An Early Memory about Reading

*This is not an update about our life. It's a short essay about an early reading memory I wrote for my Children's Lit class. Double dipping for blog content.*

I remember cinderblock walls. My younger sister and I used to lie down on my bed and play out the stories we listened to on our audiocassettes. 

Sara & Me: ages 5 & 3?

“Cindo-weawah?” Sara would ask. It was a product distributed by Disney. We had acquired a few picture books with accompanying cassette tapes featuring a narrator reading the story aloud. There were portions of the Cinderella tape that were so worn the narrator’s voice went deep and slow for a moment and the tape emitted such a sound that we always held our breath until the voice resumed a normal cadence and we knew it had lived to see another day.

“Sure,” I’d respond as she inserted the cassette.

We settled in next to each other on the bed, with our heads hanging off the long side and our bare feet flat against those cinderblocks.

“When you hear the chime that sounds like this ‘brrriiiinnnggg’,” said the woman’s lovely voice over the speaker, “it’s time to turn the page.”

My suggestion was always the same. “You hold the book and I will be Cinderella.” Sara was an agreeable child and rarely challenged this arrangement. I cocked my head to the side to read along as she turned pages and our feet danced out the storyline on the wall next to our bed.

Her foot was the dog, Bruno, and chased my Lucifer-the-Cat foot across the wall. At the Royal Ball, her right foot, Prince Charming, joined my Cinderella Left Foot, our skinny little legs in contact with each other down to our Underoos. Our feet danced in sync until we heard the “brrriiinnnggg.”

Every now and then dad would come into our room with a bottle of bleach and a washcloth. We did our best on those days to scrub the dirty footprints from the wall, but they were made from cinderblock and weren’t especially clean in the first place.

I think this is the dress I wore on my first day of school.

To this day, when Sara tries on a shoe that is too small, she comments “I look like Cinderella’s ugly Stepsister in this shoe.”