I had an imaginary family when I was little--an entire group of tiny, plastic people that closely resembled Weeble-Wobbles but without the wobble. The dad actually looked a lot like my own father, with dark brown hair and a thick mustache in a matching shade of black/brown. The mom was the antithesis of my own mother, however, with long, blonde hair, glistening blue eyes and permanently pink lips. She wore a black and red plaid skirt and was fashioned with a protruding white scarf around her neck, tied in a bow just under her fixed earrings. I had imaginary brothers and sisters, too, but their ages never remained constant, because sometimes I would want to be the older sister to two younger siblings and sometimes I wanted to just be the baby. I would take my little people and the little house they all came with and play for hours on the floor of our living room. I recall using my storybooks to form the "downtown", where the dad would venture off to work each morning. I don't remember the names of my first books and I can't recall reading any of them, but I used them almost every day to stack together and build the office building where my Mr. Little Person worked at his imaginary job. Reading books never brought solace to me as a child and they never transported me to some fantasy world. With my parents screaming at each other in the kitchen when my father would return home unusually early from his random construction jobs, my little plastic family allowed me some kind of control over family life--even if it was all just pretend.

My parents started a country and western band when I was five years old. My mom played bass guitar and my dad played lead guitar, string guitar and sang lead vocals. My dad was still doing construction work, but playing music turned out to offer a pretty reliable income of Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday night gigs at local bars in Cedar Rapids, where we lived. Sometimes my mom could afford a baby sitter, a girl from up the street who was in junior high, but most of the time, I would spend the night at Grandma's house when Mom and Dad played music. Grandma didn't have a lot of kid toys, so on the nights I stayed over, I would help Mom pack my duffle bag full of pajamas, my little people (minus the house) and my big sketch pad and colored markers. Tracy, my favorite baby-doll, would sit beside me in the car on the way over to the other side of town.

Nights at Grandma's house were great because she'd always have some surprise homemade treat waiting for me in the refrigerator and she always wanted to get down on the floor and immerse herself in my toys and playtime activities. We'd play "little people" for a while and then switch to giving Tracy a pretend bath and then she would usually suggest playing school. I would retrieve my big sketch pad and markers from my make-shift suitcase and begin the first lesson for the day with Grandma as my pupil. I remember running out of things to teach pretty early on, so Grandma would take over as "Mrs. Krinkledorf". She would instruct the class (Tracy and me) to sing songs, add and subtract and complete spelling quizzes.

It was during Grandma's spelling tests over the first few years of my introduction to kindergarten and first grade where I realized how challenging and fun it was to hear unfamiliar words, sound them out in my head and try to form the sounds into letters and words. Soon, Grandma's spelling tests prompted me to read the magazines she had laying over the coffee table--just to sound out the words I didn't recognize and see if I could spell them on my own and pronunciate them correctly. Reading became a game to me, as I wanted to see how good I could become and how far I could go without getting something wrong.

Looking back now, I see how invaluable my grandmother's game of "school" was to my ability to verbalize and write words. Making words and learning to write them became a challenge to me and each week during school, I would bring my spelling sheets to Grandma's house and show her all the stars and stickers I earned from my teachers. As a young girl, I may not recall falling to sleep with my mother's sing-song voice reading me a story and I seem to have mentally misplaced the content of the early starter books and stories involved in my introduction to language, but I will always remember my Grandma and the way she strategically centered most of my time at her house on learning activities. I realized from her examples that I could make words fun and that trying to figure out the meaning and spelling of words and learning to put them all together, as in a book, could be lingered over and played with like the pieces of a large puzzle.

Although I learned to enjoy forming words and deciphering the meaning and spelling of words, I never appreciated the plot or characters or setting in a written story and thus, never really enjoyed reading just to "read". To me, the storyline in a book seemed to drag on forever and I never started out very interested in the initial plot or cast of characters to begin with. I remember struggling through reading assignments and letting my eyes wander off the page and rest firmly on a spot on the wall, where I would daydream for twenty minutes before grudgingly returning my focus to my assigned book or packet of stories.

However in 1985, when I was ten, my burning hatred toward reading began to melt. A series of books titled "Sweet Valley High" arrived at our school library and on the cover of the first book was an illustration of two blonde, teenaged girls. They were both pretty and thin and smiling. I remember immediately envying the girls' good looks and with a bitter jealousy festering inside me, I picked up the first three volumes and marched them over the librarian for check-out. My curiosity into the life of "popular" girls fueled my desire to read these books, and while Jessica and Elizabeth, the main characters in the series, remained virtually unscathed during each written episode, I was introduced to Jessica and Elizabeth's friends in the imaginary kingdom of Sweet Valley, California.

These other girls, the ones who were friends of the Wakefield twins, surprisingly went through a lot of the crap that I did. One girl had parents who fought constantly and eventually divorced while another girl was overweight and was teased because of her size. These books and the stories they presented not only drew me in, but helped me learn that I wasn't alone in dealing with bullies or feeling "fat" or getting into an argument with my best friend and feeling really lonely. The Sweet Valley High books became my salvation throughout my elementary and middle school years and the characters somehow taught me to survive and gave me "tips" and advice on just how to go about it.

Sometime during my freshman year of high school, I read my last "Sweet Valley High" book and let my enormous collection take a backseat to other literary genres. Those books are still around my parents' house somewhere and one of these days, I'll uncover them again and take another look at what it felt like to be an unsure and uncomfortable adolescent girl. But in high school, I started making friends and I joined the band and the swim team and realized that just reading the books that were assigned in my classes was going to be trouble enough. I digested many of the canonical novels like glasses of lukewarm water--feeling no connection to the story or the message contained within the text. However, in my junior year of high school, Mr. Campbell helped me discover how I could connect reading to my love of words that began as a young child in my Grandma's kitchen as we played school.

Our class was reading The Crucible and I hated that particular book more than any other text I had ever read. I didn't understand some of the language and I had trouble making sense of the historical plot. But, after we finished the book, Mr. Campbell assigned us to write a critical essay over the novel and although I despised the book itself, I became completely involved in its analysis and in how I was going to express my analysis through my paper. It was another challenge to see how I could formulate, in writing, the deeper themes and issues floating around in the text of the novel. I learned that I could take a book I didn't really like and use my love of writing to come to some kind of treaty with the literature. In writing and analyzing books, I could finally understand them and begin to make them my own.

Ultimately, my road to literacy has been rocky. It began with an inability to remember my first books or experiences with reading and it continued with me figuring out a way to not only understand words and language, but to connect to the words of other people through words of my own. I plan to keep on reading--even after I'm finished with college--because I've learned over the years that there is something to gain in every story. Maybe a book gives me a little insight about myself or maybe I gain a better understanding about a historical time I can never visit in real life. Maybe it's just that crying over a good story makes me feel alive somehow. Maybe I'll just keep reading and someday I'll truly understand the complicated, enveloping and often surprising relationship between the written word and me.