The Big Red Book

There are well over 2300 days of school between your first day of kindergarten and graduation from high school. This doesn’t take into account if you attended pre-school and any time you spent in college. Taking into account sick days (fake and real), snow days (if you had any) and ditch days, let’s just call it 2300 school days.

How many of those days do you recall? Likely, not many. Those days were formative, creating character and intellect, some lifelong friendships mingled with bittersweet moments we’d rather forget.

In first grade at St. Anthony’s, I sat in near the front, second row from the aged windows to my left. Sister Louis, who seemed older than the dirt on the playground (but was probably 35), instructed her young charges. Positive and energetic, I recall her smile and feeling safe in her room.

The room was nothing fancy. The desks were tiny, the kind where you lift the lid, holding it open with your head, burrowing like a gopher to access whatever you needed. There was a cut out furrow in front to store pens and pencils (and contraband candy). Somewhere in the mess was an 8-pack of fatty Crayolas. Most of my mini-cave was populated by workbooks and loose papers, artifacts of my first grade successes.

In the left corner sat Sister Louis’ wooden desk, a spot none of us wanted to visit, even with her kindly demeanor. Behind her desk, a well-used slate chalkboard dominated the front, and above that a long poster of the alphabet was tacked to the wall. Half a century later, what I mostly recall from the room was an oversized red reader somehow anchored to the front wall.

It was one of those days in first grade when my life changed forever. Sister Louis opened the cover of the Big Red Book, just as she had many times before. In days past, we had learned the guy was named Dick and the girl was Jane and the dog was Spot. They went on simple adventures–Jane was sick or Spot was lost or Dick was scared–a few words on each page with sparse illustrations to accompany the text. The pictures weren’t much to look at. Mostly my legs bounced in anticipation of recess.

One day out of the blue, the letters joined to make words. Actual words! I knew the alphabet, including the song, but I hadn’t been able to unlock the code. Suddenly, the letters made words! As Sister Louis read, I was able to predict the words she would say. I wasn’t doing it by memory or lip-reading. No, this was bona fide reading.

That moment, of course, was just the beginning. I read simple words on billboards or TV. I perused the newpaper to see what I could decipher. I opened books without pictures and realized I wasn’t quite there yet. I returned to my realm, slowly growing a vocabulary.

I scanned the room and wondered how many others had the skill. I wasn’t the first, that much I knew. Danny Hackman and Gigi Nord for sure, and Mary Novak no doubt. But I didn’t care if I was first. I just cared that I was in the club. From then on, I looked forward to reading time. It still wasn’t as good as playing British Bulldog at recess, but it was pretty cool.

Funny thing, I remember learning to read, but not learning to write. I recall oversized green pencils (no eraser), hunks of wood beyond my fine motor skills. We all tried to replicate the examples on the alphabet chart above the blackboard, scrawling upper and lower case letters on paper with that little dotted line to show you where to cross the “t” or how tall I should make the circle on the small “d.” In later grades we graduated to cursive writing, those scribbles I was convinced were a made-up language.

I mostly take reading for granted. Writing too. But somebody (or somebodies) taught you to read and write. You might not even recall who did the hard work. But if you’re reading this, someone unlocked the code for you.

I started with Dick and Jane and Spot:

And graduated to Devlin and a cast of many:

It’s been 57 years since the Big Red Book first made sense. I gotta say–that was a good day. A very good day.

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