Para LeLe
From her own childhood my mother had a collection of Prince Valiant, perhaps twenty issues all together in hardcover. When I got to them they were old already, missing the back cover and in some corner of my grandmothers house. I read them, and then I read them again. And again. In the last page of each issue there’s was some sort of educational drawing. The one that I remember was one of the Paleozoic sea. I have a clear memory of nautilus-like creatures with tentacles reaching out their shells, crinoids waving in the water, and few armored fishes swimming around. If I read the Prince Valiant front to back few times, I must have stared at that drawing for hours without end.
Time passed indeed. Perhaps ten years later and already in Venezuela, my father drop in my lap a pamphlet “Einstein’s relativity for teenagers” I was very impressed by the sheer daring of creating an explanation for known facts totally different than the explanation received. And the idea of a geometry driving dynamics seemed to me unbelievable elegant. I wanted to be physicist, if physicists where the ones capable for such elegant leaps of imagination. In the first year of university, before choosing career, I asked a friendly physics professor how was it to be a physicist. His honesty was disarming: “Is horrible” he said. So I register myself in physics and did my best for about a year. It was hard indeed. Not quite horrible, but hard. I have never been a person that does housework. In the lessons of basic physics and mathematics I attended I understood what was taught, but it all needed anchoring, I needed simple hard work to make that knowledge mine. Needles to say, I didn’t do any anchoring on my own. So I stalled. I did not advance much.
But I didn’t do only physics at university. I dived and I joined a political party. The less I advanced with algebra and analysis, the more I got involved in politics. And the more politics took over my life, the less algebra and analysis I did. What was few to begin with, became non-existent. When the diving club stalled, I joined a climbing group. We walked in the Venezuelan Amazonas and in the Colombian high mountains. Life was great, but my studies were stuck. It didn’t seem to matter much, though. Some other day I’ll figure it out, I thought. Right now there was training to do, or flyers to write. Perhaps tomorrow I would decide to study something else, I told myself, perhaps philosophy, perhaps journalism. But those were studies given somewhere else, so I demurred. There was another expedition in the planing, and surely another election coming. Why to care that much about my career?
Many years later my wife bought a box with salt crystals for our son to play. The idea is simple: you supersaturate a solution, and suddenly crystals grow beautifully and unexpectedly. Pretty much like that I became a biologist.
Just arrived to the University campus one day, I was too late for a class and too early for the next. I went to the cafeteria to see what was going on, probably in search of an excuse to miss that second class too. What I found was my beloved friend Jose Luis Ortigoza, a fellow climber, and one of the most happy persons I ever knew. When I asked what was he doing, he said it, nonchalant as he was: “changing careers, why?”. He had talked to the decane of materials engineering, to the decane of architecture, signed few papers, and instead of an unhappy-never-gonna-make-it-student-of-engineering, he became a promising, and happy, student of architecture.
45 minutes later I was a registered student of biology. Best decision in my life so far.
You might wonder why do I mentioned that old drawing. Well, about a month after I switch studies, my grandmother came visiting us from Argentina. In the car from the airport to our house, I was popping to tell her about my daring, totally abrupt and unexpected change of studies. She did not quite get it at first. I insisted, I was daring and original, of course she did not get me. Slowly we cleared the misunderstanding. My grandmother could not imagine that I ever studied anything else than biology. She was the one that brought that drawing to my memory, since I had totally forgotten. And the uncountable times that, as a child, I talked about animals and plants and jungles. I had forgotten.
She didn’t.