Telling a Lie - Melody Cryns

Sometimes when I tell people I’m getting my master’s degree in English, I feel as if I’m telling a lie. I mean, who do I think I am in this master’s program, I think, as we all sit around and talk about ambiguity and what isn’t metaphorical in Frederick Douglass’ Slave Narrative? I was the kid with the brilliant and beautiful mother who had learned to read at the age of three and who chewed books up as if they were candy. My memories of my mother all revolve around her sitting at a certain angle in a yellow plastic chair at the kitchen table reading a book, with a bottle of Tab or Diet Pepsi and an ashtray with a cigarette in it – she was around surrounded by a shroud of smoke which, when I was young, I thought made her look magical. When I got older, I would irritatingly say, “Mom, must you smoke all the time?”

I was the kid who at the age of six still could not read a word – or maybe I could read two or three words. It was such an agonizing process for me because of my vision impairment and because I was dyslexic, a sad fact that I really didn’t figure out until later. When I did learn to write my letters, I could almost hold whatever I wrote up to the mirror and read it better that way. It was like I had my own code that no one else could read.

I was burning with stories I wanted to tell and write down and I wanted to read them, but I just couldn’t. Somehow I was blocked, so I had to tell my stories to the kids at school – usually the Kindergarten kids because they were the only ones who would sit and listen, not to all the boys I played with in the neighborhood because they would laugh at me if I tried to tell them a story. Yet we would play imaginary games pretending we were characters in Star Trek or in Dark Shadows.

And so I embraced something I had that my mother and I did share, and this is no lie – music. It all started when the Beatles arrived in our den on February 9, 1964 and my mother became so excited. She yelled to me and my brother and sister who sat on the white shag rug in our pajamas, “Music as we know it will never be the same.” She screamed when those four guys with the funny hair cuts “arrived” on our screen and before it was over, I was caught up in the excitement as we held each other and yelled “She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah!” over and over again.

By the time I was seven, I may not have been able to read well, but I knew every single Beatles song I ever heard by heart – in fact, I knew every single song on the radio or played on our victrola by heart, whether it was the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Mamas and the Papas, the musicals Oliver! And Hair…

And so I bumbled through school barely avoiding the special “mental retard” class at Laguna Honda School in San Francisco. My mother never said I was dumb or anything like that, never. But I felt it. She shared something special with my younger brother Michael who had learned to read by the age of three.

It wasn’t until I discovered phonetics that the floodgates opened. My mother was of the firm belief that phonics was not the way in which to teach children to read, that the old tired and true “sight reading” method was the way she learned to read, so obviously that had to be what worked for everyone.

When my second grade teacher, Mrs. Applan, introduced me to phonics – and this was the latter part of second grade, suddenly it all clicked the way it does when a kid gets that “aha!” moment, like when my son Stevie was five and he spelled out the letters of a “Fred Myers” store sign and learned to read the word, “Fred” and suddenly was reading all the road signs and dragging out all the books – a moment I’ll never forget that resides in my heart forever, when my kids learned to read.

By third grade, I was reading and sounding everything out and by fourth grade, I was near the top of my class in reading, and became an excellent speller as well.

And at the age of 38, two years before my mom passed away, as a single mom with four kids, I sat at my mother’s kitchen table talking about how I was finally getting my bachelor’s degree in English, and she said, “It’s about damned time you studied Shakespeare! What took you so long?”

But I could see a sparkle in her eye and I could tell she was proud.

And that’s no lie.