Thanks, Jerry and Jane

Learning to read is something I must have done so early that I can't recall when. It was before I went to school and when I went on to Grade One, I was thrilled to receive a "reader". We could put our reader into our desks. The way the reader smelled is a memory I still love. The book had in large simple print, little stories about Jerry and Jane, Laddie, their dog, and Snow, the cat. The magic of that first reader lives intimately with me as being the best book I ever read. These days school children have updated versions of Jerry and Jane, but even doing a spurt of teaching reading to Primary kids, the two little children of my blue and orange reader, remain as the epitome of  a classic. Where I lived as a child, was a mix of heritages and colours and since I came from a home that never differentiated one person from another, and why I don't know because we were a normal English speaking family of four, in a largely French Canadian neighbourhood with all kinds of races living there.  I just took each other kid in my class as that kid, period. I read books to my friends sitting on our fire wood pile. One happened to wear a "hat" in my little mind, and when someone at school, pulled his turban off and made him cry, I didn't understand why. Children are not born with prejudice; it's something learned. When it was explained to me, I still didn't get it. But time passed and all that is fuzzy now in my memory, just as hearing many languages then, I didn't understand. It just seemed what the world was like and it was perfectly perfect. It was all just day to day life but life's best gift to me, was reading. I loved my books. I had few, but the library which my father took us to every week while my parents shopped, became a temple of  the greatest fun anyone could love. Books became, as time went on, a voyage to other places and people. The fairy tales were all believable, too. When a "big" kid in Grade Six at my school, said that the puddle we passed on our walk home, was actually a giant's deep footprint, my sister and I were terrified into paralysis and couldn't walk one step more for fear of the giant coming. Only our mother who came to pick us up, convinced us there were no giants. At least not in our neighborhood. As life went on from child to teen to youth, my reading grew also, and one summer when I was thirteen, my farmer grandfather,  bought me, in a yard sale,  a huge cardboard box full of English Literature classics. I discovered the very best books by accident. From then on, I became discriminating about the kind of language I loved, and the complexity I needed out of my reading, from those wondrous books: Hardy, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Eliot, Dumas, et al.  Throughout my life, reading books whether they be ebooks or print, didn't, and doesn't matter. I am there inside that book looking intimately at what is happening. No matter what is going on in the "real" world, what's in the book is my world. Reading is my "special place", my medicine, my tranquility, my greatest pleasure.  Reading is one of the skills that comes first for those of us who are fortunate enough to have learned to read. What of those in our vast world, who have been denied this great privilege and pleasure? How very sad for them.