THE BELIEVER READER

I cannot with any clarity identify the moment when I first became a reader. Becoming an active reader later in high school was an altogether more memorable and personally enlightening moment, but this intellectual and social genesis escapes me.

I do remember one particular instant in which I was struggling with it so intensely that the frustration manifested itself physically as well as mentally (something akin to the hyperactive temper tantrums I used to throw, and which I would later recreate for my brother's amusement by "screaming" internally until my face turned a lovely shade of popped blood vessel). I felt my cheeks growing hotter and beads of fear collecting at my forehead, threatening to unleash torrents of visible stupidity.

My father, Marcel, sat with me on the floor in my bedroom, coaching me through the words, helping me to string together each letter with the letters adjacent, to decipher each syllable into a word, one magical unit of language. I remember that night, that moment, being the most difficult thing I had ever faced and yet I don't remember ever grappling with it again.

I was put in the accelerated reading classes from first grade onward. I was able to read and comprehend more quickly than my classmates. I was confident and proud to read aloud when called upon. Was my linguistic war won in just one battle? Probably not. It is more likely that my memory failed to record subsequent skirmishes. Like the one I had years later while preparing for the school spelling bee.

Again, my father sat with me at the kitchen table with the xeroxed word list, drilling me. I had little or no difficulty with most of the lineup. But when faced with the the word 'colonel,' I could not understand, no matter how much he insisted, how a word could have an 'r' sound without ever coming within three paces of that, the eighteenth letter. I implored Marcel, pleaded with him, that he must have been mistaken. He assured me that, although he could not explain why such a blatant disregard of the rules of the language was possible, no, he knew what he was doing.

He illustrated to me by taking from the cupboard a glass jar of popping corn what the word that I was spelling meant as opposed to the word that I was supposed to be spelling. But since I was not versed in the hierarchy of the military, the explanation was lost on me and so was the word.

I did well enough in the spelling bee to travel to the state competition and there failed, but not due to any encounter with the horrible c-word. And despite being able to spell the word without a second thought now, I still cringe a little when I come across that abomination of pronunciation.