Rumination and Reflection

It is strange what can send you to the rose-colored glasses of memory.

This afternoon, I was having a conversation with my mother. Just the normal daily chit-chat. Nothing at all profound or exceptionally remarkable. I was flipping through the day's junk mail, barely paying attention to the conversation, when I noticed something from the World Wildlife Fund. They sent a reference card with all sorts of information about orangutans. It was interesting in an offhand way. What was more interesting was the memories the card triggered.

As a kid, I had a wildlife reference file. I have no idea where it came from. It looks like a green tool box, about a foot long, about 4-6 inches wide, and also 4-6 inches deep. There were several hundred reference cards with everything from bacteria to sharks and elephants. I would spend hours at a time looking over these cards, trying to pronounce the classification names. I would later find out that these names were usually Greek and Latin, and my pronunciations were way off. I don't know what happened to that reference file. I don't think I had even thought about it for about twenty five years.

I do remember that the file originally belonged to my older brother. Much of what I did as a child was because of my brother. Not because I wanted his approval or anything like that. I wanted to be better than him. When my mom was teaching him how to read, I grabbed a kid's dictionary and taught myself. Three years old, and I was puzzling out what the hell the letter "A" was all about. When my brother started school, I wanted to go, too. The idea that someone would help me learn all this new stuff was exciting. My mom once told me that the first week of class was a tough one. My older brother was crying and screaming because he had to go to school. I was crying and screaming because I wasn't able to go.

Things haven't changed much since then. My brother still bristles at the ideas of scholarship and education, while I enjoy opportunites to expand my knowledge.