What my mom told me. What my dad told me.

These memories by no means represent the wealth and depth of knowledge that my parents imparted on me. Just two snippets.

Part 1

Today in my yard I saw violets blooming. As a sometime gardener and a lackadaisical weeder, I know full well that violets, though pretty in April, take up valuable lawn space and lead to weeds later in the year. Doesn't matter. I still love my violets.

Every spring when the violets bloomed my mom and I would walk back through our neighbor's backyard (now blocked by fences) across the baseball field and into the woods to pick violets. The hidden patch of violets by the woods' edge always sparked my imagination. I used to wonder how they got there, something about fairies or elves. We'd pick them, bring them home, them wrap them up into little bouquets with wet paper towels and aluminum foil to keep them fresh. Did we do this early in the morning? I'm not sure, but I remember every year bringing them to my teachers.

When fifth grade hit I got shy. My teacher was male. It's possible I had a crush on him. Maybe not, but I was still embarrassed to bring him flowers. Don't only women and girls like flowers?

What my mom told me: Maybe since he's a man, maybe no one else brought him flowers, so it was even more important to bring them to him. Was this one of my formative lessons on having few expectations of gender?

Part 2
Recently I was reading a mystery about a bone scientist by Aaron Elkins. Just a professor, the main character somewhat unbelievably but always entertainingly comes across corpses time and again. Well, not exactly corpses, but the partial skeletal remains of them. In the latest one I read he had to investigate the charred remains of an arson victim. He perhaps too graphically pointed out that a burnt corpse smells disturbingly like a steak barbecue, but looks ghastly, confusing the sense and making one gag.

Which reminds me of the day, when I was very young, that I asked my dad why we didn't eat human meat. I mean if somebody died, and the meat was fresh, why didn't humans eat it? Not that I wanted to eat it. It was more of a philosophical question.

What my dad said: "We don't eat meat because what would happen if we found out we liked it?" Good point.

There you have it. Meandering thoughts on a spring day.