Mainstream scholarship is divided as to the precise date marking the inception of Septimus Carr’s reading career, but most point to matriculation in his local Montessori academy shortly after Dave Kingman signed a five-year, $1,375,000 contract to play left field for the Chicago Cubs. Kingman’s three-run home run in the 15th inning at Dodger Stadium on May 14, 1978 was his third of the day, and renowned Carr specialist C.J. Effington Cottleswottle from Radcliffe University proved conclusively that Carr encountered his first consonant digraph precisely 16 hours later on the second page of a red Montessori reader that was both phonics-based and decodable. Cottleswottle received the 2011 Florence Howe Award for Feminist Scholarship, literary history category, for the paper, which was backed by substantial evidence including a signed black-and-white matte photograph of Kingman and a Kawasaki JS440 wetbike inscribed,
“Septimus, thanks for coming to the McCormick Center boat show. Yours, Dave Kingman.”
This discovery was augmented by a detailed transcript of the May 21 parent-teacher conference in which Miss Eugenie Temple reported Carr’s completion of the reader, noting that she personally had assuaged Septimus’s consternation over the difficulty of pronouncing the aforementioned consonant digraph. “‘The’ is a tough one the first time you see it,” Temple reportedly told him. “But it is a very common word.”
The existing scholarship is far more conclusive on the identity of Carr’s first completed novel, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Secondhand accounts suggest Carr read that book at the family’s kitchen table during a church group potluck. Guests reported that Septimus deliberately drew attention to the accomplishment by punctuating a nearby adult conversation with celebratory exclamations and fist pumps, only to recede from the room in desultory embarrassment after a church elder peremptorily intoned, “That must be a pretty exciting book.”
Other books are believed to have followed.
