Victor

I was at my husband's graduation last Saturday and amidst all the pomp and pageantry of Asia's oldest university graduating its most recent batch of PhDs and MAs, I started thinking back to the beginning when Victor's education really started.

I really do not know when this was, it would be presumptious for me to pinpoint the exact second when learning popped into his head. But I do know that long before he started pre-school his mother exposed him to books and music. I disagree with my mother-in-law on many, many points but on this we have complete understanding. Once she saw her child, now my husband, looking at books, she started buying them for him. Just as my parents did for me and my sister.

His collection, now grown to about 7000, and now considered conjugal property, really started with this woman, buying her little boy, his first comic book, his first cloth book, the first book he drooled over.

And so the little boy grew into a young man, into a mature man and turned from a son into a father, into a husband. To this date, with his fancy title of Doctor of Philosphies majoring in History, he still cherishes and keeps his old comic books, Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew novels, JD Salinger, the many, many biographies which he started reading as a child.

At night in bed, before sleeping, there are many, many times when this huge man lies beside me giggling his head off over some young adult or children's novel. While it was normally my pleasurable task as the mother to read to our daughter before she slept, many times, we had my husband join us, siiting on the floor or the foot of the bed, laughing over the book as much or more then his child or showing his grief or otherwise reacting to the stories.

Incongrous to think of this man, 5 feet, 10 inches tall, nearly 200 pounds, still reading, hunched over in concentration, his favorite children's book, reading it with his daughter or just by himself, taking joy in the words and pleasure in the pictures. Incongrous but strangely right. Just right.

Nikki's Thoughts