Sparks speaks for Family Literacy Month

Sparks reads her story at the Book Lovers Fair Nov. 1 at Odd Fellows Hall.

The following is the unedited text of a talk give by Sparks at the Book Lovers Fair on Nov. 1, initiating Family Literacy Month

By Deborah Sparks

Hmmmm…Write something good about reading.

It’s kind of…well, Frankly, at my age, it’s better to to read and collect books – all the books you can…Why?  Because my generation may be the beginning of the last bastion of folks who actually fondled, smelled, bathed and slept with paper and binding glues.

Reading an actual book book is going to become like…Woodstock has…an event that many generations to come can become nostalgic about, but few actually experienced.

It’s true, I found myself lusting after a kindle.  AND I have books downloaded on my iphone AND I love to scroll through books on Amazon kindle and audible.com.

Lately, I’ve been into magazines.  I’m kinda busy, okay!?

I’ve gotten rid of all my old text books and novels…well, I kept my DeMaurier, The Lovers…and novels that take place in Italy…and a few…It’s hard to get rid of  some of  the books that I’ve had for 35 years.  They become like old friends…that’s a platitude, I know…I can’t  sell or give away my books on ART or the art of making something!  That’s not going to happen in my lifetime!  I’ll use those books as furniture before I sell them.  I know it’s crazy.  Let’s not go there.

I love reading the New Yorker.

I may leave months of New Yorkers strune around my living room so anyone visiting can see I have a commitment of sorts to reading it.

New Yorker readers are kind of a tribe unto their own.  You are either a New Yorker reader or you’re in…well, take my word for it, it’s a triblal thing.

It’s a magazine that says to people, “Yeeeesssss, she reads New Yorker.”

Don’t confuse this with reading the New York Times…that’s a different reading experience…different tribal rights, whole different reader population.  Those that read both…well, they ARE New Yorkers.

It’s the same with Vanity Fair v.s. …what? I don’t know any magazine as satifying as The New Yorker and Vanity Fair…

Art, politics, Language, gossip…what else is there that worth reading?

I would never, never let a People magazine or an US magazine  exist in my house longer than  it took for me to read it.

If you didn’t know this, here it is:  It’s a social contaminate.

But like really good ice cream, ya gotta have it once in awhile!

I know, I’m like you…I admire people who are book readers.  Who join book clubs and buy hardbacks and have kindles with 1500 digital books on them and can converse passionately about a writer’s style.

And, I’m more particularly impressed with those that can share titles and authors in one breath.

And I swoon over hearing obscurities like, “oh yeah, Horton Foote, he did the screenplay for Carson McCulla’s To Kill a Mockingbird.  Oh, and then he wrote..” –

Now listen to this…this is a reader who has reading in the marrow of their bones…”Then he wrote, “The Trip to Bountiful…remember those lines…

“Pretty soon it will be all gone…this house…me…you. But the river will be here.  The Fields.  The woods.  The smell of the Gulf.  That’s what I always took my strength from…We’re part of all this.  We left it, but we can never lose what it has given us.”

Oh…if only…

I’m one of those people who can’t remember names…author’s names and the titles.  Let alone, lines to quote.

I remember what the cover looked like.

“Yeah, I’m looking for the book with the red cover with the small, imperceptible vase on the pedistool in the back ground and the gold filigree border on the right side.  Could ya order that one for me?”  No, I can’t remember the title. Nooo, I can’t remember who wrote it…I think it started with a B…not Bob…Brook…

On Netflix, the great substitute for night time reading, I take out movies based on the cover images.  Oh, I read the little blurbs, but it’s usually the  colors and the images that make me curious.

Does that make me shallow?

Reading has always been a phenomenon to me.

I mean, right now, I can desypher these sequences of little symbols and form them into groupings that actually identify a sound and an image in my head.  That’s pretty darn amazing!!  Kind of a miracle!  Sorta.

When I was a young girl, I didn’t learn to read until fourth grade.  That’s right…THEY said at the time…there was something unnatural about that!

Dig it – I had father who read to us the same books again and again – Treasure Island, Moby Dick, Robinson Cruso, Two Years Before the Mast – mostly adventures, mostly guy books – over and over he recited the same poems to us.  Romantic poems from the Linweave Edition such as the 25 verses of  Vachel Linsay’s “Fat black bucks in a wine barrel room, ragged and reeled and pounded on the table, pounded on the table with the handle of a broom…boom lay, boom lay, boom lay BOOM… we had many of these poems memorized.  Mother hated T.V. so my family entertained themselves and each other with reading out-loud books, the newspaper, the menu, the cereal boxes, the aspirin bottle…anything with words on it had a potential for entertainment.

Reading was taken for granted in my parent’s home, so my not becoming an early reader was HUGE.

I had aN advanced vocabulary (my parents read and talked about things to us) and a mind for details according to the testing I had done on me.

My mother said, that…I… “didn’t miss a trick.”  My brother would say “she was smart enough to set me up!” My sister just said simply –  that I was a rotten kid.

My father said I could “spin a yarn bigger than anyone he’d ever met”  I overheard him say to my mother one time, “I don’t think it’s lying, Hon, I think she’s a good story teller!”  Ya gotta love a Dad like that!

But, for some reason, it took a long time for me to learn how to read. I’d already faced the shame of flunking second grade cause of it – well, cause I couldn’t read latin –  and attending a strict girls school didn’t help my little self esteem.  You…”caught up with the other girls”…or you spent a lot of time in Miss Zarra’s office where she bribed me with things like giving me a giant China doll  if I’d read the 3×5 flashcards she had prepared for me – correctly -every day for a week.

“preh – deye – cat…”  No dear – PREDICATE!”  Now, I ask you, what is a 2nd grader going to do with a word like predicate?

And Miss Zarra never had an explaination of what the words meant…she just wanted me to read them accurately.

It was a different time then…A musty dust left over from Victorian times…Whatever…a bribe might of worked…

The doll didn’t mean much to me. But had she offered to give me… the huge carved mahogany chair she sat in…THAT might have been good incentive.  I didn’t know how to ask or get specific…or negotiate in those early years.

And along with this inability to read came torture… not only for me, but  for my mother, too.

Have ya seen the t.v. series Mad Men?…the wife? Or have an image in your mind of Lillian Hellman?  You’ll get this picture then:

After dinner every night my mother sat smoking a cigerette with an expression of total boredom and mounting rage while I slogged my way in slow motion through Arcadia and the Avangelines. “Sound it out!”  “Go back and Sound it out!”  “No, I’m not going to tell you what that word is…sound it out!”  “Oh, for God’s sake, that’s all for tonight! Go to bed.”

It was sometime, perhaps half way through 4th grade, that I tired of stealing chocolates from my father ‘s underwear drawer.  Father loved butter creams and thought he was hiding them from us.

He thought he was hiding his condoms until one day he came home to find his bedroom filled with pale skin like balloons.  Anyway,

I was poking around in father’s room which was lined with very tall white bookshelves you find built-in,  in some old East Coast houses.  They were full of books and other flat stuff.  He used a ladder he dragged in from the dingy or hallway that connected the house to the barn, if he needed to get at the locked top shelf.  He had built a panel that lifted up and was locked with a round tumbler lock he was given in the Merchant Seaman.  Just in case you were wondering, after using the ladder he would drag it back to the dingy.  The design and order of things around him was important to him after all.

So I’m a kid and I’m poking around in there, and it occurred to me that if I  used the bookshelves as a ladder I could climb up to the top and maybe open that lock and get into his secret stash.  I was thinking – must be something big like a cake in there.

I climbed up.  Hung on with one arm and the tip of my toes.  I turn the tumbler over and over and over until – it opened!

I lifted the panel and inside found only one object – a rather thick book called… Ideal Marriage.

Sitting on father’s bed, I opened it up to see stuff I’d never knew existed.  There were small engraved etchings with tiny print descriptions…”pie-nes”  “va geen a” “cop -poo-la-tee-on”

“fah-la-key-oh”

Wow!  The etchings were incredible!  What the heck?  What the heck is goin’ on in these pictures?

Suddenly, as in all abreactions or epithanies – I had to read!

I WANTED to read!

I REALLY wanted to know what this book ‘s content was.

For the next three or four months, I routinely climbed up the bookshelf, rolled the tumbler, climbed down and sounded out foreign words.  Then I copied down the words I couldn’t figure out

And asked Tommy Zelany, the neigbbor boy who was a teenager, and a catholic, what the words meant.

“Where are you finding this stuff?”  “Do you know what this word means?”  “It’s a dirty word.  Are you sure you want to know what this means?”  “I’ll tell you how to pronounce it, but that’s it!”

He was just curious enough to go along with my curiosity and he educated me to a vocabulary not all eight year olds in my town got to have.  Tommy brushed me off sometimes with “look it up in a dictionary!” I asked my mother how to use a dictionary…she thought this was a hopeful request.

I read and I read and I got better at reading and I got good at looking words up and I learned how to follow my intuition.  My intuition told me that I needed to keep my reading habit which was, as I had said, hard to do at first, and my mouth shut reading about this sorta stuff.  When your natural way is willfulness, it’s really not that difficult.

But what’s intuition for if not to keep one out of trouble with one’s parents?!

By the end of the school year I could read like any other kid my age.

Bottom line, I just needed something to engage my curiosity.

I mean, this was the early 60’s.  Not like today when knowledge about everything is accessible through a few clicks.  This was a time long gone now – when a story like this might be  a kind of cute story to tell at a cocktail party.  Now, it’s a symptom of parental neglect and ignorance.

I learned how to read and to love words, that’s what’s important.

And it not like I  can read anything ya put in front of me.  I have to WANT to read it.  You can see I’ve been that way for a long time.  When I find something I want to read, I’m in heaven…reading takes me away from normal time and space and I ‘m on fire!

And I suppose you are all wondering if I only read  “dirty” books…I read whatever gets my attention and peaks my curiosity.  I have no snobbery around books or plays or poems or detergent boxes or cans of food or menus or road signs, I just know what I like and what I don’t.   I am a snob when it comes to magazines.Sp