The Tapes That Came Back To Me

The church basement and the children I taught

Here is the part of my life that ties the knot, so I have to back up and tell it.

Before the tapes, and all through the tapes, I taught reading.

Not in a school. In the basement of the Bethany Methodist church, Thursday evenings, a folding table and a coffee urn and whoever showed up.

It was a literacy class, that is the proper word for it, but we never called it that. We called it Thursday reading. It sounded less like something to be ashamed of.

Grown men came. Grown women. A farmer who had signed loan papers for forty years he could not read. A mother who wanted to read to her own babies and never could.

And children came too, the ones the school had let slip, the ones who needed somebody with time and patience and no bell to end the lesson.

I taught a boy named Dennis to read when he was nine. I taught a girl, years later, named Katie when she was seven, a little thing whose mama worked nights and could not help her.

I will come back to Katie. She matters most to the end of this.

I was never trained to teach. I just knew how I had learned, sound by sound, and I had the patience of a woman with no children of her own to tire her out.

Harold and I were not given children. That was a grief we carried quiet. But I will tell you, those Thursday nights filled a room in me that might have stayed empty.

When I taught Virgil, he was already a grown man, already losing his sight. He came to Thursday reading in his sixties, ashamed, sitting in the back with his hat in his lap.

He told me, so low I had to lean in, that he could not read and never had, and that now his eyes were going too, and he figured he had missed his only chance.

I told him he had not missed anything. I told him we did not teach print to a man losing his sight. We taught Braille. We taught the fingers.

I did not know Braille myself. So I learned it, at sixty-two years old, from a book and a kit the state library sent, so that I could teach it to one stubborn blind veteran.

We worked at it two years. His big rough hands, a drill press operator’s hands, learning to feel six little dots mean a letter.

It was the hardest thing I ever taught and the slowest. There were nights he threw the card down and said he was too old and dumb for it.

I told him I was too old to quit, so he was stuck with me.