Aunt Maggie! Aunt Maggie! Books! Books!

Long before scholarly studies extolled its virtues, my mother believed in and practiced reading to children: any children, all children.
My mother believed in the power of the written word. My father liked to recite bits and pieces of the poetry he had memorized as a child as he stomped up and down the stairs, but it was my mother who would, on a summer’s evening, after the dishes were done, sit at the kitchen table and read to us.
She would read the what she considered classics of children’s literature: The Five Little Peppers; .the wonderful books of social realism by Lois Lenski -Bayou Suzette, Ocean Born Mary, Sand in her Shoes...books about people’s real lives.
I remember once she began to soldier through “Robinson Crusoe” --a boring book if there ever was one-- and began to fall asleep even as she read. When my sister and I told her she was sleeping, she claimed, “I was just resting my eyes.”
When she was growing up in Greenwich Village as the second surviving child and oldest sister, she became the caretaker of her younger sisters and would walk them from their tenement on Thompson Street to the library on St. Luke’s Place to get books.
The famous poet Mariann Moore was a librarian there once, and I like to think that my mother--little Italian immigrant child--spoke to this famous lady as she herded her sisters through the library checkout.
One of my earliest reading memories is of a rainy day when we were taken to the library in the Bronx where we listened to someone read a Ned and Nina book and then we took out our own books. I remember the first time I read a book by myself. I was sitting in the kitchen under the ironing board, reading a story about Peanut the horse aloud. My sister in the living room complained loudly that I was distracting her, but my mother defended me, remarking that I was reading on my own, at last and she should be happy.
My mother believed in the power of the written word. She would have neither understanding nor patience with computer games or those little hand held games that kids have--I can hear her say:”Why spend money on that when you can get a book out of the library?” She would find something like “Turn off the TV Week,” specious since she felt the TV should always be off--if there was a book to read, an outside to be in.
Come Saturday afternoons--when we were still too young to walk the distance by ourselves--my mother would walk with us to the library to get books for the week. Reading was the key to learning and entertainment and enrichment. There was no such thing as “nothing to do” or “boredom” if there was a book to read. Thanks to our mother, reading became integral to our lives.
Of course, when we were growing up she didn’t have much time for discretionary reading--but when she was older she would read--and keep a notebook of the books she read so that she could remember what she had read and not take out the same book inadvertently. She liked fine prose, sensible stories, couldn’t stomach harlequin romance type drivel.
As the children of her sisters grew up and had their own children,she would visit when she could,feeling especially obligated because their mothers, her sisters, had died long before they could be grandmothers.The first thing she would do was to continue the tradition of reading to children. As soon as a baby could sit--or could be propped up into a sitting position--she would read to them, pointing out pictures as she went along.
A famous family story is that my twin second cousins, two little boys,on seeing her arrive for a visit, ran out of the house shrieking, “Aunt Maggie, Aunt Maggie, books, books.”... Don’t ask me;I have no idea why they called her, whose name was Marie, Aunt Maggie..she was neither Aunt nor Maggie. At any rate, of these cousins is now a writer.
After my sister and I had left the nest my mother at 55 or so, learned to drive, took a course and became--yes a reading tutor..which she did wherever my parents lived out their remaining years
There was a time when my parents were living in transition, moving from the ancestral home to a new home, and in the interim were living in an apartment in Greenwich village near my father’s work.
She was recovering from major surgery, and in order to fill the time while she was in this apartment waiting to move she went to a nearby Catholic school (which was there when she was a child) and volunteered her time as a reading tutor. In the brief time she was there she did so well that the wanted to hire her permanently. As I said, my mother believed in the power of the written word.
She read to us; to her relatives; to children in many different schools; and, when I got married and had a child, to our daughter. She wouldn’t understand reading off a computer screen; she couldn’t fathom kindle. She believed in sitting close to a child, holding a good book on her lap, and reading the story, sharing the pictures, sharing an occasional laugh, and loving and instructing all the while. Finally, that is what reading to a child is all about: not just the words, the story, the picture, but that intimacy; that sharing of all of those things mingled with comfort, affection and attention.