I Can't Read

When I was a child, I couldn't read, or so I was told. My mother's theory was that I had a mental block because I had received a letter from my dad telling me he had remarried. I could read, but I wouldn't read some things. When I was in the advanced reading group in school I loved reading The Secret Garden. But some books I hated. I would be taken to the shrink and would have to read one of them aloud and say why I hated it. "Because people don't talk that way, it's FAKE!"

Every week on Wednesday afternoons I was taken out of school to see the shrink. Whenever my mother pulled the car over, in pain from gall bladder attacks, I thought I was killing her. The shrink's bills were sent to my father who had nothing. The lawyers fought and sued. So when my dad came to pick me and my sister up for a drive, I was sure he and his new wife and my sister had plans to kill me, push me off a scenic overlook. I easily imagined them all in agreement with this plan.

I had no safety but my wild imagination. I just wrote down my thoughts on scraps of paper for the shrink each week. I would write about how I stole erasers from grade-school pals, and pencils from Woolworth's, and books from school. This makes me smile now, surrounded by pencils and books, my house filled with books, pencils pointing up to the sky from tomato cans on my desk, while I write down my thoughts for my blog.