In the tea shop

I come here to work on grey days in part for the community in part for the voyeurism. The peculiar older man who is always here asks me what I am reading currently. He has started an informal book club with some of the women and another man who frequents the shop. At the table next to me a couple chats almost imperceptibly bickering. She is playing a game on her cell phone the entire time they are having tea. Their conversation in friendly, natural but suddenly rises into tension and then disperses. She wants to buy a tea cup like the one in the shop. He thinks they should use what they have rather than buying new stuff. She thinks the problem is the lack of storage. He doesn't like the new storage rack she wants to put in. She thinks his idea would be bad because of the cat. Mundane. But laced with irritability.

She can read, she can read, she's ba-ad

I was sitting in the bathtub yesterday reading the back of the shampoo bottle and my first instinct was to turn it around on the shelf so I wouldn't have to read about my hair type and the amazing nature of my product.
But then I thought, what an amazing thing, the way I can read. The way I absorb the meaning of those combinations of little letters almost instantly. The way I cannot NOT read something in front of me.
Reading....a book, a newspaper, a blog. It might be near to an addiction for me, because I get a better than chocolate or caffeine rush from shutting out the world to a captivating turn of phrase.

I can't really comprehend what it would mean to be illiterate/ preliterate. Would my mind be me with out those symbols attached to every word?

And I wonder if it is analogous to how I never learned to read music. All of the notes are merely dots and bars and I've got the tune in my head but I could not tell you which mark is which sound.
This doesn't stop me from singing in the bathtub, but once the sound bounces off the porcelain it is gone.

I am wondering what I am missing by not knowing how to read.