As the observer of so many who have been successful in the craft of writing, it seems that the two major common denominators of successful writers are a) the innate knowledge from a very young age that their one true place in life was being a writer, and b) being an alcoholic. I am sure there are exceptions to this rule, or at least one of the rules, (perhaps Flannery O’Connor wasn’t an alcoholic), but by in large, this seems to be the case. If this is part of the formula of success, I guess I fail right out of the gate. I never really developed much of an affinity for alcohol, and I didn’t know until much later in life that I wanted to be a writer. No, learning to read and write for me was born out of something far more rivalrous in nature.
I don’t have a lot of childhood memories, but a few stand out. I remember staring at the bookshelf in my first-grade classroom stacked with brown-bound primer books as a tug-of-war took place in my mind. I visualized the scene in my head as the little cartoon on Saturday mornings where a small devil would appear on one shoulder and the angel would appear on the other shoulder battling it out in the main character’s conscious. The argument was that I would never be as smart, as skinny, as pretty, or as talented as she was. I squinted my eyes, set my goal on climbing the reading levels all the way from D to A, and wedged my butt onto the few inches of carpet that stuck out under the bookshelf. The rest of my legs stretched out across the cold yellowing linoleum. Apparently, the carpet wasn’t meant to cushion the children, only the books. I was waging a competition, a war of wisdom in my mind, and my adversary didn’t even know that a battle was on.
Like many things in my life, I would have to credit my desire of learning to read to my sister, though I am somewhat certain she was completely unaware of the competition. She excelled at everything she did including school, attention from boys, fashion, writing, reading, acting, and pretty much getting noticed in general. I felt at that time that I blended into the background with the drapes, so I guess I felt like the only one of that list that I could remotely have a chance of passing her in would be reading. I was wrong of course, but it still ended up paying off eventually. It took close to 40 years, but still, it paid off.
I would love to smudge those primer books out of my memory along with all of the other memories that seem now to be clouded and diminishing. Those books were terrible. Hopefully no one that is reading this wrote them, though I don’t see that being possible because I am pretty sure they were 100 years old even then. The primer books were the type of books that cracked when you opened them as if they begrudged being read. And looking back, I only remember maybe one or two others in my class sitting there reading, so maybe that was why they were so stiff. These books that trained so many generations to read were not riveting at all. There was no plot or story line. They mostly consisted of random sentences with no relation to each other slapped on a page. Something along the lines of “See Spot run. The ball bounced.” Jane and Dick joined the ranks of Spot and the ball at about level C, and by the time you got to level A, you might meet a comma, but still no plot line. To say I forced my way through them out of pure, fierce determination would be a gross understatement. But it seemed that even at that young age I still understood that starting with those primers instead of trying to learn to read by using one of my sister’s chapter books was a necessary evil to bear.
My grandmother had a smile that lit up her eyes. She was also a stout, strong woman of almost bullish stubbornness. I could melt into sleep in her wide, soft, cool arms, but also be snapped quick into motion by a squint of her eye and the pointing of her finger. Regardless of that though, she was also wicked smart, and ridiculously early for everything. I knew by lunchtime at school if my grandmother was going to be picking me up, because I could look out the window as I ate from the green melamine lunch tray and see her white boxy Chevrolet in the parking lot. It didn’t matter that we didn’t get out of school until 2:30, she was there by noon waiting for the bell to ring.
One day when my reading war was raging on, she picked me up from school and made the mistake of asking me how my day was. I don’t remember her saying much more as I sat in the backseat unable to hold back my tears and self-pity. I was already six and still couldn’t read, so I was pretty sure that eleven more years of school was going to be a colossal waste of time for me.
“You will get it,” she said solidly. “It just takes time.”
“No Grandma, I can’t.”
“Can’t never could. I don’t want to hear that from you again.” Her statement ended the conversation, but not without me rolling my eyes behind her back.
Bookshelves lined the front entryway of her house. I loved dragging my finger up and down over their staggered heights. The cool paper covered bindings would pull slightly away revealing the vastly different hard covers as I drug my bag mindlessly across the floor behind me. Some were thick, and some were thin. Some had cracked or frayed edges and yellowed pages, but best of all, none of them looked like the primers in my classroom.
“Molly, have I taken you to my secret garden yet?” she asked that afternoon.
My grandfather cocked his head at her, snapping his attention away from the TV, a questioning look on his face.
“Never you mind Robbins. Molly and I are going for a walk.”
She took me by the hand and we walked out the door. I had no clue where we were going.
“Grandma, did you mean your sunken garden?” I asked her as we made our way down the sidewalk to the driveway.
“No doodle bug. My secret garden. I don’t go there much anymore. Not nearly as much as I should.”
As we walked, everything looked familiar. About halfway down the driveway, she took a right down the wide stone steps that led to her sunken garden that my great-grandfather “Papa” had made for her decades before.
“Grandma, this is your sunken garden!”
“I know, we aren’t there yet.”
I loved the sunken garden, but it was no secret. My sister and I played there since I knew how to walk, and possibly even before that. It was about twenty-five yards in diameter and about eight to ten feet deep. The smallest flower bed ring was at the bottom, and then it had two other ascending flower bed levels above those. In the middle of the sunken garden was a fish pond with orange fish hiding under wide green lily pads with a stone fountain in the center that I only remember running once or twice. Papa died when I was five, so the repairs and yearly maintenance on the sunken garden seemed to die with him. There was another set of stairs on the other side of the sunken garden that didn’t seem to lead anywhere except the woods, and no one ever used them.
Grandma walked past the fountain and headed to the stairs on the opposite side. I started to get excited, wondering what was up there. We climbed up the wide, tall stairs and Grandma headed straight into the shade of the woods. The outstretched limbs of the trees seemed to hang over us, blocking out the hot stare of the sun. I looked up at the canopy of green as we descended further into the forest. In the middle of the opening where just a sliver of light slipped through the branches, there was a little bench.
“Grandma, is this it?”
She slumped down on the bench with a sigh, wiping her head as if the journey across the driveway had been arduous.
“This is it.”
I was mystified.
“No one else comes here?” I asked.
“No, I have never shown anyone before. It’s my secret place.”
“But what do you do here?” I said sitting down at her feet on the dirt.
“Oh,” she sighed again. “I like to write things down sometimes. Some things I write so I don’t forget them, and some things I write because it helps me figure things out,” she said as she pulled a steno pad and book out of her apron. “And, I like to read here. It’s quiet. And sometimes… ”
“Sometimes what?”
“Sometimes I just come here to think,” she said. Then she patted her legs as if to wake herself up and looked down at me. “So, what are some of the words that you learned in those books at school? Do you think you could draw them out for me?”
This word—draw, made me stop for a second. Even back then, I loved the words my grandmother chose to describe things. Some people would call it southern dialect, but looking back, I am not so sure.
She opened the notebook, laying it out on my knee and handed me the pencil.
“It was all about the dog Spot mostly,” I said, as I stuck my tongue out of the corner of my mouth and drew out the S and p for her on the page.
Looking back on that day, though I don’t write creatively for a living, I still make a living off the words that I started forming out of competition with a sister unawares, and from a grandmother that still was in touch with her sense of wonderment enough to let it rub off on me a little.