My mom had a younger brother named Roy who we would
visit when we went to Colorado. When I was young he and his wife were
young and carefree beautiful people who lived in a cabin in the woods
in the same area as many rich and famous stars, I remember him
showing me Jack Nicholson's cabin and Sally Field's also was in the
neighborhood. I didn't have any idea who those people were but he
liked to show me so I liked to listen. He would take us out hiking
and to look at nature, we learned about lichen and beaver ponds and
about iron pyrite which I think should be called other gold not fools
gold because it is really gold colored. At the time he was working at
laying cable or something like that and since that time he has become
a doctor twice, first as a pediatrician and then when he got bored of
that he became a psychiatrist. When they were living in the cabin he
had a ton of books and toys that adults collect that are not for
playing with. He also had great big piles of awesome magazines like
the Smithsonian, the National Geographic and the Scientific American.
I loved looking through them and seeing all of the pictures and
feeling like this was really smart stuff. We had science books at
home but geared towards children, you know the ones that have silly
experiments that told you how to get an effect but were to dumbed
down and never explained the phenomenon. It really was just a recipe
and process list so demonstrations disguised as experiments. I
wanted to test things that no one knew the answer to and the
Scientific American seemed like where that sort of thing was
happening. I pour over the pictures and really got interested in
science a that point. Roy realized how much I loved those magazines
and several times shipped me huge boxes of his back issues to look
through and read. I would go through the Scientific American mainly
to look at the pictures and read the captions because I had no idea
what the text meant. I 9 or 10 years old which is very young for even
popular science but not too young for popular science pictures. I
read more of the Smithsonian, I loved the pictures and it also had a
lot of historical stories. When I was in the fourth grade I read an
article from the Smithsonian about a guy who was an American fighting
in the French resistance in World War Two. He sabotaged and killed
lots of Nazi's but they ambushed him and his wife at a cafe, she was
mortally wounded and he had to shoot her to keep her from being
captured and tortured. Maybe it was just because I was young but
that story had a big influence on how I thought about people and
rightness and wrongness. It was hard for me to wrap my idea around
the idea that he was killing his wife because he loved her but I
spent a lot of time thinking about it. Maybe it was the first time in
my life that I considered there may be more important things in life
then just being happy and healthy and safe. Roy's gift were
definitely a jump start into my lifelong obsession with knowledge and
learning, and I really appreciated the respect he showed me and my
budding intelligence. He even signed me up to recive the newsletter
from the Human Genome Project, which I had no idea about. Every month
or two I would get a technical paper on the progress of the mapping
of the human DNA it was really nice but way over my head. Not until
I was much older did I realize the significance of the project and I
was nice to know I had been a spectator even if I was a mostly
unaware bystander.
