Yep, two blogs in one evening - you lucky readers, you!
Linda has an interesting post and quasi-assignment up on her blog (nice of you to drop in from the wilderness Linda, we miss you). Apparently Linda is working on something for a course, and would like us all to get educated along with her.
I'm game. I think it's a great idea, not only, (but maybe especially?) for the writers among us. After all, aren't we all readers? Doesn't the mere fact that you're here, sitting in front of your own screen, allowing me to share my thoughts with you, mean that you have some attraction to the written word? It must - otherwise, you'd be playing Bejeweled. Instead, you're seeking out this blog, and maybe others, in order to read.
And if you blog, then there's something of a writer in you. Maybe you don't feel the same urge that I do, the need to affect someone with the words you write, the desire to make the sentences sing, the compulsion to make sense of life through the use of language - but you certainly harbour a wish to record the thoughts and events that shape your days. Why? Who knows. Even if you're blogging for you and you alone - and I've never really bought that argument, because if it was all for you, it'd be in a Word file that no one else would ever see - but even if, you still sense, on some level, the power of putting the prose on the page.
So.
This, as I understand it, is what Linda is asking:
think about how reading and writing play a role in your life and/or what memories you have of learning to read and write. The memories and experiences can come from any moment in your life. Then as you do this you try to find meaning that emerges from your study of your own significant literary experience.
As soon as I read this, I thought about Printing Practice in the first grade. I'm almost positive I already knew how to print - but this was back when penmanship and printing were required parts of the elementary curriculum. We had workbooks - those short, fat notebooks with a coloured cardstock cover, and lined pages inside. The lines on the page were alternating solid and dotted lines. Lowercase letters sat on the solid line, and only reached as high as the dotted line, except for the h's and l's and t's, that stretched all the way up to the next solid line. Uppercase - or capitals, as we were taught to call them - went from solid line to solid line.
For practice, we had to write a line of each letter, copying the one that had been carefully printed by Teacher. And I flunked J's.
You see, Teacher had hats on her capital J's, and I didn't. The hat was an extra step that I never remembered to take, and it just wasn't important to me. A J was a J, hat or no hat. But learning to print, and going to school was as much about learning to follow instructions as anything else, and so I remember having to do those stupid J's, with their stupid hats, again and again, until I delivered what was required.
Imagine - six years old, maybe five, and already I was thinking, though not consciously, "Ok. I'll write, but not necessarily by your rules."
The other thing I thought about when I read what Linda wrote was spelling. We've recently unearthed the Scrabble game in these parts - god, I love Scrabble! We brought the old board down from my mom's, counted out the letters, and decided that, in spite of the absence of an S, an O, an I, an N and a G, we could still play. (by the way, Kim's board is missing an M, A and P - what IS it with kids' ability to lose these things?)
After two games here, and one at Kim's, no one in my family wants to play with me anymore. I take my Scrabble seriously, and that makes me a bit unbearable. Hubby could no doubt give me a run for my money, but I get impatient and twitchy if he takes more than a minute to take his turn.
I heart spelling. If spelling were a boy, I would want to hold his hand, and kiss him, and cook his dinner, and maybe his breakfast too. I love to make sure words are spelled correctly, and love that when someone says, "Is this how you spell...." and I say "yes", they believe me.
And I think that's one of the reasons I love spelling. Because somewhere, once upon a time, I started to spell things and realized - I was GOOD at it. And that it was EASY for me to be good at it. And that it was something I could do BETTER than a lot of people.
Some people, they open their mouth, and music comes out, and you realize - they can SING. And other people can pick up a guitar, or sit down at a piano, and make MUSIC without even trying. Some people can touch a paintbrush to canvas and make ART. Or pick up a camera, and look through the viewfinder, and see a moment in time that no one else can see until the photograph is produced.
Other people know, instinctively, that this wallpaper will look good with those curtains, or that this piece of wood can be cut here, and shaved there, and voila, it's a canoe or something. Or that this wire should touch that wire and it will make this spark at exactly the right time and in the right way. Or that you shouldn't wear that shade of eyeshadow with that particular lipliner.
I can't do any of those things. But spelling - working with and understanding and just KNOWING words - is the gift I was given. Everyone has something that makes them special. What happens when words and I get together, whether it's on paper, or on the screen, or on a Scrabble board - is my thing.
I'm not the best - not by a long shot. But knowing that there's something you're good at - and reminding yourself of it - goes a long way toward making you the person you turn out to be. I know it has for me.
**And no, this would NOT be a good time to point out any typos this post may contain
