Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [39]
My mother taught me to read when I was four years old. Mom is a compulsive reader. She reads for pleasure, she reads to edify herself, but more often than not, she reads because she can’t help it. I understand. The minute I find myself sitting still, I start rummaging around for printed material. Pretty much anything will do—a book or magazine, sure. But also cereal boxes, the weekly shopper, the underside of the Kleenex box, or the back of the toothpaste tube. (I can recite by heart: “Crest has been shown to be an effective decay preventive dentifrice that can be of significant value when used in a conscientiously applied program of oral hygiene and regular professional care.”)
As a toddler, whenever I saw Mom reading, I bugged her to read to me. And she did. Every day. One day as I pestered her with my copy of Winnie-the-Pooh while she was settled with a book of her own, Mom set down a rule: She would read one chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh aloud (this was the original text-heavy version, not the picture-book version), but then I had to sit there quietly holding my book while Mom read a chapter of her book to herself. It worked, and became standard procedure. It took me years to recognize the power of this gift: Mom taught me to love the idea of sitting quietly with a book long before I could make out the words on the page.
In time I began to recognize letters and make attempts at small words, so Mom sent away to a Chicago newspaper for a phonics book. When it arrived, she started at the beginning and worked through page by page (sample lesson for C and K: “This cat has a bone caught in his throat and he is trying to cough it up, so he says K-K-K as in Cat and Kitty”). Soon I could read on my own, although not infallibly. Dad tells the story of me pointing at the tailgate of the neighbor’s pickup and saying, “F-O-R-D…TRUCK!”
During that same tumultuous third-grade stretch when I was getting religion with the help of Hazel Felleman’s poetry collection, Mom was sorting through a box of secondhand clothing when a copy of All Quiet on the Western Front tumbled out. I took it to the porch, settled into a chair, and dove in. I’d love to say reading Erich Maria Remarque at the age of nine stood as evidence of a precocious literary bent, but I’m afraid it had more to do with a young boy’s fascination for all things war. Whenever Mom took us on our regular trips to the Chetek Public Library, my brother John and I headed straight for the aviation section, raiding the stacks for everything we could get our hands on about the Red Baron, the French-American hero Raoul Lufbery, and our Ace of Aces, Eddie Rickenbacker of the Hat-in-the-Ring squadron. We put together glue-splotched and imprecisely decaled plastic models of Sopwith Camel biplanes and Fokker triplanes and strung them from our bedroom ceilings using black thread from Mom’s sewing box. We entertained visions of ourselves running across the green grass of a sun-soaked British airfield, prepared to buzz into the fluffy white clouds where war seemed to be a romantic romp in the clouds, with a tip of the hat to the hail-fellow-well-met set to shoot you down.
I was drawing a lot of ornate battle scenes at the time, often at the elbow of another recently acquired pal of mine, Eric Jakobs. Yin to Hardy Biesterveld’s yang, Eric was the well-behaved son of the local Lutheran pastor. He arrived partway through third grade and moved away not long after when his father was called to another parish, but for a stretch there we were best friends to the point that we created our own hieroglyphic secret code, the key to which we sketched out and buried in a tuna