My earliest memory of reading was when I was less than a year old. I was sitting in my mom's lap in this old rocking chair from the early '90s, and she pulled out a picture book. Although this is my earliest memory, it had obviously been read to me before, because I started clapping and laughing. I actually remember the big black curvy shapes on the pages, which I would later learn were called words, but I ignored them. I just looked at the pretty pictures of farm animals. :] It all spiralled from there, I think.
My life changed when I was in the first grade. One weekend we were visiting my aunt's stepdaughter Casey, who at that time was cleaning her room. I sat in her bedroom on the floor as she pulled one book after another from under the bed, eventually sorting them into a few stacks. "Take you pick," she said, pointing to the smallest one which I guess consisted of what she was about to throw away. I found one that I liked and read it for the rest of the visit and during the car ride home. Two months later, after laboriously sounding every other word out with my six-year-old lips so that I could actually read it, I finished Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. I started writing after that, mostly thinly-veiled HP knockoffs.
And so it went on in this way for the next few years. I kept reading HP. In the second grade, I won a jump rope for setting a new Accelerated Reader record for my school (400 points, I think it was). The next year I won an award for an essay I wrote about helping the environment. By the fourth grade, my stories weren't quite so crappy.
In the fifth grade something awesome happened. That December my mom had to go to Maryland for a business trip, and we all went along, staying in a D.C. hotel for two nights. One morning we were on the subway, going to the Smithsonian, when we could here a hobo mumbling loudly a few seats behind us.
Living in southern Alabama, I don't normally see a lot of homeless people, aside from the occasional elderly man leaning on the outside wall of the movie theater; so of course my sister and I started giggling as long strings of unintelligible words spilled from his mouth. He was drunk or high or maybe both, and as typical suburban ten-year-olds we found him quite amusing indeed. When I looked behind me to sneak a peek I saw he was staring right at me. He moved up a seat, getting closer.
My dad eyed him cautiously. "Hey," he said, "leave us alone." He motioned for me, and I joined him in the seat closest to the exit. The hobo moved up to the seat directly behind where I had been sitting, mumbling and staring the whole time. "The children...they...like the Chris'mas...don't they..."
I scooted closer to my dad and shared a freaked-out grin with my sister.
At the next stop, the hobo got up, but not before stopping in the aisle to face me. "You look like Mick Jagger," he said, and stepped off the train. That, I think, was the most exciting part of my childhood, even though it was downright creepy.
And that is how I spent the first decade of my life. :]
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