A Lesson in Language Aquisition

I am walking back from my first real day of classes to the boarding house on 14th street that I and several others are calling home for this semester. One of the little girls who live just around the corner comes up to me. As she moves her skinny hips back and forth on the edge of the sidewalk she asks, "wanna buy a book? A dollar for one of these books here!

A boy who might be her brother comes running up behind with two books in hand. The first one a carbon copy of "The Little Mermaid" put into literary form, the other a knock off of the Lion King only his name has been changed to Leo. Each of the books is pretty beat up looking.

"I don't want to buy a book from you," I say. "But I will read it out loud to you!" They are instantly thrown off to this reaction of their panhandling. "Are you going to let us inside your house?" the little boy asks. He was caught in there earlier today by one of my housemates looking through the refrigerator.

"No, we're going to read it outside!" I say, reflecting closely upon my mom's recent lectures about the importance of language acquisition as a critical part of a child’s development. The early phases of childhood are a “critical stage of development in a person’s ability to interact with the world”, my mom says, “that is a fact.”

They look weirded out by the idea of being read the thing they were trying to get rid of for a dollar, and then follow me to the little plot of land that separates my building from the next one that we call a garden.

The two who tried to initially sell me the books are interested in the idea of me reading allowed for perhaps thirty seconds before they start climbing on top of the fence and threatening to jump off.

A man clearly strung out on something walks by shaking and mumbling to himself. He passes us, and then turning to make eye contact his pants begin to grow wet from the crotch. "You peein' yurself!" the little girl, not more than seven, says from the fence she is sitting on. I am mortified. "He a crackhead" the little boy says to me, momentarily shaking his head and then jumping off the fence to the other side to run off. He can't be older than eight.

By now a little crowd of neighborhood kids has gathered. A chunky girl with pink and white beads in her hair comes up to me as I light up to see her deep brown glossy eyes. In an foreign stereotypical teacher voice I ask her how old she is and when she puts up four fingers an older girl says, "She lyin! She six."

"Want to read a book?" I say, having giving up on successfully capturing the attention spans of the other without resolving to threats of disciplinary action that I am in all ways incapable and unwilling to go through delivering. The chunky little girl nods her head and lets me take her hand. I sit on the bench and open the book as the others open and close the fence gate and yell at neighbors as they pass by.

At first the chunky little girl is more interested in my cell phone. She picks it up and tries to call the emergency contact in it as she offers me a part of the purple gum she has strung out between her mouth and her fingers. I tell her my cell phone is not to be touched right now and gently put it into my pocket. "Do you know how to read any words?" I ask. She nods her head no. "I'll point to the words on the page, and you can help me say the letters as we go along."

This is something that I have done countless times with my niece back at home. Olivia, who is probably very close in age to this little girl, cuddles up with me and engages brightly with the pictures as I flip through. She points out little ironies in the story line and occasionally corrects me if I fail to impersonate a character in the way that her parents traditionally portray it. She will do this until the book ends, and then pick up another book for me to read, allowing for her to enter an infinite amount of times into a world of imagination that she can interact with again and again, whether it be a place Where The Wild Things Are or a napping house where everyone is sleeping, its a world that she is familiar to and that she can lead.

The chunky girl and I get about two pages into "The Little Mermaid" before she starts to pull the book from out of my arms and shut it to look at the cover. One of her siblings is running around the yard now clapping her hands and singing as she poses by sticking her skinny butt out and bending her knee.

"She pretty" the chunky little girl next to me says, pointing to the Little Mermaid on the front of the book. "She got pretty blue eyes and pretty skin."

"You're pretty" I say to her and open the book back up again. Her brother interrupts to ask if I have any snacks in my house. "How about any juice?" the little girl says in alliance with him. "No, I’m drinking water though" I say, and hand her the overly priced bpa free Nalgene I've been carrying around in my backpack all day.

She chews on the end of the cap and seems distracted by the sidewalk commotion going on around her. People driving by locking and unlocking car doors as they come and go, men with tightly clenched paper bags walking through the parking lot across the street to and from Washington Park.

But then, as her brother runs off to find something else to entertain himself with, something happens. I begin again and after the second page she is still listening. Her bright beautiful eyes getting brighter during the scene with the shark, her thick fingers carefully pointing out Prince Eric as the same person in the pictures of him both standing on the boat and washed up next to Little Mermaid on the beach.

And then, just as suddenly as we began, we are at the end. Out of pages. What I would like to believe to be a brief silence of disappointment passed through her as she turns the back cover around and around in confusion to search for more to read and says "it ain't done."

Because both of us have seen the little mermaid movie, I know that she is right. This little beat up hardback must be part of some Disney series to which we do not have the next chapter.

You don't even get to know what happened in the second part of the book, I think. You probably never will know the rest of the bad lines these Disney characters say on paper because having the second half of the book to finish isn't of much importance to the people responsible for giving you the books you have, perhaps not of importance to anyone in your delicate and beautiful life.

And while you don’t know it, I think, there are children all around the country who are read a book every night before bed. Children who are bought puzzles for their birthdays while you’re out trying to sell used books for a dollar with your siblings. And while you are here watching homeless men pee their pants on the gray sidewalks where you play all day, there are little girls your age in ballet lessons and in art classes who come home to pink bedrooms and pink backpacks and pink nightgowns. And while the school where you and your siblings went to got knocked down to build a parking garage just last year, there are people your age being taught how photosynthesis can grow lima beans into plants which are set up in neat little rows in a window filled with sunlight. They take breaks from this to have neatly packed little lunches with their friends as your brother breaks into my house to see if there is anything good to eat in my refrigerator.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" I ask her as she lays her head in my lap and smiles at me with her crooked teeth. "I dunno" she says. "I wanna make some money." "You have two baby teeth in the front!" I say. She smiles bigger and wiggles them for me with her pointer finger.

Olivia just got her first loose tooth; I remember the emotion that her mom had, and the celebration of my family as we doted about how big she was getting and how so soon she'd be all grown up. She was standing in my parent’s kitchen eating a frozen pomegranate fruit bar. Devona, her mom, picked her up, asked if she wanted to read a story, and before long the two of them ran up the stairs together to read, say family prayers and get tucked in so that she could dream of all the everything that is and will someday hopefully be hers .

"Hey! Chico is calling you!" says one of the older kids to this girl from the other side of the fence. The little girl gets up off my lap, hugs me with a grin full of pure white teeth, opens the rusting and squeaking gate door which defines my yard from the sidewalk and then walks away through the cigarette boxes and broken bottle covered streets which are her playground, her fairyland, her childhood.

"You forgot your books!" I yell. "Keep em" the older girl says. "We ain't reading thems." And with that the two are gone before I even have time to protest. Going inside to pick up my own packet of reading for the night I think about all of this. And in terms of acquisition, I don't know which of us today learned more.