Thursday, April 10, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Goldberg: Dyslexic heart

By Tod Goldberg

I don't remember much anymore about being dyslexic or about the weird classes I took in order to "cure" me of the affliction--those years now seem like an old Polaroid picture shaken loose from a photo album. When I least expect it, though, I see something or hear something or, late at night, when my eyes have grown tired from staring at a computer screen and the letters of the alphabet twist into different shapes, I am reminded of the other kids whose afflictions were worse than mine.

The form of dyslexia I had was severe. Not only was I unable to read or write initially, I was plagued with double vision, a malady that caused me to fall and break things (fingers, wrists and, on one notable occasion, two thumbs) and caused me to suffer from regular bouts of vertigo. None of which, naturally, made me one of the cool kids--not even in my special classes. Even though Natalie "Hooks" (as we all called her) had hooks for hands, she was still able to walk a straight line without tipping over like old timber and so, at least in the pantheon of special education, she was one rung above me.

What reminded me of the long days I spent relearning how to write the alphabet, the time I spent walking on narrow balance beams to gain balance and figuring out that my name was not Dot, was a little boy I saw recently. He was sitting alone at a bus stop trying to read from a school textbook, sounding out the words in staccato bursts. The thing of it was, he wasn't sounding out any words that exist, at least not in English. I listened for a while to see if he was reading Farsi or Arabic but it was clear after a time that the words were indeed English but that he was sounding them out backwards. How odd, I thought, and then I remembered doing the same thing on the porch of my grandparent's house in Walla Walla. It wasn't a sad memory or one that made me feel shame, but it was a memory that made me think about how complex the human brain is and how easy it is to forget that not all the tools we possess are always at the ready.

It was then that I remembered my very first day in "gifted" class, a cruel misnomer if ever there was one. I'd been informed the week before by my mother that I was going to be enrolled in a class to help me with my reading and I remember looking forward to the class in hopes that I'd be as up to speed with my letters as my classmates. What she didn't tell me, and what she couldn't have possibly known, was that the class would be filled with the likes of "Mental" Phil (a boy with mild retardation and a propensity to play with himself), Natalie "Hooks" (the girl with the hooks for hands who also managed to have severe obesity and an odd attraction to kissing my ears) and a veritable menagerie of otherwise retarded and disabled kids, none of whom was dyslexic and thus viewed my particular 7-year-old ailment as something less than their own and fodder for their own reverse discrimination.

It's an odd thing to be picked on for being less disabled than someone else, but on that first day I remember well being teased by Mental Phil for not being able to walk straight and for the fact that I couldn't write my name correctly.

"Here," he said, "look," and then he wrote my name in big, fat capital letters that spread across an entire sheet of that cheap lined paper popular in first-grade classrooms in the late '70s. He then wrote his own name and asked me to do the same. When I did, or at least when I wrote what I thought was his and my own name, he yanked the paper from beneath my hand and went parading around the room with it, showing everyone that I was backwards.

It's funny--I can't remember many of the kids' names, but I can remember their disabilities and their oddities. There was the Indian boy with cerebral palsy who loved peanut butter; the girl with Down's Syndrome who cried every morning; the boy whose house burned down and who suffered terrible burns on his left arm and always smelled liked Chinese food to me; the blond girl with the club foot who was so very pretty and so very sad, and then there was me--unable to read or write or see or walk correctly and unsure why. I never did figure that part out.

I guess that gifted class cured me after all, though I wonder now about those other kids. I suppose if I really wanted to I could find those children, those adults, those tombstones, but I suspect they do not remember me as I remember them and perhaps, above all else, that is a better way to live.