Aly Hawkins

I wrote not long ago about learning to read in a new way—learning to read with attention toward the craft of writing. This has put me recently in mind of learning to read the first time.

I don’t remember it. My parents swear, with the confidence of proud progenitors, that I had just turned three when I sat on Dad’s lap as he perused the newspaper, pointed to a headline and said, “Does this say [whatever the headline said]?” There was, I’ve heard, much amazement and rejoicing.

Apocryphal or not, I feel as though I’ve always known how to read—I don’t remember not knowing how. And from a very early age, words and stories were my dear friends, friends with whom I never not wanted to hang out, even if it meant ignoring actual human friends. Books were ever so much more understandable than people, especially little people like me who were somehow not like me because they didn’t read.

When I started school, they weren’t quite sure what to do with me. I recall sobbing every morning when my mom dropped me off, clinging to the chain-link fence as she walked away, begging her to take me with her, back to my books. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the other kids or my teacher, Mrs. Hollenbeck; it’s that I was so damn bored. “Reading time” meant tracing upper- and lower-case letters on what were, in those days, purple-stained papers called “dittos.” Sometime in November, as Mrs. Hollenbeck passed out dittos to the class so that we could practice drawing the letter “D,” I snapped. I stood up from my desk, put my hands on my chubby hips and announced, “If I have to do another one of these stupid dittos, I’m going to puke.”

And so began an era when I was allowed, during “reading time,” to read.

Which brings me to a story I loved so much back then that I can remember entire passages verbatim. I Googled it the other day, half out of desire to see if I really remember as much as I thought I did and half out of fear that I made the whole thing up. (Then, as now, I had a rather overactive imagination.) To my delight, I found the following video:

In contemplating my enduring affection for Tikki Tikki Tembo, I’ve come to the conclusion that it has little to do with the story itself (which, honestly, is not that interesting) and most everything to do with the sounds of the words—namely, Tikki tikki tembo-no sa rembo-chari bari ruchi-pip peri pembo’s name. Such good rhythm! It’s like a dance that starts in your mouth, snakes its way to your booty and then to your feet. I could say Tikki tikki tembo-no sa rembo-chari bari ruchi-pip peri pembo all darn day (and probably achieve some sort of trance state for my trouble).

I think Tikki Tikki Tembo has stuck with me all these years because my discovery of it marked a dawning pleasure in words for themselves, even nonsense words. As I’ve gotten older, my passion for words has broadened to include the ways they fit together to form lovely, coherent sentences with their own more complex rhythms, and sweeping paragraphs that flow one after the other to tell stories that somehow transcend the sum of their parts. But down deep, I still get a thrill from the littlest building blocks of stories: words.