Suzanne Spitz is long retired from teaching elementary grade students in the Dryden and Ithaca districts. As long as she had a homeroom, she read to her classes for 20-30 minutes each day - even when she became a science teacher. Her time since has been devoted in large part to the Sciencenter, where she has been an active volunteer since its beginning, and to the Friends of the Library Book Sale. She is currently a member of the TCPL Programs and Services Committee.
Memory is a strange phenomenon. I remember nothing about my mother, who died when I was two years old, or about the advent of my stepmother when I was three, but the period between these events - a time I spent with my father's parents in Brookline, Mass. - has remained clearly and in great detail in my mind. That was the year my grandfather started me on the way to becoming the voracious reader and word maven that I am.
By the time I arrived on the scene, Grandpa was ninety percent retired; his time was pretty much his own, and he devoted much of it to me. However, he had well-established routines, which he unfailingly followed, and they shaped my days as well as his. First thing in the morning he woke me with a poem, more often than not, one from Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. Who else remembers "A birdie with a yellow bill, hopped upon my window sill," or "The rain is raining all around, It falls on field and tree," or "In winter I get up at night, And dress by yellow candlelight," or "I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me."?
After a solitary late breakfast, shared for a few minutes with me, he went upstairs to his study - where the books were - and closed the door. At some point – I don't remember how it was determined, but I knew when it was time – I knocked and was invited to come in for my daily word find. In this room, Grandpa had an unabridged dictionary on a stand, and he would lift me up and hold me while I picked out a word for him to pronounce and explain. Sixty years later, I finally found a stand like his for my own dictionary. Whenever I use it, which is almost every day, I see and hear Grandpa.
During the day we might walk together to the neighborhood shops, often to buy the slippery elm sticks and licorice root, which lived in his bedside table for cough and throat tickle relief. Sometimes we rode the streetcar into Boston to his dressmaking shop where, while he attended to business matters, I played joyously with the boxes of buttons, and draped myself dramatically in fabrics and laces. From the shop, we would walk to the nearby Public Gardens where a ride in one of the famous swan boats made me feel like a princess in the storybooks we read. The excursion always ended with an ice-cream cone at Brigham's, where Grandpa declaimed the deliciously long list of flavors. Often, after much thought, my choice was pistachio - not so much for the taste, good though it was, but for the strange and wonderful sound of the word.
My grandparents had a piano in the parlor, and although I don't remember hearing him play any serious music, Grandpa loved to play popular songs. When that happened, I sat beside him on the piano bench and sang along, "reading" from the sheet music. There are two songs that I've never forgotten; I can see the illustrations on the music covers and sing at least the first few lines. One of them was "Roses of Picardy", and the other was "Zwei Hertzen in drei-viertel Takt", which we sang in both German and English - another contribution to my early experience with language. And always, just as the day had started with poems recited, they ended with st0ries read.
Books and words continued to be an important part of my pre-school life after I went back home. I had a Fraulein, who among other things, taught me some of her own language with songs and well-remembered children's German-English picture dictionaries, and I attended a progressive kindergarten where we were encouraged to start reading as soon as we were ready. I was and did!
I know I was a truly privileged child, blessed with good schools, a house full of books, and continuing exposure to music, theatre, and various museums. In all probability, I would have turned out more or less the way I did, even without my grandfather. Without him, though, I would not have been so ready and eager for what came after, and I would have missed out on a cherished experience with a remarkable man – one that has stayed alive for more than seventy years.
Family Reading Partnership
Ithaca, New York
Phone: 607-277-8602
Email: office@familyreading.org
