I remember I was the one to be picked to read aloud, to dramatize and sometimes, to keep my mouth shut since my early school days. Reading began a short time before I started my formal education. Since preschool was inaccessible to the children in the suburbs in those days, I was enrolled in school at age seven, but I had already learned a lot from home. I remember my mother would make us recite the alphabet and put the syllables together and make our first calculations and also twist our ears and pinch our arms for she was not very patient and had three little girls eager to learn. Mom is and will always be my first and most precious reference in this word of letters and now, algorithms. I confess that the twisting of my ears and pinching of my arms have contributed to accelerate my reading. Our classes usually happened in the afternoons in our little room where mother sewed near the window with us around her, playing, quarreling and studying. The sound of her sewing machine and our voices reciting the alphabet is a dear memory to me, sooner she would find a job and we would take care of ourselves very early in life and see one another very little at the end of each day. My aunt also played an important role in my learning process. She worked for a newspaper company and brought home every night the fresh paper of the day with the usual lies. I do not know in your country but, here in Brasil there is a group composed by a few families that monopolize the press and manipulate all information they can to keep the population as alienated as possible, confusion is good for business. Fortunately, now with Internet we have other options to keep ourselves informed, back in those times it was not possible. I remember I would paint all huge capital letters that covered the headlines, the comics, even the photos, the color pencil was enormous in my little hands. Color pencil boxes used to have only six then, red, yellow, green, blue, brown,white and black. Books were inaccessible those days but, newspapers, I had plenty of them to paint and even risk some loud reading to please mom. Mother got a job short time later and when Grandma was not with us, we had to get on very well alone until Mom came back at the end of the day. Mom and aunt were the only women in the street who worked out. It was a very important change in our lives. This is what I remember from the days before my schooling, I was the first of three sisters to go to school. Much time has passed since then to the pile of books in the photograph: graduation, marriage, teaching career, birth of kids... The books reflect that little girl's restlessness with the important issues of that, this and all times and the humanity we all share, but this is a long story ...
