It's National Punctuation Day!
Today is National Punctuation Day, and they have made a meatloaf in its honor.
There is a baking contest, but as much as I like punctuation, and meatloaf, and baking, I can’t really look at those photos without being totally grossed out at the non-loaf shape. But that’s just me. Go for the punctuation! Avert your eyes.
I remember being little, learning to read. And I remember how natural it felt to sound out or recognize certain words, how easily reading words came.
My confusion was all about punctuation. In general, I tried my hardest to ignore it. Doing so wasn’t yet a huge problem. My books had maybe one sentence per page, on a page filled with characters and scenery. For example, my scratch n’ sniff Sesame Street book — how the licorice page was scratched and sniffed into oblivion, and how I couldn’t resist trying to identify the stinky smell coming from Oscar’s trashcan.
I’m not saying reading was all magic and intuition for me. Words like “the” and “said” were annoying. I mostly scanned over them too, because I was too shy to ask except very rarely. When “said” finally clicked into place, it was one of those lightbulb moments. I got over my block against words that weren’t spelled like they sounded.
Quotation marks took me the longest to figure out. I knew they appeared around something being said, but not why they were there exactly. I think part of my problem was that sometimes they were straight and sometimes they were curvy. (FYI: Straight quotes are actually the incorrect character. Those are inch marks, not quotation marks.) So part of my little brain inferred that that was a meaningful difference, that these marks were supposed to instruct and describe how something was said. Up through the beginning of first grade (much to my ultimate chagrin) whenever I saw the curly marks around something being said, I thought it was something that was supposed to be said in what I distinctly remember thinking of as “a shaky voice.”
I certainly understood the concept of “voice.” I think we are hardwired for storytelling, hardwired to think and do and perform in “voices.” Childhood stories are better when caretakers “do the voice” and playtime involves saying things in character. Consciously or not, we internalize and mimic the voices we associate with those characters, and they become part of our play, part of our performance and empathy with them.
The summer before first grade my parents split up. My mom and I came home from the grocery store one day and her key didn’t work anymore. That was that. She and I stayed with an old couple for a while, then got our own much smaller apartment in the same building where my dad and older half-brothers still lived.
I heard the shaky voice coming from everyone around me. I had a lot of things to say in the shaky voice. The words weren’t clear. Words didn’t matter, didn’t prove or resolve anything. If they were said in the shaky voice, they meant something different, something you had to feel, something you had to brace yourself for.
I read in the shaky voice because I thought that was how things were usually said. When first grade started, I was put in the reading group for the slow, the stragglers in the class.
I wanted to love school, but I felt anxious because all the other kids had gone to kindergarten together while I had transferred from another school. The other kids had learned subtraction, while at my more inner-city kindergarten, I remember hiding in the teepee, or peering through the radiator at the class bunny, who used to hide in there. The phrase “gotten off on the wrong foot” is so appropriate here. First grade was like a game of jump-rope, and I missed my chance to jump in on the right beat.
My teacher, Mrs. Self, scared me a little. We had gotten off on the wrong foot too. On the first day of class she introduced herself, and as a bonus, gave a little lesson in name prefixes. She was called “missus” Self, she said, because she was married to a man whose last name was Self. And Miss was for unmarried women. “And can anyone tell me what Ms. stands for?” she asked the class. My hand shot up for the first time. None of the other kids knew. I was so excited.
“It’s for when you’re divorced!” I said.
Mrs. Self’s mouth got tight. “It is for an older woman who is not married,” she said.
It was the second time in my life I ever felt my ears burn (the first being when I almost got hit by a car while chasing a ball, and my middle brother told my parents, who seemed mad).
Later in life I realized that of course my teacher had to say that. That was the more correct, if not modernly PC version of the answer. This was a Catholic school. The other kids didn’t know so much about divorce, and the teacher wanted to keep it that way. This was a school where, when the other first grade teacher started to show her pregnancy, had to take leave so that no child would question what was happening.
I remember thinking adults were pretty stupid. All us kids knew the other teacher was going to have a baby. You could tell, we told each other, because of the way she sometimes touched her stomach, like pregnant women do. We believed that swallowing watermelon seeds would grow a watermelon in your belly, but we weren’t totally oblivious. We picked up a lot from subtle clues.
Slowly I made friends in class, mostly because the girl sitting next to me, Sarah Casey, was super nice. She was there when I panicked about subtraction, and taught me how to count on my fingers. Once I asked her for help during a test, and learned about what was considered a test instead of learning time, and about when asking was considered cheating. Numbers didn’t bother me, only vagaries. My mother probably remembers me demanding that she explain the difference between “a couple” and “a few” around this same time. I couldn’t bear any more uncertainty around me.
I was ashamed of being assigned to the “worst” reading group, and of our books that had embarrassingly short sentences and large text. Fortunately it wasn’t very far into the school year when we finally got to the business of actual Reading.
Our dim little group sat in a circle so that each child could read one line out loud, with the teacher helping us along. The book was about a family of squirrels, cute and cartoony. The mama and the baby squirrel were looking for a new home. It wasn’t clear quite why, the seasons changing maybe. As soon as we flipped a page, I silently read the line, then looked at the pictures and waited. Everyone was reading in a shaky voice, only not on purpose. Finally, it was my turn. The squirrels were out on a branch, approaching a door, a knot in a tree. The sentence I had to read was in quotations. The mama squirrel was talking. I read my line as naturally as speaking — without hesitancy, without sounding anything out, and most purposefully, without using the shaky voice.
I read the line only half looking at the page, my eyes on Mrs. Self. She reacted, her whole body communicating “Oh!” and from that day forward, I was in the advanced reading group, always.
I still remember what it said on that page.
“We will go in.”
What a great writing :-)
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