The Christmas I was six, I received The Human Body book and discovered that I had a passion for the human organism and wanted to know everything about my mysterious insides. This interest remained with me and grew over the years, but the unfortunate result was a not so occasional bout of “hysterical illness” and endless teasing by my cousins who were with me on the outing, in the boat, in the middle of the lake the time I became sure that I was having a heart attack and made my Uncle Tony turn back for shore as I clutched my chest and gasped, “My heart! My heart!” I’d just seen a documentary featuring open heart surgery, and to this day they greet me with a sing-song chorus of, “MY HEART! MY HEART!” and peals of adolescent laughter (though we are all near fifty).
By third grade, I had my own library card and I delighted in going to the Public Library, where, for FREE, I could take out as many books as I could carry home (This fact continues to amaze me, especially in our consumerist world where everything costs somebody something.) Like all the girls my age, I borrowed series books such Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and Amelia Bedelia, eating them up, one after another, like peanuts from a bowl. But I also took out books on "peoples of the world," and my special favorites, "how-to" books, with titles such as A Rainy Day Book for Girls, and How to Make Almost Anything from Almost Nothing, at Home.
In fourth grade, I wrote my first research paper. Our class was studying Hawaii, so I hauled out the old World Book and began my “research.” The search went only so far as that one volume, but I was very diligent and very serious about getting the facts straight. I felt all grown up doing my research, even going so far as to ape my graduate-school parents’ use of 3x5’s for quotations and page numbers. I was quite proud of “The Pineapple Industry in Hawaii Today,” and so, I was equally disappointed when my teacher shook her head over my use of only ONE source and an antiquated one at that. (“Lisa. Your paper is about the industry forty years ago!” she wrote.)
None-the-less, my love of research continued, and I became particularly attached to the objects surrounding the research process: The short yellow pencils and slips of paper the library left out in tiny boxes like offerings; The colorful walls of books with spines arranged like abstract art; the hushed upper floors of the Graduate Library where I walked among the study carrels and long wooden tables with their focused lamplight looking for my father while my mother waited outside, double-parked with the car idling.
My favorite research object, though, was the card catalog, and fifth grade was the year we “graduated” to its use. I loved everything about it: the smooth pull of the oak drawers; the buff-color cards tight-packed inside it; its mix of order and serendipity. Looking for information on cats, I might find a book on cattails, and next to that another one on catalogs of all kinds (the card catalog included!) Or if I searched by an author’s name, I might find Maurice Sendak and all of his many books within flipping distance of Doctor Seuss. I liked the feel of the cards too. They were soft with use in some places, like the skin on my grandmother’s neck, but in the drawers for recent acquisitions, the cards were so stiff and crisp and official that they made me stand up taller myself. I decided right then that I would write a book some day and add it to the file.
That same year I became a member of the “We Never Guess; We Look it Up” club (I still have the tiny metal pin they gave each of us) and I took what I assumed was a solemn vow to--you guessed it--never guess, but look it up. From that day forward, each time I wondered how to spell a word, or where a common act found its origin, or who that actress was in that movie that starred that other actor who was in that other movie (you know, with what’s his name?), I felt compelled—no, duty bound—to look it up. My fate was sealed in that hushed school library, in the fifth grade, in the big-kids’ section, when the librarian stuck my shirt through with that pin.
I admit it; I’m an addict. Every research paper I have ever written has unspooled across the page, lengthened unchecked, as lush, untamable, and unkempt as Methuselah’s beard. Word upon word, fact after fact, I have followed the research out of my life and into another one. In every class I’ve had to ask for extensions and incompletes to accommodate my lust for more. And unfortunately the computer has not helped one bit: out of three page essays, book chapters have been born, and out of twenty page papers, whole books. Sadly, for us “look-it-uppers,” the internet and its endless avenues for research and “rightness” is as much a curse as it is a blessing. Even now, when I am no longer a student--and though I am unfailingly gratified by the ability to cut short arguments with my spouse over proper English usage and word etymology with the click of a mouse--I have gone to bed too late, on too many nights because one of my daughter’s simple study questions has become a grail quest for a factoid not worthy of the expenditure of time or electricity. Mommy should NOT be up at 2:00 am researching Tiberius’ reign when her daughter sleeps like an angel. It has to stop.
