3
SO DELICIOUS was the pleasure of listening to adults read to me that I resisted learning to read for a long time. Mr. Beaker came to my parents’ house a few times a week to read to me and to try to teach me to read. He would run his finger along the lines of type as he read to demonstrate that it was from them that he was taking his words, and I soon began to understand that he was just repeating what was already in the book, that he wasn’t improvising the stories from the pictures, and I began to think that Mr. Beaker wasn’t as smart—as clever—as I had thought. He would point out words to me and have me repeat them, and if a word appeared several times on a page he would have me point to each occurrence of it. But when he asked me to try to read, I would return to the pictures, to my memory of the story as he had read it, and to whatever popped into my head, and I would improvise. I’d try to concentrate on the type, but my eyes and my mind would wander. I used the written words that I could read only as I used the pictures—as prompts for memory, spurs for imagination.
Finally, one day Mr. Beaker asked me to read the fable of the fox and the clam, which he knew was my favorite. “One sunny day the silly fox hopped into his rowboat and set off to see his friend the farmer,” I began.
“I give up,” said Mr. Beaker, and he did. But by that time my mother had grown fond of the stories in the Big Book, and she read to me from it every night when I went to bed. Inevitably, I began to be able to decipher the blocks of print, but when I read, whenever I came to a spot that I didn’t like or a place where something seemed to be missing or where something seemed to be wrong, I would make an improvement, an addition, or a correction. I did this when I read to myself, and I did it when I read aloud for my mother. She became concerned, and she asked Mr. Beaker to listen to me read once more and decide what should be done. He did. When I read the words on the page, my mother and Mr. Beaker smiled. When I added or changed anything, they frowned.
I loved my mother dearly, and I wanted Mr. Beaker’s approval. I wanted to please them, and I was trying to please them. I had gotten the idea, and it had become an unshakable conviction, that the writing in the book was only part of the story, and the thinnest part of it at that. It seemed to me that it was an outline, that it was just supposed to get you going, that the best parts of any of the stories were waiting in the spaces where your mind was free to wander, to decide what the fox’s children were doing and what his house looked like, to make up the stories that were told about the clam.
“Peter,” asked Mr. Beaker, “why did you say that about the fox’s children fighting over the toy lamb?”
“He says that every time,” said my mother.
“Why do you say that, Peter?” Mr. Beaker asked again.
“Because that’s what the children do,” I said.
“Do you think that’s part of the story?” he asked.
I wasn’t quite sure how to interpret this question. Either Mr. Beaker was insulting me or he had begun to lose his marbles. Hadn’t I just read the story to him with the fighting over the toy lamb in it? Didn’t that make it part of the story? If I put it into the story, it was in the story, wasn’t it?
“Yes,” I said, warily.
Mr. Beaker gave me a pat on the head, and he began talking to my mother in whispers.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
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