Obsessions

Since I was a little girl, I've gone through what I call "obsessions." The first obsession I can remember came in the Mark Twain Elementary School library. For weeks, I looked at seven very pretty books on a shelf just to the right of my desk. They all stood in a neat little row, their pastel bindings making them look like a selection of Brock's candies.   I thought and thought about those books until one day, I reached up and pulled one down.  It had a mint-green cover and was Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter.  This was outside my comfort zone!  I usually read books about horses; this book was about a girl and her family, and they didn't even seem to own a horse.  But I gave it a try, checking it out and taking it home that afternoon.  Tucked into my bedroom, I read through the night until I learned that the Ingalls family had made it safely through that winter of blizzards.  And thus my obsession with the Little House books was born.  In no time at all, I had read all the pretty pastel-colored books in the series.

There have been many obsessions since then.  Through junior high and high school, I was obsessed with English history, especially as it pertained to royalty.  I couldn't get enough of Elizabeth I and her cousin Mary Queen of Scots.  A teenage visit to Winchester Mystery House, strangely enough, was my first encounter with a photo of Clark Gable--after that, it was all old movies all the time.  A trip to Sacramento's historic City Cemetery sparked a desire to know more about my family history, an obsessions that currently takes hold of me every few months or so.  And thus it goes on....

Right now, I'm passionate about the study of German.  This, too, has been an obsession that reappears every few years or so.  From German classes in junior high and high school, to self-taught German before my first visit to my ex-husband's family in Berlin, to German classes at American River College, I've loved studying the German language.  For all that I get this German language bug every now and again, I'm no where near fluent in the language.  But that doesn't stop me.  I practice vocabulary every day right now, and I struggle with conjugating verbs and understanding sentence structure.  And I love it.

I never know when the next obsession will appear.  But the old favorites linger on--family history, German, old movies, and my all-time favorite, attending college.  My wish for myself is that I always have obsessions, that I am never content with what I have already learned.  I want to constantly strive to learn more, to feel that rush when a new obsession is discovered and pursued.  As my sister so nicely put it recently, I'll likely be found in the "Alzheimer's Wing of Sac State" when I'm 90, still going to school, still learning.  And that's fine with me.