"Teaching children and adults to read, write, and comprehend is not only our essential duty and investment in America's future; it is also an act of love."
– John Corcoran

My Johnny Can't Read

By Anonymous
Dec 15, 2008

2008, WOW, how time flies. July of 2008, we will celebrate our 55th wedding anniversary. On the same day, Johnny will turn 73.

It was the summer of 1952 that this 6’ tall, 185 pound, curly, blonde headed and blue eyed hunk walked in where I was working. I just knew he had to be a football player with those broad shoulders. He kept coming back to see me and when he asked me out, I said “yes” and by the end of September, a mere 3 months, we were going steady.

We were a twosome at all the senior parties. It was my senior year, he had quit in his sophomore year. We met each others families and I got along so well with his family that they were becoming like my own. I had lost my mother just before I met Johnny but my dad and brother really liked him and I was very glad because things were getting serious between us. We were talking marriage and got engaged by Valentines Day.

BUT one evening, before I got my ring, we were home alone when he told me he had something very serious that he had to tell me. He said it would probably change my mind as to marrying him. He began to sob, which he had never done before, nor has he since. I comforted him, as he told me, he could not read nor write. Being 17 years old and very much in love, I said it didn’t matter, that he could learn.

These many years later, I don’t believe there has been a year that I did not wish I could relive that time because as an adult, I’m sure I would have said “you learn to read and write and then we will get married because I do love you very much.”

Most people have no idea what it would mean not being able to read. I am as ashamed as he is and so we work to keep people from knowing. Our two children grew up not knowing and my dad died having no idea.

Have you ever written a note on the bathroom mirror? Do you make out a grocery list and send him to the store? If you’re apart do you write a card or letter telling him where you are and how you are getting along? In your married life, have you had to leave a note and tell him where you have gone and when you will return?

To most people reading and writing is as natural as drinking and eating. They don’t give it a second thought. The next time you start to look up a phone number or address, imagine not being able to read. To get your drivers license you have to take a written test, what would you do if you could not read the questions? Picture yourself applying for a job and they hand you an application, what do you do? Johnny pretends he forgot his glasses and takes the application home for me to do. Honesty is the best policy so you could tell them you cannot read or write but after being turned down so many times, just perhaps you would go back to feigning forgetting your glasses, too.

I have always been thankful that Johnny’s father had a trade and taught his son well. He is an expert painter and wallpaper hanger and can always look at the color of paint rather than read the labels. He can’t read addresses but with the help of landmarks and various other acquired means he finds his way around as well as most highly educated people and sometimes better because he is so observant of an area.

When we go to a restaurant with friends, I pray he will hold the menu right side up and there are usually pictures to indicate direction. Many times he will have whatever I am having or ask for the special of the house but sometimes I go on about how they have his favorite or I may read several aloud as if I’m thinking of what to have myself. I know many people think I am an overbearing wife but I choose that to them knowing that I married a man who can’t read.

Vacations mean trips away from the usual and roadmaps are a way of life so I have become the navigator in our family. If it means a big, strange city with fast decisions to be made then I do the driving as well. Needless to say that I take care of all the bookkeeping as well as tax records. He carries a ‘cheater card’ with him that has 10=ten and such so he can write checks, if the clerk won’t write it for him. Oh yes, he can write his own name and mine and recognize a few words but so few.

One evening a couple from church invited us over for dinner and afterwards they brought out a game that demanded the ability to read. I don’t remember how we made it through the evening, without telling all, but we did. Johnny is an avid card player, as long as it doesn’t require reading so most of our games center around cards. He is very good at sports. He caddied as a very young lad and learned golf that way. He lived by an ice arena and spent many spare hours skating and played semi-pro hockey even after we were married.

Johnny is also mechanically inclined and does most of the work on our cars. He has put together some of the most complicated things. He repairs small and large appliances which I thought would never work again. He has saved us much money by repairing the TV, toaster, dryer and other appliances. He has done much of our plumbing, electrical and other work that continually amazes me.

Well, by now you are probably wondering why he didn’t learn to read and write in all these years. His mother told me that his teachers wanted them to send him to a special school but they would not allow it because her son was not going to a school for dummies. They transferred him and his younger sister to a small, Lutheran school but they still passed him on to the next level. Remember he was tall, good-looking and a charmer. His mother regretted it and needless to say, so did he but better late than never. So over the years there would be great literacy programs and he would enroll but would get frustrated and quit.

Today, he would be diagnosed dyslexic. When he mentions numbers, he will say it is between 10 & 8 or he transposes numbers on a sheet and calls 76 - 67. Would you suppose that his inability to read would make him humble? You would be wrong, it has made him defensive, so he insists on his right to do things his way.

I dream of being married to a man who can read and write but I would not trade my kind, sweet Johnny for anyone else. Johnny would like to spend the rest of his life sending me notes, reading menus, maps, books, playing some of the games he missed. He would like to read to his grandchildren and great grandchildren but he thinks it is too late. Is it?

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