The Emergence of Words

I don't really remember a time when I couldn't read - only when I couldn't read so well, though that barely lasted past age 3.

I wasn't prodigious on all fronts. I didn't speak until age 2, except for two words: "Popeye" and "cookie."

It was a meager vocabulary, I guess; or perhaps a select one. The problem with learning more words than you personally need is that then people expect things of you, like responses. Why not put that off as long as possible, is possibly an advanced way to think.

So I always got to see Popeye on TV, with cookie(s), and everything else was somebody else's problem, at least for a while.

Of course, concerns of idiocy arose, but there again: someone else's problem.

At any rate, those concerns evaporated when I began to speak, in complete sentences, and apparently in rather an adult style. Then there was a concern about what gives with this kid, or more accurately what doesn't give, like hints of normal development before achievement.

That concern intensified with reading.

I don't remember any kid's books around our house. But we had the Daily News, which my father read every night, and I would look at with him. I remember seeing certain words a lot - Kennedy, Capitol, Yankee, Yogi - and getting the idea of how to write down what you say.

When I turned 3, or actually slightly before, there was a massive flood of words in the house, and my head, when my older brother Eddie started school.

He brought home books. I guess because he looked at them all day he didn't care about them at home. I looked at them every afternoon.

It was fascinating to me that they had stories that stayed the same. The newspaper changed every day. But readers, as they were called, had dozens of stories, with numbers on the pages. With the numbers, you could go back to where you were before, and try to figure out the words and story.

So this was my hobby in our sunny autumn bedroom every day. Somehow the words came readily, so to speak.

One day I had trouble with a word. It looked like it meant a piece of furniture, but that didn't make sense. No way I looked at it made sense.

Outside, my mother was hanging clothes in the yard. I stuck my head out the window. "Hey, Mom?"

She turned from the clothesline and looked at me. "Yes?"

"What does c-o-u-n-t-r-y spell?"

She was silent, with a strange look on her face.

"Why are you asking me that?"

"Because I'm reading this book and it says something about 'a city mouse and a c-o-u-n-t-r-y mouse'."

"It spells 'country'."

"Oh - yeah! A city mouse and a country mouse. That makes sense! Thank you."

In a minute, I had company. My mother came in from her work and asked me to read her the book. I showed her a couple of stories I liked. I got a lot of questions that had more to do with reading than with the stories.

She got a look on her face that seemed both happy and sad. It was a look I would come to know well, yet puzzle about, too.

Goyish Supermarket

Once a week, on Saturdays, we went to a supermarket. I say we because my mother didn't drive, so my father had to go, and they couldn't leave us kids home alone, so we all went.

The supermarket, King Kullen, was a mile away in distance; miles away otherwise. It wasn't fancy. But it had chicken in packaging, not on hooks. It had bread on Passover. It had a parking lot.

They spoke English there, presumably, although no one ever talked to you. At any rate, they didn't speak Yiddish.

You couldn't tell who owned it. They had a symbol of a cartoon character King Kullen who looked like Mr. Monopoly with a crown, but he didn't seem to represent anyone in the place.

We liked this weekly trip because it was a regular thing we could do all together. Our parents didn't particularly want us there in the first place and they did not seem to consider this all that much fun, so we could run around. No one working there knew you, so you could misbehave.

It was also an opportunity to refine your pestering skills. You needed practice against our mother, who was full of surprise in battle.

"Ma, can we get this?": Hershey's syrup.

"No."

"Why not?"

"It makes you drink too much milk." Tough, you see.