Eccentricities

I have a strange family. Not, it's even stranger than you may realize, and not just for our 19th century pastoral tendencies. All of us are information junkies. We all of us collect knowledge as greedily as a rich man collects blue-chip stocks. It's not necessarily so we can use that knowledge, mind you; it's just because we want it, like pretty new toys.

It's not exactly a "love of learning" in the conventional meaning of the phrase, though that certainly applies. It really is like a kid with a new toy. Every time I read something cool or interesting, I go tell my mom, even today. When one of my kids finds out something, they come tell me. My sisters will call me from work to tell me about something new they've learned. Share it out, brag about finding it first, turn it over and examine it like a shiny stone.

Mom and Dad being teachers probably was the cause of it all. They created a family of raging autodidacts. "The day you stop learning is the day you start dying," was one of my father's favorite sayings. They encouraged us to be curious about anything and everything, no matter how bizarre.

So it hardly becomes surprising that my mother has made herself an expert on Victorian novelists. Or that my sister is a walking encyclopedia of art history. Or that my husband (who caught the infection shortly after we married) is a raging Civil War buff. My elder son is a computer geek; my younger son has gone on a Greek mythology kick after playing God of War II.

But it's not just the valuable or significant information. Sometimes it's just silly stuff. My daughters recently saw the movie, "Casanova." Did they get curious about the historicl accuracy of the movie's costumes? About sexual mores? About 18th century journaling traditions?

No. They were fascinated by the fact that the actor "flipped the bird" to another character differently than we Americans do (it was the British two-finger salute). So the girls went researching, and now they can do obscene gestures from a dozen different cultures.

Do I understand it? Umm.... no. I guess you gotta be sixteen to appreciate that sort of esoterica. Do I stop them? Well, I probably should, but all I've asked is that they don't share their new-found knowledge with my mother in law, who:
A) is a church woman
B) would be appalled, and
C) would blame me for it.

Then there's the language thing. We all collect languages. I can fully blame that on Mom and Dad. They used to conduct their private conversations in German to keep small ears from knowing what was being discussed. We all of us girls learned German out of sheer self-defense!

In our household, we have speakers of ASL, naturally. German, Spanish, French, Latin, Farsi (my sister Margaret), Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, and Japanese. Not for any good reason (I don't even know what country speaks Farsi); just because somebody wanted it. I'm halfway hoping to pick up a Chinese class in college, just because nobody's gotten a good tonal language yet.

Adam told us a story that has entertained our family for several months. He was in his Japanese class at school, and the teacher handed out various newspapers, magazines, some American, some not. Adam received a newspaper from Berlin, I think it was.

I don't know the exact nature of the exercise, but when she approached Adam, her first question was "Suinfodosan, wakarimasuka?" (Mr. Swinford, do you understand the paper?)

Adam says, "Hai, wakarimasu." (Yes, I understand)

"Wait, wait," the teacher says. "It's in German. You're supposed to answer in the negative. Now, wakarimasuka?"

"Hai, wakarimasu."

Poor Suzukisensei was so confused. She says, "OK, read it to us."

So Adam proceeds to read out the first few lines of the paper, in beautiful German, and then translated it to English. Adam says Suzukisensei was at a complete loss for words.

God, I love being in this family!