Outside of a Dog Read Online Free

table in the
hall, which is one of my earliest visual memories. I was apparently supposed to be excited by this gratuitous addition to the family, but spent my time in my room twisting coat hangers (I
couldn’t find any way to attach screws or nails to them) making a ‘baby swatter’. My father came up to examine it: ‘Quite a good baby swatter. Shall we put it away?
I’ll read to you, if you want.’
    Connection to a man that you could count on one hundred per cent. If Hortons are – let us admit it squarely – perhaps a little unexciting in their placidity and steadfastness, they
aren’t just out for a good time, they can be counted on. Not in some paltry way, as you might rely on your accountant: Hortons are mature, reasonable and great suppliers of love and
reading.
    But, sadly, you couldn’t just be read to for the rest of your life. Would you like to learn how to read yourself? I wasn’t so sure. Being read to was better, surely? Faster,
more comfortable. I could drift off to sleep lapped by language, hardly aware of the last sentences, though my lips still moved with them. And then, right away, it would be morning. Could anything
be better than that?
    There was certainly something worse. When you learned to read two unpleasant and frustrating things came together. First of all you didn’t get any more stories : no Babar and Queen
Celeste, no little nuns, no Hansel or Gretel, no Dr Dolittle and his gang of animals. Having inhabited this enchanted realm, I was conscious of some going backwards, a regression, a fall. No
stories, no sentences, not even any words. Only the acute sensation of beginning again, puzzling out, the frustration of, say, a native speaker confronted with a foreign tongue.
    I began singing and sounding my ABCs, well before they might be assigned the utilitarian task of being made up from sound to word. The first pleasure was simply in mastering the connections, the
sounds, the sequences. As if I were learning to count, because B follows A as surely and satisfyingly as two follows one. I would follow my mother around the apartment for hours, counting to a
hundred, doing it again, then singing my ABCs, incessantly. It drove her crazy.
    But when I got my first reading books, a process was initiated which was rather frightening, consisting of repeated experiences of puzzlement, frustration, and resolution.
    C – A – T
    Three sounds, in a slow order, then a faster one, as they are elided. What do they mean? Reading begins in anxiety. It is up to me to decipher and decide. Can I do
this?
    A dawning recognition, a smile, a great sense of incipient achievement and relief. I get it! CAT!
    And on to the next word, and to the yet more creative and complex process of assembling those words into sentences. I am in my pyjamas, sitting on the edge of the bed. It’s night-time, the
lamp is on, and the milk and Oreo cookies are on my bedside table. I sit on a lap, cuddle and squirm into some mutual organic rhythm, reach out and tentatively touch each letter, secure in the
warmth and visceral encouragement of being held. My father smells better than my mother: a cigarette, closets and stuffed teddy smell; mom smells sharper, sometimes she almost stings my nose, with
a smell mixed up of metal, marigolds and the wolf enclosure at the zoo.
    We’d sound out the words together. The reiterated moments of triumph as one overcomes those spurts of anxiety and learns to read is forever associated, I suspect, with warmth, proximity
and physical comfort. People like me, who are compulsive lifetime readers, are unconsciously prompted as we turn the page by memories of this Edenic collaboration, in which the book ultimately
replaces the breast or bottle. (Goethe says, ‘in all things we learn only from those we love.’)
    It was particularly hard when, at the same time, often in the same session, my own halting reading of some banal book or other might be interrupted and replaced, before going to