A Reading and Writing Story

I've been asking friends and students I teach what they remember about learning to read. Below my friend Grace Stueve shares what she remembers:

To be able to write is a skill that should not be taken for granted although at times I tend to do so. There are many people who actually cannot write. That seems incredible to me.

I think I learned to write before I went to school. I know my son did. I can remember him being seated at a table with paper before him and pencil in hand laboring to write a letter to his grandmother while I was busy with some household task that required my attention.

He would ask how to spell certain words and I would trace the letters out in the air with my index finger and he would copy the motions onto his paper. It served as well as a blackboard and made it unnecessary for me to interrupt what ever I happened to be occupied with at the moment, and in the process he learned to write.

It seems to me that most children want to learn to write before they are old enough to go to school. It is valuable to their sense of identity to learn how those marks on paper represent the sound that is their name and the names of all other things in the world. As it is written in the Bible, "In the beginning was the word." There is something awesome - maybe even holy about writing.

Such was the miracle that transformed Helen Keller who was struck deaf, dumb, and blind by an illness at the age of eighteen months. When she realized that the letters traced by her teacher into the palm of her hand represented the names of the physical objects of the world she was able, in spite of of her multiple handicaps, to make sense of her life and grow to fame in spirit and intelligence.

As for myself, I cannot imagine what life would be like if I could not write. At present I am attempting to file things - mostly unpublished - that I have written in my lifetime of 80 years. Some of it goes back to childhood, others are the reams of writing - that defies classification - which I have turned out in the last ten years while attending THE HUDSON HOUSE WRITER'S STUDY GROUP started by Mary Kirkendall.

I once mentioned my filing problem to another good friend who had the solution. She said, " You have a shredder don't you? Why don't you just shred them?"

And do you know what? I think she was serious. She is a remarkably sane person and I generally agree with her opinions. But obviously she not a writer.

Grace Stueve