Building Blocks

For a couple of years, Alex has been certain that when he entered college, it would be as a pre-med student. We weren't sure why, because he never seemed particularly drawn to the sciences and was ambivalent about taking things like biology, although he always did well. We both wondered if he decided on that in junior high because he was told he had the intelligence for it, or if he was encourage to take that path by a teacher; we never wanted to discourage it, whatever his reasons were.

Today he sat at the table with my dad, going over the plans for their renovation of his master bathroom, and he was fascinated. My dad understands how things are built, how to repair just about anything in his house, and can undertake being his own contractor, but he's self taught, and his education was out of necessity. As Alex asked questions, he was able to give his grandson at least basic answers, and remarked at some point that Alex ought to consider engineering or architecture, and Alex's eyes lit up.

I don't think he'd considered it as a possibility until it came out of my dad's mouth. And his excitement over the possibility grew when Ian told him he would be entering college at such a young age that he could take time to explore more than one thing, and we wouldn't bat an eye of he changed majors a time or two.

After everyone left this evening, Ian and I curled up on the bed to watch a little TV, and we wondered why some obvious things had escaped us. Alex has always loved to figure out how things work; if something around here breaks, he takes it apart and tries to figure out why. He spent hours playing with Duplo and then Lego blocks, and later the K'nex sets that Ian bought for him. He grasps the complexity of math, he can take a small motorcycle engine apart and put it back together, and he absolutely loved helping my dad paint, move a wall, and then lay a new floor.

He's done all this school work to assure that he has what he needs to get the classes in college he'll need to move onto medical school but I think his heart has always been in other things.

Who knows if he'll switch gears when it comes right down to it, but I think we're both just very, very glad that my dad opened up to him a possibility we had never considered, which in turn gave us the opportunity to let him know that he's free to explore the world before committing to it.