The View from a Drawbridge

There’s a streak that runs through my family, and it’s as wide as the Mississippi River. For lack of a better word, I call it “enthusiosity”. It’s curiosity mixed with a great deal of enthusiasm. My mother had it more than anyone else. She’d get interested in a topic such as Australian History, and she’d read every single thing that the library had on the subject. Then she’d move on to something else, like Anasazi basket weaving. She was an amazing woman, my mother. One of those people who could walk into a room and suddenly the lights would seem brighter. She loved to talk to people. She loved to learn.

I love this picture of her. You can see the “enthusiosity” written all over her face.

She would have chewed up college like locusts in a field, but her father, who intended to send her to school, unfortunately died in WWII when she was 17. I often wonder what her life would have been like had he survived.

She never lived to see the internet, and that’s a shame. If she had, we’d have been hard pressed to get her off line each night. She’d have been constantly saying things like, “Oh! Look at this! They’ve found a new species of lobster with HAIR!”

I think of my mother every time I go into a library. I remember her telling me one time that libraries were the most amazing places, because when you went inside, you could go anywhere in the entire universe. To this day, I get butterflies in my stomach whenever I enter a library, not unlike the kind other people would get by going to Disney World for the first time.

If you never lose your “enthusiosity”, if your mind is always open to learning new things, you will have riches beyond measure.