Four Years Old

What do you remember from when you were four years old? Our oldest granddaughter, Molly, is going to be four in less than a week. We celebrated her birthday this last Saturday and it made me start thinking about the fact that four years old is when I really started establishing solid memories. Some are fuzzy but some are still pretty vivid in my mind.

It was a sobering (and exciting) thought that this could be the year of things that will make up Molly’s first memories. Will she remember her birthday party? Will she remember getting a new puppy? Will she remember the Minnie Mouse guitar I gave her?

The possibilities are endless.

When I was four, my brother was seven years old and had been wanting a dog for some time. My uncle had rescued a stray dog, a poodle, from the parking lot of a local establishment he liked to frequent (which may or may not have been a bar). She had been hanging around, begging for scraps, and nobody claimed her. He took her home to my aunt, who immediately bathed her, but little pink bows on her ears, a rhinestone collar around her neck, and painted her claws with toenail polish. They named her “Wee Dog” because she was a little thing.

A few weeks later, Wee Dog had three puppies. I remember being at my Uncle’s house, cuddling these three adorable, wiggly furbabies. Two of them were females and the runt was a male. They had already promised the male to my cousin. My parents allowed my brother to choose from the other two.

It’s odd how you can remember certain details but not others. I don’t remember the drive to or from my uncle’s house but I remember fidgeting with the kitten that was embroidered on my blouse when I quietly snuck over to whisper in my Mom’s ear and ask her if I could have a puppy too. I remember her giving my Dad the look that I now recognize as The Mom Look That Says “See, I told you she would want one too.”

My Uncle, of course, was all too happy for me to have one too because that meant he found homes for them all. They were too young to take home that day so we had to wait a few weeks for them, which I remember seemed to last an eternity.

I remember my Mom calling me to the kitchen window one day for a “surprise” and when I peeked out, I saw a brand new dog house on our back patio that my Dad had brought home for the new pups. There were still no dogs, though, and I remember feeling like the day was never going to come!

It did come, though, and I’ll never forget the day my Aunt and Uncle brought our new babies home. My Dad unlocked the front gate, which as I mentioned in a previous post, he only did very rarely because he didn’t want people ringing the bell. That was a big deal. It meant company was coming.

Someone threw open the front door and I stood there in the front hall and watched my uncle come up the front walk. He was a big man, around six feet tall, with a thick frame and fiery red hair on his balding head. I can still vividly remember him holding his arms out in front of him and in each massive hand was  a tiny little black fur ball. That moment is imprinted so strongly on my brain that forty years later when I gave one of the eulogies at his funeral, I talked about that moment. It will forever be the memory that defined my uncle for me. 

Four years old is also the year I learned how to read. That’s pretty young, considering most kids don’t even start learning reading skills until they’re in kindergarten, and back then they didn’t even start teaching reading until First  Grade. I give full credit to my grandmother, who we called Cokie.

My grandparents lived with my aunt and three cousins, and we spent every Saturday afternoon and evening at their house. I realize now how lucky I was to have my grandparents living close enough to see so often.

On these Saturdays, Cokie would sit in her corner of the sofa and I would snuggle up to her and she would read books to me. Dr. Seuss books were my favorites but she even still had those Dick and Jane books that she would read as well.

Note to millennials: Dick and Jane books were books used to teach kids to read way back in the day. Sentences were like, “See Spot. See Spot run. Run Spot run!” Or this classic: “Dick and Jane are gay. Are you gay like Dick and Jane?”

Back then, gay meant “happy” but in my revisionist history, I like to think that Dick and Jane were actually openly gay and that we were all comfortable with it and that we didn’t cringe when someone asked if were gay like Dick and Jane because it’s no different than asking if we’re American or if we like pizza.

Sometimes, my mind is a much better place to live than real life.

But I digress. My grandmother never missed an opportunity to read to me, even when she wasn’t feeling well. She was already in her sixties when I was born and had already developed severe osteoperosis that left her 5’10” frame shrunken down to about 5’3’ and with a large hump on her back. She suffered from crippling back pain that would leave her bedridden for days and even weeks at a time.

When she would be down with back pain, my parents would warn me not to ask Cokie to read to me because she would never have said no to me and they didn’t want her getting up and having to sit on the sofa with me to read. Of course, they didn’t really ever need to warn me about this, because it would never fail that as soon as we got there, Cokie would be painfully settling herself into her spot on the sofa with Dr. Seuss books waiting. My aunt and parents would beg her to go back to bed, but it was to no avail. She was going to read to me. Period.

And so, one of the memories I have from age four is the day I read the book to her, instead of her reading it to me. We were settling down in our spots on the sofa and she picked up the first book and started reading the first page. My memory of which book it was is fuzzy, but I think it may have been The Cat in the Hat.

“Cokie, I can read that book all by myself!”

She looked at me, surprised. “You can?”

“Yes, I can read it! Watch me!”

I took the book from her hands and read it from cover to cover, only looking up when I was finished. She handed me another book and I read it too. And then another and another.

I remember her smiling with pride at me.

Writing that sentence made me cry. Cokie had a beautiful smile and I still miss her even though she has been gone for twenty-two years now. Amazing how those memories come back to you too.

Later, my mother would say that she thought I had probably memorized the books and was just reciting what I had memorized until I finally attached my memorization of the words to the actual words on the page. She may be right, but Cokie would have none of it. As far as she was concerned, I learned to read at age four, with her, on our Saturday sofa time.

I have to believe that my love of reading and books must have come directly from her, and those first early memories of our Saturday sofa readings. I remember a teacher trying to give me a book to read in the second grade that she thought would be a “nice challenge” and I had to tell her that I already read it in kindergarten. I told Cokie about that, and she just laughed.

“Don’t they know you’re the smartest girl in your class?” she’d ask.

Nothing like a grandmother’s love to inflate your ego to unreasonable proportions!

Just a little side story…years later, I found myself in an education class, working toward my teaching certificate. As it happened, my oldest cousin on my Mom’s side of the family, was already a teacher working on his Masters Degree and was enrolled in the same class.

Our assignment was to write about our first experiences learning how to read. My cousin and I never discussed what we would write but our stories were both extremely similar. He talked about Cokie reading to him all the time from Dr. Seuss and other books from the time he was very small. It was the first time I really thought about the fact that Cokie had done the same thing with all five of her grandchildren. We all turned out to be readers and a couple of us are writers.

What a gift she gave us all!

These things are all on my mind as Molly embarks on her fourth year of life. She is already a thoughtful and sensitive girl. She shows a lot of compassion and love in her heart for a child her age. She recently brought me a book and said, “I need someone to ready this to me. I can’t understand the words by myself.”

I just laughed and told her, “Don’t worry, Baby. You’re going to be reading all those words by yourself before you know it! But I’ll help you for now.” We snuggled together and read about Elmo.

Will she remember this moment? I don’t know.

If she remembers nothing else, I hope she always remembers that she was lucky enough to have three sets of grandparents and even more great-grandparents to love and dote on her in different ways. I hope she remembers the day that her first puppy came home to live. I hope that she remembers the first birthday party she had in her new house. 

Most importantly, though, I hope she remembers how much she is loved.