Author: Colm Lannigan (Page 2 of 3)

“Mama, can you teach me how to read? Caleb already knows how, why don’t I?”

“Caleb doesn’t know how to read, his parents just taught him to remember certain words. You’ll figure it out on your own and that’s better than me messing it up for you.”

     The first book my father ever read to us from was the jungle book. I used to think he was reading Kipling to us with aspirations in mind, but now I realize it’s much more likely that he was just terribly bored by picture books. Whatever the intention I think the effect was the same. Being introduced to vocabulary and the idea of imagining the story rather than “watching it” did a great deal of good in ways that I’m sure I don’t know. My mom still read the standards to us, and I think that her choosing not to teach us was more out of the fear of doing it wrong than anything else. A bit ironic given that she holds a degree in latin and taught at berlitz. 

     I took it upon myself in unusual ways. I went to the library and I learned how to write in some obscure hieroglyphic system. Well, translate more than write; I would force one of my siblings to sound out every word and I would copy it down in pictographs. I had no ability to sight read or even string together these sounds I had created. When I hit first grade I caught up, and then surpassed “Caleb”. I read every book in that classroom, and soon was being sent on my own trips down the hall to the library. I had always been obsessive about TV, and fortunately that switched over to books once I had the ability to appreciate them.

     I grew very tired of nonsensical, formulated “children’s chapter books”. It seems that if a book has any sort of serious content, it only becomes acceptable for children once it has passed 75 years old. So I read all the classics, too young probably to have gotten much out of them and definitely too young to remember them at this point. As my life became more secluded due to moves and what else, I retreated even more into books. Until one day, I just stopped. What was so important to me to start, soon became taken for granted, and eventually ignored. I wish I still had that passion, that hunger for more. The ability to get lost in a world of someone else’s creation seems so rare to me now that it’s hard to really believe it’s still possible unless it’s actively taking place. 

     I have thought of going back to those books, to try and recapture some of that magic, but invariably I choose not to. It scares me. Sure I’ve reread Kipling as an adult, and I’ve read picture books to kids, but I can’t bring myself to reopen those volumes that I know so completely defined my imagination. I don’t know if I’m afraid that the magic won’t be there anymore and it might ruin what I’m holding onto by a thread, or if I’ll use up all that’s left and there won’t be any left to share when I have children of my own. Perhaps it just seems like such an innocent time, that understanding it better now seems only like a way of tarnishing it. Perhaps some things like memories, are best enjoyed with the glasses off.