My mother always said 'two wrongs don't make a right'. To me, that means my actions stand alone. It doesn't matter what someone else did that was worse or whether they did something to provoke me, I am responsible for myself.
Jane and Professor, at first, I almost gave the same answer; I had to think about the concept of the question really hard before I realized that I did have a great life lesson that my mother taught me. You see, even with all the positives I put in my answer here, after putting down that great foundation when I was a young child, my mother didn’t follow through in my later years. There was absolutely no emphasis on planning my life, on considering what I would do after high school, on setting goals, on attending college, on taking steps that would lead to it. It’s true that we were poor, but if I had had a plan in place, grants, scholarships, loans and working my way through higher education were options available to me. None of it was ever discussed, proposed, mentioned, etc. Of course, some may bring up guidance counselors or other intermediate level school-related entities that did the sane same thing, but I’ll admit I was a bit oblivious. Since age 14, I had a bee in my bonnet to enlist in the US Marine Corps after high school, and I was so focused on that singular path that I didn’t even realize that I could have gone in as an officer instead of an enlisted man, or gone to college on one of the military plans. I did carry out that plan to be a Marine, and it has been the greatest chapter in the story of my life.
When it comes to education, I am grateful to my mother for what she did do, not bitter for anything she didn’t do. I am the third of five children, she had her first pregnancy at age 17 before she finished high school, she was a single mother for extended and varied periods during my childhood, she spent years getting her bachelor’s degree while raising us, most of the time on some type of public assistance or another, etc, etc, etc. I realize she had challenges and difficulties to deal with, and based on how her own life was going, she really started out parenting while still a child herself, and with zero parenting skills. She had a lot of self-created deficits in front of her, and of course the full story has many more factors that won’t ever fit here. She did well, adequately (I stop short of saying that she did the best that anyone could have done under the same circumstances).
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Similar path that you took?
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Oh.
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“Look it up”. [Millennials who read this, please brace yourselves.
I grew up in an age before the internet, before search engines, before cellphones/smartphones, etc., which meant that in order to learn about something, one of the number one options available was to crack open a book and read. It required study, research, perusing, cross-referencing, going from one source to another to compile information.]
My mother believed that instead of just answering every single question that we asked her, it was better for us to know how to find certain answers for ourselves. She taught us how to use the dictionary, encyclopedia, thesaurus to find answers. Growing up, we all had library cards from the youngest age that libraries issued them to children, our house was filled with books and magazines and newspapers, etc. There was fiction and non-fiction, classic literature, news, everything. To fuel my natural sense of curiosity and my love of history and English and science and grammar and many other topics, delving onto these treasures was both mind-blowing and eye-opening. A caveat: my mother is extremely intelligent and well-read, so she didn’t just shunt us off because she didn’t know answers to questions, I don’t want to give that impression at all. Instead, what she did was put the ball in our hands and gave us the tools or the roadmap to figuring some things out for ourselves. She did answer some of our questions, but she did so selectively. Sometimes, when she’d say, “look it up”, I could tell that she knew the answer(s). It was frustrating to me as a child to go dig through books to find answers, but over time it became habit. I hardly ever came away from it having only learned the answer to the singular question I had asked, often, a search led from one new fact to another, one new word or another, one new definition or another. My mother is smart, because she was teaching us independent thinking without it seeming as if she was teaching us anything at all.
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Thank you, my friend.
¿Por qué, mon ami?
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Larks, commonly consumed with bones intact, have historically been considered wholesome, delicate, and light game. They can be used in a number of dishes; for example, they can be stewed, broiled, or used as filling in a meat pie. Lark's tongues were particularly highly valued. In modern times, shrinking habitats made lark meat rare and hard to come by, though it can still be found in restaurants in Italy and elsewhere in southern Europe.[15]
Alauda arvensis).[1]
Lark
Eurasian skylark (Alauda arvensis)
This post was edited by CosmicWunderkind at September 30, 2020 4:45 PM MDT
Element 99 