WEBVTT

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So my little grandson who
lives in Pittsburgh, his dad

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texted me this
morning or last night

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and said, "Do you want some
copies of the pictures?

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Tomorrow's picture day."

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And so I remembered
me having picture day

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in Tucson public schools.

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How we would have to--

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not only anxiety about your very
existence and how you looked,

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but how that existence
would be translated back

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when the pictures came
back two months later.

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And whether you had
ordered enough pictures

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for all the aunties.

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And so this is about that
existential crisis called

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Picture Day and about reading.

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A lot of the poems
in this book are

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about reading and like
a mystical relationship

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to letters.

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The letters themselves.

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"Some Kinds of
Reading in Childhood."

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"Do you remember picture day?

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Then, when the
packets came back--

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in each child's eyes
incomprehensible fire--

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you were ordinary in the
sense of the endangered West.

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Your mother wiped the windshield
with a shredded Kleenex.

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That's why you deserved
your oily treats.

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Inside the school, reading made
sparks, peril, peril, peril,

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and awe.

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Outside the school, acres
of signs in cellophane noon

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where under the school
termites take the tasty

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beams into their
bodies, Incisitermes

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minor, delicate, hairless arms.

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Save the volcanoes for
later, flame folder.

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You did such a good
job with the maps.

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The world has created a
sickness but the sickness

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is being reversed.

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Consonants can be reasoned
with but vowels start fires.

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Now-- breathing twice--

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now here come the
bandit occupiers--

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silence and meaning."

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