I wasn’t taught how to read until I was about eight or nine years old.

I went to a private Catholic school and it was in second grade, when she realized that none of us knew what she was talking about, a teacher finally caught on to the fact that we hadn’t been taught anything. She’d have us come in an hour early every morning and a group of us got extra lessons so we could catch up. I don’t know if having no real idea of what I’m doing is a boon or not, ultimately. A lot of people who write or read extensively have these mystical stories about having done it at a very young age, I don’t have that sort of luck. I can’t go backwards and make it happen. People thought I could read because of how I talk, I talk how I do because I spent most of my time with old, old men. Most of them immigrants and traditionally uneducated themselves. I talked how they did. Which tends to be decisively.

My mother played radio for me, trying to keep things on classical stations because she thought it would make me smart. She wasn’t aware that at midnight this radio station that she had constantly going switched over to stock projections. My little brain got blasted with numbers most of the time. Everyone thought I knew how to read because there wasn’t a reason not to.

My oldest kid was showing me their homework and I had no idea what I was being shown. I was never taught grammar. That, I think, is obvious to anyone. It’s not clear if it’s because I was never properly taught it the way most people are or if I’m just vaguely dyslexic, but I can’t spell for a damn. I had a teacher in highschool, I had to explain to her, it just doesn’t make sense to me. Sometimes a word I’ve used a thousand times comes out like some phonetic, new creature. I don’t know any tricks of how to make a sentence. I don’t know how to tell whether a vowel is going to be long or short or whatever the hell. I just write how I talk and rely on meticulously editing it down to make sense after the fact. I ask other people to look at it and tell me what I’m doing.

In fifth grade I used to carry around a copy of Twelfth Night. People thought that it was very smart of me. Shakespeare never bothered me, with weird spellings and grammatical differences or whatever, because I already didn’t know how anything was spelled or metered. It just sounded all right out loud. That’s all I need. And what no one realized was I wasn’t carrying around the book to read it. I carried it around because it was the oldest book we had in our house. It had the date it was bought, sometime in 1897, and I thought that was reason enough to like it. I didn’t know anything or anyone that old.

One of my great grandfathers left behind everything in Italy except a suitcase of some clothes and a copy of Dante’s Inferno. He taught himself English by translating it back and forth. Maybe it’s some generational ingrained memory that that was what I was supposed to do to figure out English. I’m always carrying a book.