I Suppose Essay Research Paper suppose I

I Suppose Essay, Research Paper

suppose I believe that I learned to read like I learned to breathe. That it was something that could not be recalled because it was either so embedded in my experience that I had no memory of it, or it was an involuntary reflex of my brain. My mother tells me that she read to me; that I began to learn to read in Miss Grogan.s Kindergarten class. But I retain no distinct memories of the .Bumper Book. that my mother has kept all these years on the shelf in the closet of my old bedroom. But somewhere along the way, I developed a love of reading. I became a true bibliophile in third grade when we were assigned Charlotte.s Web by E.B. White. I still remember Wilbur.s proclamation of .Stupendous Pig. in Charlotte.s web. Then it was Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, who was the neighborhood child psychologist. Parents would come to her with their concerns. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle came up with ingenious cures for very ordinary problems. The chapters had titles like .The doesn.t like to bathe cure. or .The never wants to eat cure.. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle.s cure for the little girl who never wanted to take a bath was simple. She told the parents to let their child get as dirty as she wanted to. They were to wait until the little girl had about a quarter inch of dirt on her arms and legs, and then, when she was asleep to go into her bedroom and gently push radish seeds into the dirt on her skin. Lightly water her and then wait for the results. The result, of course, was that the little girl started to sprout in a few days and began to grow radishes. Needless to say she decided to take a bath. We also read The Cricket in Times Square and I was so inspired by the friendship between the cricket and the cat that I bought a wicker cricket cage and tried to keep a cricket as a pet. It didn.t work-crickets don.t make good pets and my cricket certainly wasn.t like the cricket in the book.

I was lucky. My parents could afford to buy me books. And I had my mother buy me every book we read in class that year. Even though we read them in class, I still wanted to own them. And like the .Bumper Book., I still have them to this day. I don.t know if those books made me love reading or the books themselves. All I know is, I began to love the physicality of books; having them, holding them, flipping through them. We did go to the library and I did check out several books at a time. I remember the smell of the books, the steel library shelves and I remember my first forays into the adult section. I became a serious book collector with the advent of the Nancy Drew Mysteries. First, I collected them all. Unfortunately, I don.t think I still have these, and like the multitudes of Barbie dolls and clothes that I once owned and I gave away, I really regret not keeping my Nancy Drew collection. I may not be able to correlate any thoughts or assumptions I made about myself after reading Charlotte.s Web or The Cricket in Times Square, but, looking back on it, I think I made some very clear decisions about who I was and was not after reading Nancy Drew. What I loved about Nancy Drew was her mobility. Now this is probably not what comes to mind for most girls when they read Nancy Drew. But when you live in the endlessly mundane suburbs where there is nothing to do or see, then you begin to appreciate Nancy.s adventures. In my neighborhood, you couldn.t go anywhere, not even on a bike. So what impressed me most about Nancy was her spirit of adventure and her willingness to tackle anything that came her way. I remember how she would hop in the shower before a big date or would leave the house in a moment.s notice, hot on the trail of another mystery. She lived her own life and did exciting things. In comparison, my life seemed very boring. Even worse, I began to see myself as a boring person living a boring life. I do not know how much of this belief was in reaction to Nancy.s adventures or just the results of comparing myself and my family to other families on the block. Whatever the true source of this feeling, It is one that has remained with me throughout my life and drives me even today. I refuse to live in the suburbs, anywhere.

Books remained my one and only diversion as I grew older, and in times of trouble, like being grounded, I turned to literature for my escape. In high school it was Trinity by Leon Uris and Studs Lonigan. I remember my 12th grade English teacher remarking on me reading Studs to the rest of the class. I was setting a good example.

Trinity sparked my first political forays. I was very impressed by the plight of the Irish in Northern Ireland and did my first research paper in college on the IRA. Again, the excitement and sense of identity gained from such a struggle appealed to me. I not only came from the suburbs, but I was a boring Wonder-white bread WASP to boot. At some point, I decided that I wanted to study literature. I was an accounting major and I possessed such a secret thrill to be able to take literature classes and excel in them. Although I did not always excel. I could not write about literature, which is what studying literature translated to. I owe my sophomore American Lit professor, Dr. Sorrentino, for showing me the way. He said that the hardest thing to do is to sit in front of a blank piece of paper. .Just write something, anything,. he said. He taught me how to read a poem. .Read it literally,. he said. We were reading Dickinson.s .A narro