The Lucky Idiot

The thing to keep in mind is that I am completely average.  No smarter or more clever than anyone else.  I am only a fair writer, nothing particularly special.

In fact, to be perfectly blunt, I can be kind of an idiot.  The biggest thing that sets me apart is that I am a lucky idiot.  Let me explain.

When I was a child, every summer, my local library would host a reading contest for mothers and their children.  It was the late 70’s when more middle class mothers stayed at home.  The purpose of this contest was to encourage and celebrate reading, the library, and mother/child bonding.  For each book that you read, you would fill out a card that was then attached to a string and hung from the ceiling.  Even now, my mother reads books like most people watch television.  She can finish two or three a week.  She works the crossword puzzle in the newspaper every day.

She taught me two things during those summers: the importance of words, and if you’re going to win, win big.

Our string would snake onto the floor, while the strings of other mothers and children barely reached half-way.  We dominated.  Each year, at the little awards party, we would eat shortbread cookies, drink some sort of red punch, and receive our bookmarks.  I used to treasure those bookmarks.

My mother has one of the best reading voices you will ever be privileged to hear.  It is soothing, low, with a cadence that turns syllables into pure music.  This is not necessarily so when she speaks, but when she reads, it is hypnotic.

Before I could even read, my mother taught me how to play Clue.  She put little colored dots next to the individual characters, so she, my brother, and I could play on rainy Saturday afternoons.  Whenever we watched an historic miniseries on television, we would follow up with trips to the library.  Oh, how I loved the feel of a card catalogue on my fingertips!   

I was obsessed with Peter the Great for months after watching the miniseries.  I devoured all information that I could find about him.  Over dinner, we would discuss the differences between the movie and the real life accounts.  We performed home-style film analysis. 

Before I even started school, for recreation, my mother would sit down with me after dinner and teach me to read.  We used phonics.  I can still remember the illustrations in the book.  Learning to read for me was a fun game—one that I wanted to win and win big.

Dinner at my house was a time to discuss current events.  Dinner table topics ranged from politics to religion to sex.  Nothing was off-limits.   My parents never spoke down to my brother or me.  They indulged every question and answered as well as they could.

We attended a church that believed in delving deeply into the text, analyzing the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin meanings and contexts of single words.  I was taught to view texts as multi-layered, so much more than the two-dimensional black and white of a printed page.  The Bible was, after all, the Living Word.  Naturally, I began carrying over these practices to all books that I read.  

It is no surprised that I majored in English, garnered praise for my writings.

My mother had been cultivating my vocabulary and critical thinking skills the minute I emerged from the womb.

Every time someone comments on how “smart” I am, I have to smirk and shake my head.  Trust me, I'm really not that smart.  I'm only lucky.

There are places in this country where children come home to empty rooms, televisions provide the only voices you hear; books are things they make you read in school but have no relation to the life you are living.  There are no mothers to sit down and read to you for hours, teach you to play complicated board games, or teach you to sound out words on your own. 

I am where I am not because I have above average intelligence but because I had above average parenting.  There are far smarter people in this world being lost to worlds of economic destitution, crime, and the disadvantage of not having anyone who cares.

Sometimes, I look at these tools that I have been given and wonder how I can use them to help those who were not so lucky as to have a mother like mine.