I'm redoing my TypeLists--specifically consolidating them and cleaning up links. Excuse the mess.
In my real time life, I'm working on the next draft of my literacy narrative, and have come to realize a few things that now require further thought:
1. The drive to strive is still there three generations later, but we are not reaching towards getting at least a high school education to become teachers and escape poverty. Education was a given, though paying for it was up to each of us. All of my grandmother's granddaughters (that would be three of us) have degrees and graduate degrees. One of us is a lawyer, another is a dual-language researcher, and the third is a community college professor. So what? This may merely reflect the rise in the family's income along with the the momentum of the women's movement. In between, my mother was a teacher (with an M.Ed.), and my aunt was a librarian. our mothers each had three children; in my generation only one of us has children. But all three of us are in careers that in some way involve language.
2. Unlike the other contributors who are either scholars of or residents of (or both) of Appalachia and who are thus grounded in the place, my Appalachia is a memory, a passed down story and a dream and intersects with the everyday reality of the place only when I visit. When I first went there and listened to the stories, I imagined that my relatives lived a Laura Ingalls sort of existence, a little house in Jellico, so to speak.Now, like Merlin in T.H. White's The Once and Future King, I feel like I'm moving backwards in time while others may ground their writing in a forward- moving life narrative or research project, I'm reaching back to tell my story of discovering myself from others' past and others' recording of that past, through saved letters, photo albums and oral stories.
3. Education was pushed to a great degree, but my parents never preened about it--I taught myself how to read at four, and when my mother realized, as I read out loud the stained-glass windows in church on Easter Sunday, that I could read, she just more or less took it for granted. From that time through first grade, I was always surprising my parents with what I'd learned. Since they didn't brag or preen, I didn't either, and just taught myself things like how to tie my own shoes because my parents were busy and i was impatient.
(Reading though is something that I need to write about in greater detail because it was singularly the best and most important thing in my life. I was impelled to learn to read.)
My verbal precocity lead my teachers to want to push me ahead two when I was in the primary grades. I wish they had. My best friend was two grades ahead of me. But my mother had been pushed ahead two grades and absolutely hated it. Of course, she was also the daughter of the superintendent of schools in a small town, and I think that the attention that that must have generated might have added to her woe.
But the point I'm trying to make here is that my reading life was wide and varied because my parents were generally liberal and didn't supervise what I read. I wish that they had talked to me a bit more about my forays into the grisly (Catholic Martyrs' Lives) and the gross ("I Am Joe's Kidney" in The Reader's Digest.)
( Reading was such a regular activity in our family that I never realized until I was a teenager that the RD was a subscription and a yearly gift from my aunt's family--I assumed that everyone got it, like a free local paper.
So we could take reading and writing (and, alas, ciphering) for granted.
I also want to spend time writing about those orange-bound biographies that I read in third grade--the women were either wives and mothers of presidents or "the first woman. . ." The vocational influence that this series had on my was that I wanted to be a "first woman who. . . ," and was not picky about what the career would be. Astronaut, President, Underwater Photographer, Airline Pilot. Why not?
3. religion reinforcing literacy--both via Protestant and Catholic strands. More later.
4. My family was so involved in getting and giving educations that the Goins family motto was"whatever you do, don't teach middle school."
5. When I was very little, I never thought that i would be forced to be a stay-at-home wife and mother. I always felt that I would do something(see above)outside the home.
6. Books were given as gifts, always with inscriptions from the giver to the given. Sometimes family friends (like Velma Linford) would give us inscribed copies of books that they had written.
And tomorrow I'll add this to the draft.
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