Thoughts Before David's Wedding--Part 2

As almost all families do, we became convinced quickly that our David was brilliant and far advanced beyond his age.  Certainly two ways he was gifted in the first year were growth and sleep.  He was a hungry baby and grew accordingly.  From eight and three-quarters pounds (all three of our babies were born within two ounces of one another's weights) to over thirty pounds at age one, he was a fast grower.  Maybe all of the eating and growing played a role in how well he slept.  Two beginner parents couldn't be more thankful than to have a baby who slept mostly on schedule and over fourteen hours a day.

The more mobile David became, the more we realized his capacity to focus in on one thing and stay at it.  The first "research and study" commitment we discovered involved small balls, those baby's interlocking beads, and buckets.  David would take apart the "necklace" of plastic beads and place them one-by-one into a bucket or pitcher until he filled it up or ran out of beads and balls.  Then he would find another bucket, and carefully remove each item from the first bucket to place it into the second bucket.  There were, of course, times for dumping the bucket, followed by placing all items back into the bucket.  As he got able, he would put the beads back together in a string, then take them apart and place them in a bucket.  Day after day, little David pursued this vocation.  What he was learning from it probably goes far beyond what we might imagine.  Taking a riff from the old Monty Python jokes about British bureaucracy, we used to say that baby David worked for the "Ministry of Taking Things Out of Things and Putting Them Into Other Things."

Duplo blocks provided a new variation on this crucial research task.  If I stacked fifteen or twenty or more colorful Duplo square blocks in a tall tower, he would rush to claim it from me and painstakingly remove each block from the tower, either placing it in a bucket or placing it on a flat Duplo base piece.  It would get tedious, but I could think back and come up with many more examples.

Along with the balls and blocks, David also was obsessed with books.  I was a graduate student at Duke when he was an infant, and I shared a big part of the daily child care while Everly went to work to make a living for us.  When he was awake, and we weren't busy with playtime, he would often sit on the bed and look at books.  With a full load of classes, I was almost always holding a book.  One of our rooms was packed full of bookshelves.  Then Everly would get home from teaching school in the evening, and after dinner she would be working with papers and books.  David got the impression early that human beings must mostly read books, so he dove in and started reading.  At night we would have to read every book in sight, and repeat some if necessary.  Years later, we carried a milk crate to the Durham County Library to check out enough books, sometimes with twenty or forty on one subject, to keep the boy busy.

That intense research and study drive with focus on a single subject continued for many years.  He knew all about birds, about geography, about Mayan and Aztec civilizations, about dinosaurs, about Bible stories, about folk tales, and so many more topics which he would press into until he had exhausted the resources available at The Regulator Bookshop, Sandy Creek Books, the public library, the Gothic Bookshop, and any other sources we could find.  He also turned his focus to book series, and would read every volume of the Boxcar Children, Ramona, Fat Chance Claude, Berenstain Bears, The Magic School Bus, Roald Dahl, and on and on.

The curiosity to learn in depth about a subject and the ability to focus through to understand the breadth of the subject describes to me one of the amazing gifts that David came into the world to display.  It's never gone away.  Focus and discipline get harder as we get older and face more complicated tasks, but no one can seriously doubt that David is gifted in this way.  In recent years, his orchids and cacti, which expanded to his community garden plot and his prize-winning Dahlias, his rocks and crystals, his knowledge of how to care for dogs--all of these show us again and again what an impressive capacity for useful knowledge he has.  Even his editing and research-oriented employment has let this gift become manifest in the workplaces where he has thrived in Ann Arbor. 

And ultimately, this sometimes quiet and shy boy, became a fascinating conversationalist.  It's a joy just to get him started sharing all that he has learned and thought about.