“Rindercella told her wicked wistersteps, Oh, how I long to go to the mall and beat the pransome hince!”
An early memory of being read to: my father and I are sitting on a scratchy couch, in the living room of my first home on Cheery Lynn Lane. The room is dim and probably cool, because outside it is Phoenix, Arizona – it is the desert longing to get in. I am three, or four or five years old. My father is reading me the story of Cinderella Backwards, or so he says. Whether this was my idea, or his, or if there is actually a book written this way, I still have no idea. I do know it was a one-time occasion, and that I laughed so much it hurt.
I also remember when reading was difficult, a task, something encrypted that needed deciphering. A sentence like, Nut Little Bear told Mother Bear, “It is cold. See the snow? See the snow, Mother Bear?” was arduous, like setting the table correctly or tying my shoes. I spent full minutes puzzling syllables into words and words into sentences. I remember this did not aggravate my mother. It always delighted her when the symbols on the page blossomed in my mouth, into sense--into a story.
Two houses and several years later, my mother read me Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princes, and The Secret Garden. It was halfway through The Secret Garden that I grew impatient with the pace of oral storytelling. It delighted me, but I wanted to know what happened next. My mother would be reading aloud, but I’d already reached the end of the page. When she put the book down for the night, I’d pick it up again and finish out the chapter--and then the next.
“Claire!” she’d scold me. “Don’t read ahead! Do you want me to read this book to you, or not?”
“I do, I do!” I said. There was nothing better than leaning into her mother musk, feeling her hair whisper over me as the flex and fall of her voice brought each dialect to life. The woman could read aloud like nobody’s business.
“I do!” I assured her until she was satisfied.
But I kept reading ahead anyway.
I grew up on musicals. Because of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance, I insisted people call me Mabel instead of Claire. Because of Roger and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, my “dress-up clothes” consisted of gauze, lace, and my mother’s Miss Leavenworth rhinestone-studded tiara. Because of Les Miserables, which my father flew me out to L.A. to see when I was in second grade, I had read Victor Hugo’s fourteen hundred-page novel by the time I was nine years old. I didn’t understand most of it, but I read it. And I loved it.
In sixth grade, I read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn on my father’s suggestion. To impress him, and because his taste in books was more exciting than what the St. Jerome Elementary School Library had to offer, I read Ben Hur and the Lord of the Rings.
He would ask, the blue in his eyes sparkling, “Do you know Galadriel’s secret yet?”
“Her ring?” I would answer.
It was a hopeful guess. Everything about Galadriel, I thought, was a secret. And he would nod yes, that is correct, and then his voice would undergo a change, a deepening; it would acquire an echo:
See the snow? See the snow, Mother Bear?” was arduous, like setting the table correctly or tying my shoes. I spent full minutes puzzling syllables into words and words into sentences. I remember this did not aggravate my mother. It always delighted her when the symbols on the page blossomed in my mouth, into sense--into a story. 
