I hid it my whole life. You learn to hide it. You memorize menus at restaurants you go to regularly. You ask your wife to read you things, pretending you left your glasses somewhere. You sign things without reading them and hope for the best.
I worked construction for thirty years and I was good at it. I understood plans by looking at the pictures. I kept everything in my head. My mind for numbers and measurements was reliable enough that no one ever had to know.
Then my wife died. And I was alone in the house with all the papers and the bills and the forms and no one to quietly read them to me anymore.
My daughter found a literacy program. She didn't make a big thing of it. She just told me where it was and said she'd drive me the first time if I wanted.
I was the oldest person in the class by twenty years. My teacher was twenty-six. She never once made me feel like something was wrong with me.
By the end of the year I read my first book. It was a short one — a children's book, really, about a dog. I cried when I finished it and I'm not ashamed to say so.