When I was young, my friends and I would go to restaurants to eat. I could read pretty well. But when they gave me the menu to read, I got what the actors called stage fright. My friends would order and I would say, “That sounds good and I will try that also.”
When I was in high school, I had a teacher named Ms. Goldsboor. We were reading, The Pit and the Pendulum, and we went around the room and took turns reading. When my turn came Ms. Goldsboor said to the class, “Now its Neil’s turn to read and we will all have a good laugh.” This made me very hurt and nervous. I could not make out the words on the page.
I got a summer job in Washington DC. My Uncle Bob wrote a letter to Buck, the man who I rented a room from in the basement. He called me upstairs and asked me to read the badly handwritten letter. Of course, I could not read it. Although I tried in front of his whole family, he laughed and made fun of my reading. The family was embarrassed for me and for their own father for making fun of me. When I get excited, my mind does not fire right.
When I caught a ferryboat from Piraeus, Greece to Brindisi, Italy, I discovered my Visa card was missing. I had been assigned to a room and I knew I was excited so I stood outside my room for at least five minutes trying to memorize the four-digit number. I went top side to try to find out how I could call the T-shirt shop in Athens where I left my card. When I went back to find my room, I could not find the number I thought it was.
I once read a sign on Van Ness Avenue and went back the next day and the same sign said a completely different thing because my mind did not acknowledge the right words.
Today I sometimes leave the endings off the words. I sometimes make up a different word that is not on the page and pronounce it differently. This is something I am trying to improve. Reading out loud to a group of people is something that I used to do, but today I refuse because it takes too much out of me. Except in a group setting in Project Read, where the learners understand and the tutors will not make fun of me if I make a mistake. God bless Project Read.
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