I had several speech impediments as a child. I routinely blurted Ws in lieu of Rs, while Hs often stammered me silent. Complicating matters, sentences spurted from me in a rat-a-tat manner, perhaps due to my sizable sugar intake, with the occasional gaps due to Hs soon bridged by the next thought. It was as if my word spigot was forever twisted to full blast. Friends and family mostly understood the gist of what I meant. Others did not. Teachers and random adults, aka parents of friends, routinely insisted I “speak slowly”—and then, as grown-ups often do with kids, proceeded not to listen.
Speech therapy is recommended for kids in my situation, of course, but it wasn’t available to me until 5th grade, a few months after my family returned to the United States. Over the first months of the 1975-76 school year, I met once and sometimes twice a week with the school-employed speech therapist, a kind and patient young woman who, looking back, must have been fresh out of college. She helped me overcome my issues.
Prior to our return home, as I explained in this long-ago essay, my family lived in Saudi Arabia, where we kids attended an American-styled school. Mrs. Reilly, my teacher for first and fourth grades, singled me out for attention and encouragement, and fed my love of and for the written word. On her recommendations, I read child-friendly tomes that celebrated historical figures as well as such fictional fun as The Three Investigators (though I may have come across the latter on my own). I soon graduated—not at her suggestion, I hasten to add—to adult fare from such authors as Harold Robbins and Don Pendleton, whose The Executioner book series proved riveting to my young mind.
By 4th grade, I was scribbling my own essays and action-packed mysteries into a workbook that I shared with Mrs. Reilly and my parents. What I loved about writing then is what I loved about it in high school and college, when I majored in English with an emphasis on creative writing: It allows me to articulate my thoughts in full. Being able to communicate in a clear and entertaining manner, while weaving in gentle rhythms, rhymes and humorous asides, is—as we sometimes said in the ‘90s—“all that and a bag of chips.”
The Old Grey Cat 
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