When I was seven, we lived in a remodeled chicken coup. My parents paid twenty dollars a week for rent. One year after attending a book fair at my grade school, I begged them to let me join a book club where I would receive a book a month and a model of the lunar module. My uncle and I both loved to put models together. Not realizing that the cost of the books was nearly half of the rent, I continued to beg my parents to let me join the book club. I wanted that model!
My parents consented, the books and model arrived, and I put the model together. The books just sat on the top of my dresser.
My Dad saw I wasn’t reading them and insisted I read them, after all, he had spent good money on them. There were stickers to go along with the information so I put the stickers where they went, but didn’t really read the books. When my father saw I wasn’t reading the books, he insisted I only put stickers on the pages I had read. I was seven. I listened to him and read all those books just so I could put the stickers on the pages.
My dad insisting that I read those science books is what got me interested in science. I started picking up fossils to examine them. Soon after that, I got a telescope. And then a microscope. I still pick up rocks to look at them.