reading has always been an escape for me. even as a child, i was hungry for the written word. in elementary school i was put in a class for 'slow' children, because my marks were low. the reading program consisted of shelves of color coded books. readers, they called them. when you'd done enough brown readers you did some assignments and took a little test and if you passed it you got to progress to the red readers. when you'd done your due diligence with them, you 'graduated' to the blue readers, etc. my test and assignment marks weren't good. mostly because i seldom did them. i'd rather be reading. by the time they sent me to the 'special class' i was running out of readers, so i was thrilled to find that there were heaps of new ones i'd never seen before in the 'special' room. we weren't very far into the first class before the teacher exclaimed, "why are you here?" and sent me back to the classroom. it didn't take her more than a few minutes to recognize that this child had no problem reading or comprehending the written word. this did not please the teacher who had 'diagnosed' the problem and didn't want to deal with it, back in grade 2 home room.
in grade 3 we got to go into the library and check out books every Wednesday after school. i thought i'd died and gone to heaven. a whole, huge room of bookshelves that reached the sky, filled with books i could borrow. i never missed a Wednesday library visit. even then, i'd read anything. i took home the Hardy boys, and 'boys' novels and how-to books and romances... anything that caught my interest - and not much didn't. till one day the principal was overseeing after school Wednesday in the library. she was a demon. and she intensely disliked me, from the very start. after fearfully waiting in line to check out my books, the demon sneered, "you can't read that." i didn't know what she meant. i'd been reading things similar to what i was checking out for weeks. why couldn't i read this batch? she pointed off to a shelf, and told me. "you need to get your books from there."
so, dutifully, i went to the shelf she indicated. it was filled with 'easy readers'. mostly pictures, and no tricky words. i remember being confused, thinking, "these are beginner books. they hardly even have a story to them. why would i want to read them?" then i got it. and i got angry. she thought i couldn't read anything more challenging than this fluff. so i went to the absolute lowest reading level and grabbed an armful of the easiest books in the library. when i slapped them on the checkout desk, the demon very smugly checked them through, gave me a prim smile, and said, "that's better." another teacher, who was the usual supervisor, was working alongside her, and gave me a long, thoughtful look as i went through. she knew the books i usually took out, and she knew i read them. and she understood what i was doing right away. from then on, if Ms. Demon was in the library on Wednesdays, i stayed away from her, or if that wasn't possible, i just dropped off the last week's books. this meant enduring a whole week without new books to read, but it was preferable to the humiliation of being refused access to the books i wanted...... to be continued......
