#120 Learning

My 6 year old starts first grade this week. I’m definitely doing better than when he started kindergarten, but first grade feels like another big transition; big kid school as opposed to an extension of pre-school. I’m not worried about how he’ll do, he’ll be fine, I just hope I will be.

I remember my first few years of elementary school when Eric wasn’t old enough to go yet. He was so jealous. I would walk to school with some of the neighborhood kids and Eric would chase after us. My mother used to have to open the door just wide enough for me to squeeze out and then quickly shut it and put herself between the door and Eric before he could escape.

This desire to go to school presaged a life long love of learning. Eric was kind of dorky, but he didn’t care. It never bothered him to do things by himself or be interested in things that others weren’t. He did well in school and was still enrolled in a second post-graduate degree course when he died.

He was also a true intellectual. I’ll never forget going to browse in a bookstore with him and while I stayed in the fiction section, Eric came away with a book on physics. For Chanukah one year he gave me a subscription to a magazine that each quarter contained scholarly essays, both classical and new on a different topic. I never even knew such a magazine existed, and in truth, it was much more suited to him than to me. I read medical journals to keep up in my field, but then I much prefer a good murder mystery to anything else scientific. Eric read about astronomy and religion and archeology to name just a few topics. He also read fiction, mostly science fiction.

I hope my children inherit his love of learning. It served him well and left him able to converse with pretty much anyone, anywhere on any topic. It made him versatile and better able to come up with unique solutions to problems. I guess we’ll start with first grade and go from there.