Reading 1997

She sat with a straight back, eyes front, her book held upright in her lap.  She was small for the large arm chair, her pink tennis shoes splaying off the edge of the cushion. I watched her read; eyes moving across the page until she came to the bottom, then moving to the top of the next page. That page finished, she would lift her right hand and turn it. She sat quietly, serious about what she was doing, page after page turning as she progressed through the book.

This was my first child, so I had no idea how the process of reading unfolded.  I thought perhaps it had just come to her, out of the blue, suddenly able to read big books with small print.  Her concentration was obvious.  Clearly, for my daughter, reading was an important and weighty matter.  Of course, as it turned out, she was years away from reading the kind of book that sat in her lap.  She had watched us read and  knew how important it was, and therefore, it mattered to her.  For all intents and purposes, she was reading, or at least learning the attitudes and postures that went with the process. And really, for all intents and purposes, those things mattered just as much as anything else.