I missed Cosmos the first time, so I look forward to seeing it.
Rob, I'm sure my actions have also contributed to Borders' demise, as the holiday gifties, which include a lot of books, are ordered online, and yes, I do a lot of reading online, too, and looking up of things. But here's a little tale pulled from my (online, not hand-written in a hardbound book of blank paper) journal... oh, this seems almost a lifetime ago now! My son's name has been changed to protect the (sometimes) innocent.
Tall child, who was then a small child of four, and I were in Borders. Bookstores are a favorite outing for us. We had picked up a number of books and were sitting in the cafe having a snack as we perused our selections. I don't know what prompted this, but at one point, I looked up and asked the tall child to spell "pharmaceutical." He did. I asked him to spell "pharmacist." He did. I asked him to spell "pharmacy." He did. And then I asked him to spell "farm." He laughed.
A moment later, a man sitting at a nearby table said, "Excuse me, but those were some big words you were giving him to spell. How old is he?" "Four," was my reply. "Four!" "Yes," said I, "my small child learned how to read at an early age, and he is good with words and spells well."
The man and I exchanged a few more comments along the line of then-small child's spelling; small child interjected with, "Yes, Mom, but you don't give me very hard words!"
"I don't?," I asked.
"No, you don't! You need to give me higher-level words."
"Like what, small child?"
"College-level!," replied he.
"Really! And what kind of words would college-level words be?"
Small child was quiet -- he'd not expected me to ask him what college-level words would be!
I was stumped, too, but then asked him. "You mean like 'deoxyribonucleic acid'??"
Whereupon small child lit up and said, "D-E-O-X-Y-R-"
"Wait, wait, wait!," I interrupted. "I'd like you to write this down instead of spelling it out loud!" So I handed him a napkin, the gentleman at the neighboring table provided the pen, and the small child wrote down "deoxyribonucleic acid."
"How do you even know that, small child?," I asked.
"Oh, I read it, in one of my 'Discover' magazines," was the small child's reply.
The gentleman and I looked at each other.
"As I said, he's good with words!"
(I still have the napkin, and remember very well my shock.)
Many a Saturday night, we sat on the floor of that Borders reading, or stood upstairs tethered to the listening stations -- when it still had them -- dancing together to different music. Many times in those early days of his childhood, I couldn't afford to buy us much during our visits so we had to chose our purchases carefully, to make sure what we got was what had the most value to us. Tough for a kid sometimes, and oh, so hard to have to say no so often to his big green hope-filled eyes!
Even now, the tall child (a college student) and I will still browse bookstores, and his major outing by himself when we were in San Francisco was hunting down bookstores and visiting them (and buying a lot of books to cart home).
I did buy the 30th anniversary large-format hard-copy
Cosmos last night. Also
Postcards from Mars, which I had once been given but which I gave back,
Packing for Mars, because I gave away the copy of the book I had purchased for myself,
Elegant Universe, which I had given to exH#1 and had hoped to borrow back from him when he was done with it (that never happens!), and a few (*cough*) other books, too. Time to rotate what's on the bathroom bookshelves, after all, and the kid, who's been away for three weeks, will be coming home soon.
