As easy as ABC... or is it?

I make a lot of cultural faux pas around here.

I manage to avoid big ones, like calling the cell phone of a deaf tenant or asking a wheelchair-bound tenant to "run" over here.

I made one just after Christmas when I asked a very cheerful and friendly caregiver how her Christmas was. She replied (gently) that she doesn't celebrate Christmas. (She wasn't offended and was certainly happy because she knew I meant well, but I forgot "Secular World 101: say "holidays" when talking to a stranger.)

The one I make most often, though, is asking a person to read or spell something.

For some reason, I continually forget that it is not a given that my tenants are literate. I just asked a tenant to read me his social security number over the phone to spare him a trip downstairs. He paused for a moment, then told me it was no big deal; he could just as easily bring me the card. It's not convenient for him; he's paralyzed.

Many people who want to make a call from my office phone will have the number written on a slip of paper, and before I can stop myself, I ask, "What's the number?" They just hand me the paper. I dial the number. My face always flushes; I should know better.

Sometimes someone will enter the office, freaking out about a bill that they've received (for example, from Comcast). They (or in most cases, a loved one or aide) have already paid the bill for the month and are about to have an apoplexy because they think they're being overcharged. Then I'll look at the bill they've brought me, and it's not a bill. It's an ad or promotion for the company.

It isn't their fault. No one took the time or energy to teach them when they were a child. Either there was no school to attend, or their parents hadn't learned, or they have a mental disability. None of that is the tenant's fault.

But what I can't get over is how easily this slips my mind. Is it that I just assume that everyone had the resources to learn to read? Or even if they did, that their teachers were patient and loving enough not to give up on them? And that's not even taking learning disablities into account. Given the age of so many of my clients, it is unsurprising that no one knew a whole lot about how to teach a child with a learning disability when my clients were young. Many of their teachers would have given up-- the child was impossible and nothing could be done.

Is this a fallacy of mine, that I would just assume that most of my clients can read? Is it naive? Does it demonstrate some fundamental lack of understanding of where my clients are coming from?

I learned to read when I was two or three years old. If memory serves correctly, it was a combination of the neon "Dodge" sign that spelled out its letters one-by-one, Sesame Street, and (most crucially) my parents reading to me. I've always thought it was cool, and lucky, that I picked it up early.

But it wasn't just that I had a knack for it; I have parents who know enough about kids, and certainly love us enough, to turn on Sesame Street.

And read to me at night.

And take me to the library and the school book fair.

And sign my summer reading chart each time I read for a twenty-minute period of time.

And let me call the library on Saturdays to listen to the children's book on tape.

And sing the letters "D-O-D-G-E... DODGE!!!" with us every damn time we stopped at the traffic light by the Dodge dealership.

They cared that they had literate children. It would seem only natural that a child who grew up in that environment would figure that everyone else's parents went to those lengths to teach their babies to read. So I don't think it's a bad thing that I came into this job practically forgetting that it is even possible to grow up in a first-world country without learning to read. Naive, yes, but not bad.

So when I think about how much potential has been lost along with the ability to read, I become overwhelmingly sad. I think about all of the books and stories that have changed my life, and how much joy they give me.

Forget that I just read Pride and Prejudice for the millionth time.

Forget the combined thousands of hours I've spent devouring and discussing books with friends, family members, and classmates.

Forget all the summers that I spent on Amelia Bedelia and The Baby Sitters' Club binges.

Forget that someone read me the The Chubby Little Tugboat, Emma's Pet, and Mouse House about a thousand times before I was five years old.

Forgetting all that, I can still hear the "Dodge" song in my head, sung as passionately by my parents as it was by the children in the car seats-- parents who loved their kids so much that they did everything they could to teach us to read.

Realizing how many people missed out on something like that makes my eyes well up with tears.