I'll be sick.

Abyssey,

ABCD,

Baby City

Bobbipay.

Welcome to strangers from KCW and Radiotopia.

I'm Leah Tao.

And that's my son, Oliver, when he was two, which is when I first produced a version

of the story you'll hear today. The alphabet song was Oliver's favorite song, but he only knew the first

four letters, so he'd just repeated those over and over through the entire song. I figured he'd add more letters as he got older, and he has.

But what if he hadn't? What if the alphabet had remained an impenetrable mystery to him?

That's the subject of today's story, which is also about the alienation of living a lie.

I would not tell anybody. I never trusted anybody. The only person that knew that I couldn't

read was my wife, and I was a college graduate, and I was a teacher at the time.

That's right. John Corcoran graduated from high school and college and went on to

become a high school teacher without knowing how to read or write. As he said, his wife was the only

person who ever knew, and she didn't even really find out until a few years into their marriage.

John says he did try to tell her when they were engaged, but as he tells the story, she was a bit blinded, you know, by young love, and didn't fully take in what he was saying.

My wife tells a story that I didn't tell. I said, I did tell you.

You just weren't listening to sharply.

But really, she didn't find out that I couldn't read until about three years later

when she heard me trying to read a child's book to my daughter.

...