One member brought along the book that did just that for her. It was a dutch book, dated 1961, and was one of the treasures she brought with her to Australia when she emigrated.
She described that exact memory of when the words actually made sense to her and she knew she could read and her life would not be the same again!
It made me start thinking about my own memories. I can't say that I remember that moment.
I certainly remember when I couldn't read. On the back page of our local newspaper when I was very little was a cartoon strip called "Louie".
"What's Louie doing?" I'd ask my dad pretty well every day, and patiently my dad would explain to me what Louie was doing and why it was funny. "What do the words say Daddy?" I remember pestering him, referring to the words underneath. "No, no, they are just about the paper, they aren't anything to do with Louie" he'd explain to me. I never quite believed him, thinking he was brushing me off and that really there was more to it than he'd say. Of course now I look at it he was right: Printed and published by The Advocate Newspaper.....blah blah.
But that moment of reading myself, I don't remember. I remember sitting in Grade 1 on the mat. We'd learned the alphabet parrot fashion and I was proud that I knew it well. I loved flash cards. The teacher would sit there holding these in her hands as we repeated the words on them. I knew words were powerful, you could whisper them, shout them, they made you cry and they made you laugh. You could sing them and make them rhyme, and sometimes if you picked one and said it over and over it turned into a strange and unrecognisable sound.
And here she was, the teacher, holding one in her hands, an actual word. A word incarnate, sitting there in front of us on a piece of cardboard and we knew what it was. "apple". I knew, I could say it and I knew what it meant. We'd strung five of those letters we'd learned together and something was created. I didn't know what it would do for me, but I loved it!
