| From
the March/April 1997 issue of The Horn Book Magazine
Snapshot
“Look”
By Lois Lowry
 y
oldest child, a daughter, remembers that when she was three, and
we lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while her father was a law
student, she often walked with me to a nearby grocery store. She
tells me that there were letters painted in the street at the corner
where we stopped and waited for the light to change. I have no memory
of them. But she tells me that I pointed the two Os out
to her. I told her they were like eyes, she says, and that because
of those O-eyes she could remember that the word in the
street was look.
Then — a miracle! — one evening she
glanced at the print in a picture book I was reading to her (who
knows what it was? We had so many) and happened upon the same word.
She saw it on the page, looked up at me, saw that I was reading
the print, heard me saying the word look — and made
the magical connection in her mind that propelled her, like a little
tow-headed rocket, into reading.
Thirty-five years later, I live again near that
same street corner. The letters are no longer there, though I believe
my daughter that they once were. I never walk past that place without
thinking how private, powerful, and memorable a moment it is, in
the life of a child, when the shape of letters takes on meaning
and a door of the world opens.
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