Opening the Door to Reading

 To the best of my recollection, I was simply a middle of the road elementary school student; not an especially prolific reader but I did the work necessary to collect my Bs and Cs. That is, until my 7th grade English teacher, Mr. Gammell became my 8th grade teacher. It was in our second year together that he saw something in me that other teachers had failed to notice. He pulled me aside one day after class and asked about my reading habits. The next day, to my surprise, he handed me a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea saying, “I think you might like this,” and a door swung wide open for me. One Hemingway book followed another and then came Steinbeck and F. Scott Fitzgerald. From then on there was no going back to doing the minimum or taking the easy way out for me.

Hemingway’s themes of our human struggle against nature and perseverance were a perfect match for me growing up in the Midwest but more than that, the simple language and sentence structure of this particular selection allowed me access to the first book that led to a deeper understanding of symbolic themes. I finally understood how to answer the question, “What does it mean?”

Fishing had never been a part of my experience but this small Cuban village on the sea came to life through Hemingway’s description. While it was definitely challenging for me as an adolescent to identify someone as a fisherman who had gone 84 days without a catch, Santiago captured my sympathy. I struggled with him day after day and lamented with him at the slow demise of his beautiful marlin for which he had sacrificed everything. The reward that came in the form of the village’s public adulation of the remaining skeleton was something that took me by surprise. Unbeknownst to middle school me, there could still be glory and honor in what might first appear as a personal defeat.

I spent a good deal of my life recommending the book that started me off until I eventually became aware that it wasn’t about the book at all; it was the connection to Mr. Gammell that actually held the fire of this memory. I can still feel that book in my hands today and hear the crack of the cover as I opened it seeing for the first time his signature emblazoned across the front end paper in black letters "Eldon R. Gammell." He was the first to identify me as a reader and thus begin my love of language. He had no way of knowing that I would grow up to become not only an avid reader but more importantly, a teacher that would spend decades doing exactly what he did for me - lead children to that first book that opens the door to reading and the infinite worlds held within their pages.