dancing letters

This is one of the assignments from my Imaginative Writing courses. The prompt was: Pretend you have never been told anything about writing or writers. In place of that pretense, try to recall a very early experience you had of reading or hearing language that interested or excited or confused or enlightened you. Maybe it was something you overheard, or something someone else read, or a comic-book, or a sign on a billboard. Now write about that experience, trying to describe what about the text got to you and why.

"I remember my parents using the cryptic language of spelling which floated right over my five year old head. I would look up and try to grasp at the dancing letters falling and moving around me. I didn’t feel slighted or unnerved, just curious. Soon the realization dawned that those were letters forming words and I could not quite piece the puzzle together. “When are we going to pick up the P-U-P-P-Y” my mom would say to my dad. P’s and U’s and Y’s would rush into my tender ears and jumble and mumble themselves in a messy heap at the bottom of my brain. I couldn’t yet comprehend the Morse Code pulsing from my parents lips sending secret messages to each other while I observed with mild curiosity.
Looking out the car window my eyes would search the symbols on the signs whizzing by trying to make sense of this strange phenomenon. At stoplights I would interrogate my mom and demand she interpret every cryptic sign within the radius of my eyes barely able to see over the dash of the car. My mom would read them and I would repeat them hoping to understand that what I was saying and seeing somehow collided together to form one. Words could tickle my eyes with their shapes and curves and also graze my ear with soft and sharp sounds. How could these two universes be the same?
I worked diligently at my mini desk in my hard plastic blue chair. Bent over my paper carefully copying the curve and plank of “t” the images of trees and turtles crawling from the worksheet into my imagination. A turtle was all of a sudden linked to the unsteady and ragged pencil scratch I labored at. Reading became my one and only goal. I couldn’t get enough books and though I couldn’t quite read I shoved them under my parent’s noses and requested them over and over. In an excited frenzy I grabbed my favorite, Cinderella, and proceeded to “read” it to dad. It didn’t matter that I was simply rephrasing the story engraved in my imagination from repetition, to me, I was participating in this great merging of worlds – I was almost reading.
It was late afternoon. My dad walked in the door coming home from work and I ambushed him with hugs and giggles. His heavy winter jacket flaked with snow cooled my warm cheek. I stood on the beige carpeted step picking at the odd wooden wall hanging of two cats with turquoise eyes eerily staring back. Mom came out of the kitchen and casually said, “Hey let’s go to an M-O-V-I-E tonight.” M…O…V…I…E. Those simple letters started to fall into place and I scrunched my brow in concentration. Mooo viii, no. Moooveee. Movie. Success! Connection! I blurted out: “Ooo! Yes! I want to see Pocahontas, can we please see Pocahontas?!?” I remember my mom smiling at my achievement uttering, “Well, guess that’s the end of our secrets!” That was it. I held the key. The locked treasure chest was now mine and as I unlocked it the words cascaded and fell on me with rapture. I was the richest girl in the world."