No matter what the Thinkers said, Mom and Dad always believed I could learn. Mom was a second-grade teacher before I came along. She gave up her twenty-five students to focus all her energy on me, her class of one. The two hours before dinner she called homework time. I never got actual homework from school. They assumed I could not learn anything beyond “Cows go moo! Pigs go oink!” Every afternoon, though, Mom sat next to me at the kitchen table, laying out supplies.
Crayons, pencils, flashcards, puzzles, books.
Then she would wrap a slender arm around my shoulder and steady my fingers to hold a pencil and draw letters. Our hands and arms worked in rhythm, like Olympic ice dancers.
“Keep going. Eyes on the page. You can do it.”
Even when I just sat doing a puzzle, Mom played educational TV shows, science shows, math videos. Aunt Elvi always had her pity look when she saw me watching videos on deci-mals or atoms or volcanoes. “C’mon, Gail, what makes you think she gets any of this?”
Mom stared her flat in the eyeballs. “What makes you think she doesn’t?”
Homework was not just for home. Wherever we went, Mom toted a beach-bag-size purse full of activities so we could play matching games or look at flashcards in waiting rooms, restaurants, or between therapy appointments. In the car, she played audiobooks, and my hungry brain took in the data as eagerly as our bulldog, Hero, gobbled up liver treats.
By age three, I could read, thanks to Sesame Street and Mom’s daily homework sessions. Mom would have been properly proud if she knew. I read signs and labels, newspaper headlines, and every book I could wrap my tiny hands around. My fidgety fingers liked feeling the pages—and tearing them sometimes too. Sad to say, that made Mom put most books on a high shelf after reading them to me. The Amazing Kids’ Animal Encyclopedia was the first book she let me keep all to myself.
I clung to it like a life preserver.
Mom did everything she could to teach me, even though she had no evidence that it was sticking in my head. Sitting right next to her, with no way to communicate, I felt we were a million miles apart.
Define frustration: Being told to do the same thing over and over and not being able to do it even though I really, really want to, even though I understand how to, even though I did it once last week—but getting my body to cooperate was like teaching a hippo to tap dance.
…
Dad, he is like Ernie from Sesame Street. Happy and carefree. To him, I am just right.
“We could be twins,” he jokes whenever our faces smush together for a selfie.
He was a little right. We both have blue eyes ringed with specks of grasshopper green. He calls me Princess Charity or his Super Cherry or Cherry Girl, and he never treats me like I am “special.”
“There’s no such thing as failure, only opportunities to learn.” That’s his annoying attitude even when my body is a jiggly mass of cherry Jell-O. “Don’t give up! Let’s try it a different way.”
More than once, he has proved my messy body could learn. His lessons started when I was two.
According to the “Developmental Milestones Checklist” that Mom laminated and posted on the fridge, I was supposed to be able to throw a ball by age two. When I could not do it, she panicked. Big time.
That’s when Dad became my coach.
Dad was a basketball star in high school. “You were born to play ball, Cherry Girl,” he told me. “You’re gonna be our little hoop master.”
He started off by rolling a Nerf ball. I grabbed it and drooled on it, and Dad waited and waited . . . and waited some more until I finally rolled it back.
After a week of rolling, we moved on to throwing and catching. Starting off with our hands almost touching, he tossed me the ball. I watched it hit my belly and drop to the floor.
“C’mon, Super Cherry!” he cheered.
He placed my hands out in catching position.
“It’s the fourth quarter and we’re down by two. You gonna let ’em win?”
I probably lost about a thousand imaginary games before finally, he threw it, and I . . . caught it! Dad jumped and whooped all over the living room. Hero—he was just a puppy back then—barked in celebration.
When I was six, I was not able to take dance classes with other little girls, so Dad had the improbable idea to teach me ballet. My sixth sense told me he was trying to make up for the fact that I had almost no friends. Believe me when I say he is no dancer. Dad’s dancing is all finger-pointing and shaking his hips like a hula girl.
He was serious about this.
He made foot-shaped cutouts in different colors and taped them to the garage floor so I could see how to stand for each of the five positions. Instead of surfing on Saturday mornings, he inserted a Swan Lake CD into an old boom box and, dressed in his usual Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops, practiced pliés and relevés with me—those are fancy ballet words for bending your knees and standing on your tiptoes.
The music’s racing violins and crashing cymbals made me feel I could leap to the clouds. My jumps flew my feet more than five inches off the ground.
On warm days, when the garage door stood open, we got big smiles from passing neighbors, especially kind Dr. Singh, a gray-haired lady who walked her beagle, Sadie, up and down the block twice a day now that she was retired. “Good for you, young lady. I expect you will be a ballet star soon.”
Coach Dad launched an even bolder plan when I was eight and way too big for my tricycle. “I’m gonna teach you to ride a bike,
