Dad's influence, part 2

A few days ago I wrote about how some of Dad's magazines influenced me. Reading was a normal activity in our family. I remember that Mom and Dad were always reading something when they went to bed at night. There were always books around, and they weren't for decoration. I thought it was normal to read for entertainment. I always read something when I went to bed, too. When I was less than 10, but old enough to read, we had a few comic books around. I didn't like reading them more than once, though. The only magazine we got back then was National Geographic and I at least looked at the pictures and read the captions. Often, though, on my way to bed I would stop at the bookcase in the hallway outside my room. The World Book Encyclopedia was on the bottom shelf. I would pick a letter I hadn't looked at for a while, or one of the yearly updates we also got. I would read some entries but most seemed pretty dry to me. I did absorb a lot. How many 8 year olds know who Nikita Kruschev is? I did. How many know what a hologram is? I did, even though I didn't have a source of coherent light with which to view the hologram that came in one of the yearbooks. I knew what the letters in LASER stood for. I guess I was one of the original uber geeks. I didn't know it, though. I was always surprised when one of my friends didn't know something that I thought was common knowledge. I didn't say anything about it, though, because I didn't want to embarrass them about their ignorance.

I remember going into my parents closet once and discovering a treasure trove of National Geographics; issues they had gotten before I could read, even before I was born! I spent hours on the floor of the closet, looking through those magazines. At times I felt overwhelmed, thinking I would never be able to look at them all. Then one day, in the back of the closet, I discovered two more huge stacks. They weren't National Geographics, though. Same size and shape. I think they might have even been yellow. No picture on the front, though, just lots of words. I can't remember the title, but it was something like "Geophysical Review". I know now that it was a technical journal, with papers written by researchers. Those magazines contained cutting edge information on geophysics. I didn't know that then, though. I knew they didn't have many pictures, and the pictures they did have were not very interesting, but I doggedly pushed my way through 10 or 20 issues. I didn't read much. Too many big words. I tried to understand the graphs, and was able to make sense of some of them. (In college, I was astonished to encounter people that couldn't understand simple graphs. Didn't they have anything besides comic books to read when they were kids???) I did read enough to realize that a lot of the articles discussed plate tectonics or continental drift. So I knew what those terms meant long before most people had ever heard them. Why am I not a geophysicist? Well, most of those articles were very boring. That and Dad discouraged us kids from having anything to do with the volatile petroleum industry. I got involved in semiconductor electronics instead. Ha ha! Talk about ups and downs.

Anyway, because of the example that Dad set, I've always had a thirst for knowledge. I've accumulated quite a bit of it, and some of it is even useful sometimes. It's very rare that I look at something and wonder how it works or what processes led to its existence. Thanks to Dad, I understand the world in which I live.