At 11 o'clock this morning a nice young man stood in my front yard with me. He gave me $500 and I gave him the title to the Jeep, a set of keys, and the repair manual. May the Lord be with you, my son.
At 3 o'clock this afternoon, I stepped out the back door of the lab and turned left, headed for the bathroom. I passed a young man in the hallway, and it took me a moment to realize that he was the same young man I'd seen in my front yard 3 hours earlier.
"I know you!" I said. "You were in my front yard a few hours ago!"
He blushed cutely, looked at the floor, and said, "Yeah. My sister's having a baby."
I'll admit, I briefly considered that this may be a brush with Fate, and this poor flustered boy could possibly be my son-in-law one day. In some countries, driving a girl's Jeep is considered a marriage proposal, you know. And then I remembered that if he had to drive that crap-ass Jeep, he was clearly too impoverished to marry my daughter, the National Merit Scholar.
Oh! Did I forget to mention that Katie is a National Merit Scholar? Not only is she poised to become the first member of our family to graduate high school (But not, oddly, the first to get a college degree. We all do that, eventually.), but she's actually going to do it with her head held high. Huh. The ability to see a task through to the end? She must get that from her father's side of the family. Dogged bullheaded stubbornness? That comes from my side.
Do you know why I'm a Biologist? Because it was the only class I ever got a C in in high school. Imagine, if I'd sucked at English I might be a famous writer today.
We have a funny relationship with education here in Nowhere.
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My dad forced me to take typing in high school. I went kicking and screaming and sat behind that gigantic manual Olympia typewriter every day in grade 9 and got a D. Little did I know I'd spend the rest of my life earing a living AND having fun at the keyboard. I'd like to credit my dad with incredible vision of the upcoming computer age, but he was just thinking I'd be a secretary. Thanks dad.
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