Never Too Late
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| Adult Literacy |
When we shook hands,
we were strangers. But the hour or so we spent together left a mark on my
memory.
The local adult
literacy program had moved into new lodgings. I needed a feature story for my
hometown paper and decided to drop by and check out a reading class.
There were six
students in the room. None was younger than twenty. An African American man who
had clearly been cashing Social Security checks for a while was part of the
crowd. And he was struggling.
He scratched his
head. He fidgeted. He seemed nervous. I wondered what had finally inspired him
to learn something that was as natural to me as drawing breath.
When the class was
over I asked the man to visit with me for a while. He obliged.
I started with the
obvious question. What took him so long to take up reading?
He told me that when
he grew up during the Great Depression, helping his dad farm the small plot of
land that fed a growing family was more important than school. He finished the
sixth grade and never went back.
He then told me his
mother was at church every time the doors swung open. She took him along. He
ate it up.
He couldn’t read.
He couldn’t decipher
a single word of the book that inspired his sermons — and his life. READ MORE ➤➤
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