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5

By Heart

ON A TABLE at the back of the classroom, I wrote the opening of what would become my first real story. I had just turned eleven, and this classroom was not in Los Angeles, but in Turin, Italy where my father had come to teach during his sabbatical year and where we lived for six months. Three teachers rotated among the fourth- through eighth-graders at Scuola Svizzera. Mrs. Rodoti taught us history, geography, science, and Italian. Miss Lutz taught us arithmetic. Or she did so when she wasn’t crying. Miss Lutz cried often, running from the classroom to sob on the shoulder of Mrs. Lutz—our principal and Miss Lutz’s mother. Miss Grimshaw was our English teacher and her curriculum included asking us to write stories. Her method of instruction was to put a series of phrases on the chalkboard: Rita Remembers, The Night of the Black Cat, The Shut Curtains. We students were each to choose one as title for a story we then had thirty minutes to write.

Stories, my favorite thing. Before I knew how to form letters, I dictated stories to my mother, and she wrote them down on the backs of the mimeographed course lists and research notes my father brought home from UCLA. My mother transcribed my words, and I drew accompanying pictures. Even at four, I found it funny: which were the front sides of these sheets, which the back, my illustrated story or those typed words from my father’s university world far away from our house?

Words-and-pictures in the first grade, too. Mrs. Green printed words in neat lower case letters on large sheets of newsprint: jump, truck, dog. She placed these sheets on the wooden tables at which we children sat, handed out boxes of thick crayons, and told us to read each word silently and then to draw what that word described.

Letters—truck—were lines on classroom paper and on pages in books. Each shape had its own sound, sounds I recited along with everyone else when Mrs. Green held up Ts, Cs, and Ks in front of the class. The shape of words, though, not the sounds of letters, taught me to read on my own before coming to school. I put no effort into this learning. I simply looked, again and again, at the books I loved; listened and noted as my mother read; and soon I knew every word of those stories. Words from Doctor Dan the Bandage Man were also in Pantaloon. “Boy,” “and,” “black,” “dog,” “mother,” “home.” Reading meant words and the forward motion that linked them. Words and forward motion, that’s how stories were told.

Letters were symbols Mrs. Green urged us to soundout; words named the world: boy, black, dog, mother, home; stories strung separate things together: the boy and his black dog ran home to mother. But letters, words, and stories were empty, meant nothing, without my own imagination to bring them to life. When my mother read me stories in books, I, of course, imagined the scenes she described. When I dictated a story, Mama wrote down the words leaving plenty of room for the pictures I’d draw. When Mrs. Green gave us first graders sheets of newsprint marked truck, I paused for a moment, visualized truck, and then drew one. When I read books on my own, I could see—in my mind’s eye, as the phrase accurately has it—the heroine’s red hair and blue dungarees; the sun-filled kitchen with a mom at the sink; a schoolyard, a park, the grandfather’s barn. I could see the new puppy and naughty kitten, as well as the flowers and trees lining neighborhood streets.