Little Words

The first word I learned to read was “coffee,” which my father pointed out on a billboard and sounded out for me as we rode past in a streetcar when I was four or five years old. After that it became a little ritual for me to point to it and say it out loud every time we passed that billboard on our weekly jaunt downtown on the streetcar. In the next few months I somehow managed to add little words like “the...it...on...if,” and I remember sitting on the porch one sunny afternoon with a newspaper searching out these new words I could now recognize, realizing that I was actually almost ‘reading the newspaper’ as my eyes found these little jewels on the page. I knew for instance that when I came across “the,” the next word (and there always was one) was what “the” was about, so its meaning sort of spilled over to that next word. And a combination like “in the” or “if it” was getting even closer to the real thing, of what it was like to look at a newspaper and read it. I figured I could learn the words I didn’t know, and in that sense they were just like the ones I did know---even if I hadn’t learned them yet.

So in my childish experience these simple words were things I’d come across, wonderful little things that became my way into the world of printed language. Through them I was learning what it was like to see the meaning of words as well as hear it, as adults did all the time.

It was only a few days ago that I realized the possible connection between all this and my recent attempts to incorporate minimal words in a formal graphic structure. No wonder, I said to myself. Maybe there was a kind of imprinting, maybe I got zapped with the language ray through those little words, seventy-five years ago.

Or maybe it’s just another example of ‘what goes around comes around’, which is what imprinting is in a way, like those newborn ducks that follow whomever or whatever they first see moving after they hatch, because it’s supposed to be Mom.

I’m not saying there was anything unusual about my learning to read. We all love words so much, we don’t even know it. What I’m really talking about is one of life’s rewards for growing old (which is itself a huge reward)---the pleasure of unearthing the distant past in the present in such an unexpected and benign way.