grandchildren developing dyslexia or looking down on him for having it. Any possible children in my future will look up to my dad just as I did when I was growing up. If they notice and ask, I’ll let them know why their grandfather can’t spell or read things as well as they can, and they’ll understand his dyslexia like I do now. Even though dyslexia impacted my father greatly on an emotional level while growing up, he never let any weakness show through when teaching us, his children, while we grew up. I can remember him always reading to me and helping me learn my ABCs. I wasn’t aware of his dyslexia until I became much older, but even then it was an odd concept for me to grasp fully. You wouldn’t know my dad struggles with dyslexia by looking at him, but every now and then he’ll ask me, my mom, or my siblings how to spell a word. He described his words as getting “pinched and staggered,” and it’s almost like “imagining the letters of the alphabet on top of one another, then stretching back out.” He hates it when he’s corrected on how he writes or types something, and “it sucks, but it kind of helps [us] understand how important is it to understand your vocabulary and your English […] it’s important for [us] to read and understand what [we’re] learning.” He thinks of it not only as a curse, but a gift. It gives him the chance to “keep tabs on how intelligent [we] are by asking [us] how to spell things.” My father didn’t graduate high school, but he never let that stop him. After dropping out, he worked many small laboring jobs. A lot of the machines and tools he used had manuals that showed what to do if something messed up. Eventually, he answered an ad in the newspaper asking for a driller. He “got lucky” and landed the job as a geotechnical and environmental driller. The position required him to operate a life-threatening machine, and most of it was “all hands on learning,” but everything he needed to know about how to become a driller or a driller’s assistant and handle contaminated materials was “in the Hazmat and OSHA books” assigned to him. They were huge and “entailed a lot of reading, so [he] tried to read them because there was a reward for [him]” in the end. He got through that job and made something of himself, but he unfortunately got hurt on the job and had to retire early. We didn’t always have a computer in my home, and my dad wasn’t so fond of it when we first got it. “You guys are so connected because of the Internet, but disconnected from the real world” were the words that came out of his mouth when I asked him about how he felt with the new technology we have today. He doesn’t mind it now, though. It has
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