I was a very slow reader. I hated being called on to read aloud in first and second grade, maybe as much as I hated playing the publically humiliating math game, Around the World. I wasn’t good at reading, and I didn’t enjoy it. But my mom worked patiently with me at home and I slowly improved until, one day, something happened at school that changed my entire reading life.
In third grade, my teacher, Mrs. Nase, implemented SSR – Sustained Silent Reading. We would pull out books we had chosen ourselves, sit quietly at our desks, and read for half an hour. I was struggling through Sarah, Plain and Tall, when an office messenger came with a note for Mrs. Nase.
Every head rose when the girl entered the room. Our eyes tracked her as she crossed to Mrs. Nase’s desk, delivered her note, and walked back to the door to disappear from our lives, an utter mystery. Would Mrs. Nase tell us what it was about?
“Really good readers,” Mrs. Nase said casually instead, “don’t get distracted by things like people coming in and out of a room. They don’t even notice it.”
I don’t know about anyone else, but my competitive, people-pleasing head went right back down and my eyes glued themselves to the page I’d been reading. It had never occurred to me that getting distracted from reading was a failing, but now I knew. From that moment on, I vowed, I would be a really good reader.
And so it was. I refused to look up when someone made noise during SSR, and after a while, Mrs. Nase’s comment proved itself true; I stopped noticing distractions altogether, and I became an excellent reader.
Reading was soon my favorite activity. I read in my free time at home. I read after bedtime, hunched under the covers with a flashlight. So when I learned about blindness from my favorite TV show, Little House on the Prairie, and how Mary Ingalls had, to my understanding, become blind because she read too much, I grew concerned. I worried about reading so much that I would go blind, and I worried about never being able to read again when that happened.
But God can take care of even irrational fears. He certainly took care of mine, that same school year, in a surprisingly simple way. The memory of it has stuck with me my whole life, so I decided to write a poem about it.
Priorities
When I was little,
we watched Little House on the Prairie,
and I thought that’s how blindness happens:
First, you read too much
(by lamplight);
you start rubbing your eyes.
Next, you need glasses.
Then you go blind.
I liked to read –
sometimes by flashlight.
Would I go blind?
I was afraid to ask.
I was afraid to know.
I was afraid of reading –
and of never reading again.
But then we learned about Helen Keller at school.
Our teacher invited a woman who taught blind children to read.
She brought a Braille book and told us about the dots –
she told us we could read with our fingers.
I ran my fingers across the page,
felt the first pull of a foreign language.
And then—epiphany!
If I became blind, I could learn Braille.
I could still read books.
I never worried about blindness again.
Rachel Lulich is a writer, freelance editor, and Air Force veteran. She has been published in GateWorld, Clarinet News, Short and Sweet: A Different Beat, The Upper Room, and Everyday Fiction. Lulich has a Master’s Degree in Book Publishing and has edited a number of award-winning novels and memoirs. She has independently released a science fiction novel, Random Walk, and her first play, The Confessing Church, is being published in January 2021 by WordCrafts Theatrical Press. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Lulich now makes her home in Indiana.
