The Most Important Day in My Life
Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore? I was like that ship before my education began, only I had no way of knowing how near the harbor was.
The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me. I am filled with wonder when I consider the immeasurable contrast between the two lives which it connects. It was the third of March, 1887, three months before I was seven years old.
On the afternoon of that exciting day, I guessed vaguely from my mother’s signs and from the hurrying to and fro in the house that something unusual was about to happen, so I went to the door and waited on the steps.
I felt approaching footsteps. I thought it was my mother and stretched out my hand. Someone took it, and then I was caught up and held close in the arms of the person who had come to reveal all things to me, and, more important than that, to love me.
The morning after my teacher came she led me into her room and gave me a doll. When I had played with it a little while, Miss Sullivan slowly spelled into my hand the word “d-o-l-l”. I was at once interested in this finger play and tried to imitate it. When I finally succeeded in making the letters correctly I was filled with childish pleasure and pride. Running downstairs to my mother I held up my hand and made the letters for doll. I did not know that I was spelling a word or even that words existed; I simply made my fingers go in monkey-like imitation. In the days that followed I learned to spell in this uncomprehending way many words, among them, “pin”, “hat”, “cup”, and a few verbs like “sit”, “stand” and “walk”, but my teacher had been with me several weeks before I understood that everything has a name.
One day while I was playing with my new doll, Miss Sullivan gave me my old doll, too. She then spelled “d-o-l-l” and tried to make me understand that “d-o-l-l” applied to both. Earlier in the day, we had a struggle over the two words “m-u-g” is “mug” and “w-a-t-e-r” is “water” , but I persisted in mixing up the two. I became impatient and, seizing the new doll, I dashed it on the floor, breaking it into pieces. I was not sorry after my fit of temper. In the dark, still world, I had no strong sentiment for anything.
My teacher brought me my hat, and I knew we were going out into the warm sunshine. We walked down the path to the well-house. Someone was drawing water, and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still; my whole attention was fixed upon the movements of her finger. Suddenly I seemed to remember something I had forgotten — a thrill of returning thought – and the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that the “w-a-t-e-r” meant that wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul and set it free.
I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house, every object which I touched seemed to be full of life. That was because I saw everything with a strange, new sight that had come to me. On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. I felt my way to the fragments and tried in vain to put them together. Then my eyes were filled with tears, for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt sorry.
I learned a lot of new words that day. It would have been difficult to find a happier child than me when I lay in my small bed that night and thought of the joys that day had brought to me, and for the first time I longed for a new day to come.
