One of the few clear memories I have of my childhood is the moment I learned to read. There were red, plastic letters spread all across the floor. Their backs were magnetic, so you could attach them to a blackboard, order them, and try to make sense of things.
Sitting in the middle of the chaos, suddenly, everything clicked. I felt my heart beating faster. A door to a new world was open. I got up and ran through the house. “Mom! Mom! I can read! I can read!”
I was six years old. Lucky me, I had six months left before I started school.
“So many books, so little time.” ― Frank Zappa
Fahrenheit 2018
Two rather extreme ways to look at the world are that either nothing or everything you do matters. I believe in the latter, so when I say I was lucky, I’m rather serious. Without the head start, the extra time to fall down the reading rabbit hole, I’d be an entirely different person today. I might not be a writer and I definitely wouldn’t fight as hard to keep reading.
I’m choosing the word ‘fight’ here because sometimes, even for someone who’s always loved books, that’s what it is…
