Flashback Friday — Reading is Fundamental

The emails are coming in from Catherine’s teachers in advance of Tuesday’s Back to School night.

Her Honors World Lit teacher let us know the kids had just finished Gilgamesh, and that they liked it more than they had expected. This kind of class is right up my alley and I can’t wait to hear more about it.

Of course, the note got me thinking about Catherine’s journey to Gilgamesh. I may not be the World’s Greatest Mom in a lot of ways, but I did have the reading thing down.

Every day, right from the very first day I brought her home.

Back then the story of choice was “Goodnight Moon.” If you ask nicely I might recite it for you, even though I haven’t flipped the pages to peek at the great green room in many years.

Like me, Catherine has always enjoyed a good book. Unlike me, she has a tendency to reread favorites over and over. And she gives equal attention to fiction and non-fiction.

Back when Harry Potter was her fiction of choice, she could pick any book in the series, open it to any page and sink right into the narrative. The morning after one of the Harry book’s midnight release, I picked it up as soon as our local bookstore opened at 8. Catherine hungrily dove in, and hardly moved from the couch until she reached the back cover that day. A quick bite to eat and she started from the beginning once again.

Basil and Catherine read to the kids at Mead School 13 years ago. This is back when Catherine was still very shy.

When she was small, we had some books in Greek that Basil read to her. The one they are reading in the accompanying photo to her Mead School child care program friends was a duplicate of an oversized version the class had in English. Basil read the Greek and one of the teachers read the English version.

I don’t remember the book very well, but as I showed Catherine the photo before scanning it, she got excited: “Remember?! That was the one with the tiger and the bull.”

If she says so…