oh-Eey. The BOY! Dougie's eyes widened. The boy. It made sense! He could see it. He could figure it out. It made sense! Unlike most things, this reading thing seemed to make sense! And the next three letters: s, a, w. Suh-awww. The boy saw, and then THE again. The boy saw the -- duh-aww, GUH.The boy saw the dog!HE WAS READING! It was like magic. One moment he did not know how to read and did not know if he would ever be able to read, and the next moment something audibly clicked in his head, and he could read."The boy saw the dog!" Dougie yelled out in the classroom. Mrs. Fowler came over, a very nice lady with dark hair and big thick glasses. Dougie always thought she was pretty, and reminded him sort of, like Mama a little, and a little bit like Grandma Medvee. She reminded Dougie to raise his hand. She stared down at his copy of The Little Red Book. Dougie pointed at the words. "The boy saw the dog," he read, pointing at each word as he read it."You're reading, Douglas," she said.And he was. He was definitely reading. He read through the whole book and got a star, and by the next week he had four stars up there on the big chart as he moved through the colors of the books. After about three weeks there were about seven stars by Dougie's name, and only one other child had that many stars (and most of the children had only one star, many hadn't received their first star as yet), a little girl.Always a little girl. Throughout the years there would always be a little girl who read more books than Dougie, second grade, third grade, fourth grade, all the way up through his high school years, it would always be Dougie and a little girl (the little girl was always different, but she always managed to read at least one or two more books than did Dougie, even when he was trying to beat her!). But mostly Dougie never even thought about what anyone else was reading, or how fast, and in truth he was never a fast reader, but rather a plodding word-by-word moving through the books, always reading because the magic that happens when you read, the little black dots making letters and those letters joining together to make words and the words making sentences and the sentences making paragraphs and all of it turning into a story, that's just not the kind of magic you can stay away from for very long.He started with "The boy saw the dog" and he never stopped, absolutely never. Long before he was supposed to read The Little White House, Dougie finished it, probably an hour after the little girl in the class who read faster than him. And then there was no more room for stars on his chart! So Mrs. Fowler allowed Dougie and the little girl to read whatever they wanted to read, and they headed off into second-grade reading territory.From second grade to third he loved solving the mysteries with Encyclopedia Brown, and from the first grade to about the fourth grade Mama allowed him to pick out three or four books, about three times a year, from the Weekly Reader catalog, which is where he met The Mouse and the Motorcycle and many other stories involving high-adventuring animals.By fourth grade and Mr. Haas, Doug (it is what he was usually called at school, but the "Dougie" slipped in sometimes as well) was reading adult novels and writing his own stories. He often spent long hours reading The World Book Encyclopedia, rarely for any specific purpose, except that there was so much information, interesting information in that old train of massive blue books (the family set was from 1960, a used set from somewhere). In the fourth grade he took aptitude tests that measured skills and knowledge, and everyone was shocked by the results.For math and most everything he scored just a tad above average, which was no surprise; however, for reading comprehension he ranked as a sophomore in college, with the same scores for written expression and vocabulary. This didn't mean anything to Doug, as he just read because he liked to read, and he seriously never learned too much in school (other than HOW to read). The teachers kept saying things like: "He doesn't apply himself" and "he is just not interested in learning" and "he is a daydreamer." Not even the teachers were very impressed with his reading skills, chiefly because he was not very interested in reading what they desired him to read. As for reading at "college level" while in the fourth grade, that didn't mean too much either, as Doug already knew a lot of people who had graduated from college and had never read a book from cover to cover in their entire life, so reading at "college level" did not seem like much of an achievement.Everyone was just more interested in WHY Doug wasn't the kind of kid who received straight A's on his report cards. But he was never interested in anything at school, except for the books (and the little girls, of course) (even if one of them always did read better than him, but she was the one he usually liked the best, as it turned out).Mama and Dada actually told Dougie: "Don't read so much. Do your homework. Reading is important, but it isn't that important.""If you want your children to be intelligent,
read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."
- Albert Einstein
Doug had caught the reading bug, and could never shake it, not that he ever tried too hard. All of his life from the first grade on he finished at least one book a week (and by the fifth grade appreciated bigger, thicker books better than the thin ones, as the writer generally had a bigger canvas to work upon). Books became his staunch companions, especially when times were bad, and through the years he would know a lot of bad times.Reading builds bridges in the mind, it stretches connections, it ties things together; reading builds memories and exercises thought, all the while developing the imagination and training the creativity. Reading plunges a person inside the labyrinth of another person's mind, flushing them through winding, twisting passages of reason and the reverberating echoes of heroic minds long years past.All Stories © 2009 Douglas Christian Larsen
important - FIGHT THE FLU WITH HERBS - important
