My granddad's poem

I know I mentioned this before, but I have a poem - that was actually published in a real magazine and everything - that my grandad wrote (You can see it here, in .pdf form.

It always makes me smile when my eye falls on it. (I have a printout of it stuck on my filing cabinet right next to my desk. I keep thinking I should print a "good" copy on archival paper and frame it and put it up in my house somewhere, maybe near my piano).

I think part of the reason it makes me happy is that it's another view of my granddad, whom I barely knew (he died when I was 8; I mostly knew him as an old man who wasn't well much of the time).

But I think part of the reason is that I see it, and I see the promise it holds: My granddad, who did so many different jobs (salesman for Steinway, newspaperman, ran a small resort) also had a creative side and could make stuff like that poem. (Okay, maybe it's not a *great* poem but it is also not bad, in my estimation).

And it gives me hope that maybe, if I let myself not be too weighed down by grading or planning future research, I could do something like that.

Now, granted, I will never have a granddaughter who will run across anything I wrote and be charmed by it (I'm not sure that the blog is particularly charming most days, and certainly is not something one can print out and post on a file cabinet). But I like it because it's a little piece of him I still have. (Along with my piano, and along with the Columbia Encyclopedia of Literature that he passed on to me - it was his set, when he was a student at Columbia in the teens or twenties).

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And it makes me think about my family, and about how much has changed in the generations. Both my parents are scientists, I became a scientist. (My brother has a degree in Mathematics but these days uses his second Master's - in Divinity - much more). My dad's dad earned a BA in, I think, English? I don't even know if my dad's mom went to college or not - she did work for a time at Marshall Field's as a clerk but that was in an era when a good high school diploma was enough (or even more than enough). She quit when she married my grandfather.

My mom's parents, neither of them went to college. My grandma left school in 10th grade to marry my grandpa (so she could "get off the farm," as her answer to one of her daughters once went). My grandpa was an accountant in a lumber camp, but I don't think he had any education beyond high school for that - maybe some on the job training, but that was it.

It's interesting to me how much the expectations changed in a generation. And what was it about my mom that made her the first in her family to go to college - and not just complete it, but earn an advanced degree?  And what encouraged my father to go into the sciences - he started off wanting to be an analytical chemist but switched to geohydrology after reading that the average age-at-death for analytical chemists was 45 (I am sure it is much higher now, and those were probably "old" numbers by the time he read them).

It's clear to me why I became a scientist: following my mom around in the garden, having her tell me about bugs and plants and birds. And my dad taking us on trips to National Parks when we were kids. And also, my parents had the attitude of, if they didn't know something, they said, "Well, let's try to figure it out together" (Unlike "How should I know?" which I've heard come out of sit-com parents' mouths, so I figure that must be sometimes a real-world response). I remember my mom going out and buying a book about spiders because my brother and I had questions about them and she felt like she didn't know enough about them to adequately answer.

And you know? Of all the pro-education stuff our parents did, that may have been the subtlest but one of the most important: if you don't know something, don't just shrug and go "meh," go find out. That it's worth knowing, it's worth caring about.  And of course, the library was a HUGE thing.