I Am Conferred As Reader

My mother taught me to read using a set of word cards. I can see her holding them up in front of me in the corner of the vicarage dining room in the winter-dark. I see myself as very small. Four, perhaps. Many significant things happened when I was four. The dog arriving, for example. The letters on the cards were large and some were red, some were black. That early evening, I knew I couldn't read, and it felt like a deficiency in me. As I pieced words together letter by letter, I sensed frustration in my mother. With four children under the age of ten, and the whole parish to consider, she was probably feeling the utter endlessness of her tasks. But back then I linked her anxiety to my reading.In this memory, towards the end of the flashcard time, something fell into its place - maybe CAT or ANT or BOY or (to make things story-neat-and-tidy) DOG. I read this word in one shot, understood something about its shape and relationship to sound. I noticed my mother being relieved about…