When my mother died, I comforted myself remembering our reading aloud. Growing up in a home of angry outbursts, she’d calm me by opening a book. Her voice became different, softer and somehow magical and shared stories cocooned us in tenderness. As she acted out all the characters in Toad Hall, I snuggled close and we were lost in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind and the Willows. Like Jane and Michael, I was carried away by the whimsy of Mary Poppins. But I knew I’d better scurry when my mother imitated Mary P.’s “Spit, spot, into bed!” How many times did we re-read Milne’s Winnie the Pooh over the years? My mother could dismiss my most severe sulk with “Stop acting like such an Eeyore.”
I understood the world differently because of the poems she read--waning moons made lyric by Vachel Lindsay’s “The Moon’s the North Wind’s cookie” and I became part of history when she woke me with Robert Louis Stevenson’s “ Birdie with a Yellow Bill”, a rhyme her father once used to wake her.
When I was older we voyaged to darker places like Treasure Island where the black spot gave us chills. I envision myself perched on a counter, reading, finishing up Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose because dinner had to be cooked and we were too close to the ending to stop.
I remembered the nurture of my mother’s lilting words and returned to reading aloud when her Alzheimer’s made conversation difficult. The chapters of Winnie the Pooh were too long so I chose illustrated fairy tales. She’d once loved King Lear and seemed pleased with William Hook’s Moss Gown, a North Carolina version with a heroine reminiscent of Cordelia. I carried books to doctors and dentist appointments, or we cuddled in bed together, this time I initiated the literary lullaby, rekindling her remembering with Kristen McDermott’s pop-up William Shakespeare: His Life and Times.
Sometimes I could convince my mother to read to me and her cadences transported me across temporal miles back to my childhood, her words again a balm.
I typed up poems from the silly (Lear’s Owl and the Pussycat) to the sublime (Wordworth’s I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud). These word snacks once carried us through a dismal seven hours in ER. And we’d walk the halls of her dementia unit reciting together and relishing sounds like “runcible spoon”.
One day as I read her poems, my mother’s eyes lit and she said “We have the same….the same…the same…”
Often I responded by filling in her blanks, but that day, I restrained myself. Just as I was accepting that fact that the perception had slipped away, she completed her sentence, “….we both have the same rhythm.”
I shivered, stored this verbal treasure and told her. “Once you read aloud to me, and now, I guess I read aloud like you.”
Her smile meant more than words.