Stories

Early on I was exposed to being read aloud to and listening.  My mother often read me bedtime stories, and when she didn't I would listen to audio books as I fell asleep.  To this day I still fall asleep easier when there is some kind of noise around me, whether it be music or television or people shuffling around.  From the time I was very small I was always surrounded by noise. Like the children in Tracktown, there was always some kind of noise around me, and it was usually music.  My father worked a graveyard shift so he was always home during the day and always had his stereo blasting music through the house.  I remember memorizing the words to the songs he would play and creating little stories in my mind to act the songs out.  When I think of my first exposure to language this is what sticks out in my memory. I became so used to music being played around me that I always wanted it to be playing.  Many of my early memories have songs associated with them in my mind.  They weren't necessarily playing when the events occurred, I inferred meaning into them from what I thought the songs meant and what the event meant to me. For example, one day I had a friend over from down the street and she started teasing my dog with a graham cracker. My dog jumped up and bit her face and my parents ended up taking him to the pound.  After that, I couldn't listen to John Lennon's 'Jealous Guy' without bursting into tears, and I still think of my dog to this day every time I hear that song.  I think being surrounded by music is really what sparked my interest in reading and writing, as well as music itself.  I loved the stories in songs and would just sit and do nothing for hours taking them in, like being read aloud to for hours a day. I never really had any guidance through my parents in what I was taking away from the music, in fact I don't think they ever really knew how engrossed in it I was, I think they probably assumed I was in my room playing games.  I was able to take what I wanted from the songs and in that sense I was able to exercise creativity and my own kind of story-telling.