Chapter 4
I learned that the city I was living in was called Baltimore, and I knew that the streets had names. I’d heard people call one of the streets ‘Lombard Street’. There were other streets called ‘Granby’ and ‘Watson’. I knew somehow or figured out that the little green and white signs on the poles were the names of the streets.
Over time I figured out that the thing with two lines that formed a corner was for the ‘L’ in Lombard. Starting there I was able to figure out what sounds the other letters meant. Once I knew what sounds the letters represented I could often figure out a word that I didn’t know. I didn’t know then what vowels were, and they gave me a little trouble, because they weren’t always pronounced the same way in different words, and sometimes not at all.
Once I had a basic understanding of the letter sounds, I could figure out that the sign in the grocery store that said A-P-P-L-E spelled ‘apple’, though why there were two ‘P’s was a mystery to me, as was the ‘E’ at the end. It was baffling.
Something else that really gave me trouble for a while were the lowercase letters. I could figure out that capital ‘M’ and lowercase ‘m’ were the same thing, but how is capital ‘R’ the same letter as a small ‘r’? That made no sense to me. Capital ‘S’ is the same as lowercase ‘s’, but how is a capital ‘D’ also a small ‘d’?
And then there were the numbers. At first I thought that must be a different language or something, like the signs that were sometimes in both English and Spanish. Who knew that something like the number ‘7’ should be read as the word ‘seven’? And what about the number ‘1’ and the words ‘W-O-N’ and ‘O-N-E’? It was a long, slow process with lots of trial and error.