By Julie Riggs
English Department Chair K-7, Lakehill Preparatory School
When I was about eleven years old, I was in love with a book.
It belonged to my mother and had an inscription dated 1945, a gift from people I never knew. Somehow I had gotten it into my head that my grandfather had given it to her, and as I knew him only from pictures and stories she had told me, I thought of it as a way to be close to him. Now, so many, many years later, it is a way to be close to her.
No other book on our shelves—and there were not so many as I have now because we could not afford them– looked like it. A slim volume, it was bound in mottled green and brown faux leather, textured with veins and embossed with an art deco design. Inside, each page bore an oval cameo portrait of a poet, creators of One Hundred and One Famous Poems, collected and originally published in 1929. The page numbers were written out as words at the bottoms of the pages –one hundred and eighty-six in all—and the appendix contained prose such as The Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of Independence. The final item, “Rules for Choosing Books” instructed parents to censor their children’s reading to avoid reference to anything likely to engender bad habits and to choose those in which all the events were “wholesome, probable, and true to life.”
I am glad that my mother never followed that advice.
Through the ill luck of a late October birthday, I was not allowed to enroll in public school until I was nearly seven. By that time, I had learned to read through the power of persistence. Everywhere I went, I saw words and asked, “What does that say?” then housed my mother’s answers in memory. By the time I could go to school, I was far past my peers in the reading circle, so my first grade teacher allowed me to choose a book to read aloud to my class each Friday. When I was in second grade, my mother enlisted the local librarian to choose novels for me, and I devoured them. The first time I read a book over two hundred pages long, I felt like a hero. And I wanted more.
When I was in fourth or fifth grade, my little sister had a “pram” style doll carriage about two and a half feet long, which I would wheel empty to the library and fill with books. I remember being scolded on several occasions for reading by a night light far past my bedtime, but my mother never discouraged reading itself. I remember her occasionally reading aloud to us from Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories, but not much else. She didn’t have much time because she was either a single parent going to secretarial school at night or the main breadwinner of the household. She was not a great reader herself, but she gave that treasure to me when we often had so little else.
Anna Jarvis campaigned for a day to honor mothers over a hundred years ago, and she was not thinking of chocolates, flowers, and brunches. In fact, she fought against the commercialization of the holiday because it meant so much more to her than such temporal gifts could ever convey. On Mother’s Day, I’ll get out that book, now rather shabby from use, and read a poem or two in honor of the woman who patiently answered every time I asked, “What does that say?” and led me to my life’s work as—what else? An English teacher.
Originally submitted to The Dallas Morning News. Reposted with permission.