Here's mine for the "Learning from our elders" theme
A good portion of what I know now has come from a simple question asked over and over again: “Hey Dad, what’re you reading?” From his well worn post on the brightly lit side of the couch he would gladly put down the New Yorker, Harper’s, Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Hawking, nonfiction and fiction alike to answer his precocious prattling son. What those writers had to say was a mere irrelevance to me but what my Dad had to tell meant the world.
I always wanted was to know what was going on inside that distinguished balding head of his. Something about his happy contemplative eyes hidden behind the double-thick panes of his glasses let me know that the thoughts he had were worth much more than a penny. It was my childhood mission to pull every piece of available information out of him, so that I might, one day, share his erudition and maybe even beat him at a round of Jeopardy. He never got bothered by or bored with my questions or impatient with his explanations, even if it did take three hours for his 12 year old to understand the latest theories on the genesis of human civilization. While I should’ve been watching TV or chatting online with my friends I would sit on the arm of the couch posing query after query until my mind was full.
Now that I’m 3,000 miles away I can still imagine him sitting under the lamp on the left side of the couch reading while the rest of the world watches television and shuffles around the internet. I call him weekly, like picking up a trusted and spine-cracked encyclopedia, and I’m never disappointed to find that his entries keep accumulating. He’s smarter than me. I would never want it any other way.
