When I was a child, my father said that I should learn something new every day. For a man who held 125 patents and owned every Scientific American ever published, this was not hard advice to give. Although it was easy for me in school, learning about everyday life as a cautious child it was not, however. A friend had once teased that I could give her ten reasons NOT to do something she suggested we do for fun. She was right. Fifteen if pressed.
Realizing that this was going to lead to a boring life, at age 18 I vowed I wouldn’t be able regret something I didn’t do, especially from cowardice, and to keep learning. I didn’t want to be 80 years old and wish I had taken more chances, so over the years I did just that, often with a deep breath, eyes closed and fingers crossed. It seems, surprisingly, that sometimes the most interesting things we learn may be the smallest, found hiding as afterthoughts, like these, between the big ones.
I wanted to keep learning about the world, so after college I bravely accepted a job with a huge consumer products company to conduct marketing research studies in a specified city for a few weeks at a time, then move on to another and another. It was constant travel 50 weeks a year, only home spring and fall to change wardrobes, all on a generous expense account. I loved it. There was discovering jazz at night on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, learning in Oklahoma that “pig fat” makes the best pie crusts, and that hot-air balloons roar with flames while I was conducting a sunrise study in Arizona.
Each city was different and new. Food was often regional then, and I learned to enjoy hush puppies in the South, cinnamon chili in Cincinnati and chimichangas in California. Time for a local museum or famous site was squeezed in as there was always something new to see. I thought of it as my master’s degree in Life and did it for two years.
Moving on to five years of living in New York during the crazy ‘60s and ‘70s, I learned to walk fast and talk faster, that Tina Turner in a live concert made people dance in the aisles, and that it was important to parade down Fifth Avenue in the first Feminist March, even though I wasn’t sure what we were marching for. But I also learned that I was at heart a Westerner who hadn’t been raised to care what your grandfather did for a living or what prep school you attended. I just wasn’t a New York girl.
A job offer and move to Chicago led to learning to wear six layers of clothes in winter, that the Greek and Polish sections of the city had the best food, and that tornadoes would approach my fortieth floor office from the east so I could run for the stairs if I saw one. Luckily, I didn’t have to test that theory.
As a long time Anglophile, trips to England led to learning to queue for a bus instead of shoving in as I did on the N.Y. subway, how to neatly chop the shell off the top of a boiled egg in a cup without splattering it all over the table, and that, during summer school at Oxford, a candlelit concert in a soaring ancient church was lovely to the ears but painful to the rear on hard wooden pews made for schoolboys. How do the Royals sit through all those ceremonies?
The move to Oregon, a work transfer, found me amazed to learn that flowers bloom here in January (I thought they must be plastic the first time I saw them), that salmon will be served in hundreds of ways including burnt from the grill, and that those tall green trees aren’t pines, as I had grown up with, but firs (you can tell by the needles). We don’t go to The Shore, as on the East Coast, but The Beach. It was all new, all interesting, the list never-ending.
Nearing that once-dreaded deadline of age 80, so unimaginable long ago, I’m glad and relieved that there are few regrets about opportunities not taken. Bravery, hard work and good luck opened the path ahead and, as Michelangelo said at age 87, “I am still learning.” There is room for more in an already full mind, it seems.
So, what have you learned today?
Peggy Keonjian is a member of the Jottings Group of the Lake Oswego Adult Community Center.
