We have been writing autobiographical stories based on timelines we made to share important life moments.  I share mine in anticipation of unveiling the students’ stories on their own blogs during this week’s parent conferences!

Cornell Playground

I got to go to Cornell when I was six years old! No, I wasn’t a Doogie Howser genius child. My dad made a career change when I was in first grade from being a farmer and plastics chemist to going to vet school at Cornell, and I loved it!

Everything about Ithaca was magical to me. Our old farmhouse with a porch that extended halfway around the house for playing rowdy games on rainy days was filled with imagination run wild. We explored parks along Cayuga Lake that included peacocks with spreading feathers and sprinkler pools to run through. The area had some of the most spectacular waterfalls I have ever seen, including one with mossy rocks you could travel down like you were on a giant river slide. But even with all those wonders, my very favorite thing was always the college itself.

I love to learn, to read, to find out more. What could be more perfect than to be surrounded by people and buildings dedicated to inquiry? This was in the days before lawsuits were top on people’s minds, and the college actually allowed the three of us girls to tromp around the large animal clinic with our dad as he was the after hours manager.

We tried our best to make the horse scale budge by all jumping on it in rhythm. I’ll never forget watching the young vet students empty several buckets of sand from a poor horse’s stomach during surgery. (Don’t put your horse’s grain on the ground to feed them, apparently.) There were rooms full of stuffed animals and rooms full of every kind of skeleton you could imagine. Everything smelled faintly of rubbing alcohol. “Cornell scrubs lime green” is still a color that makes me smile.

We thought all kids should get to be junior veterinarians on Friday nights like we did, doing jobs like washing stainless steel sinks full of syringes to get them ready for the autoclave. We helped make gigantic sulphur boluses and deliver the meds up and down the cement animal stall hallways. We dared each other to race past the llama pen without getting caught by a spitwad. Peering into one cow’s stomach through a permanent port was just gross enough to make us squeal.

We helped cows to calve and sheep to lamb. The veterinary students had picnics in a park where you actually got to drive through a river to enter the park. There were fireworks over the football field and gardens with sculptures sprinkled in among the sidewalks and bushes. Sometimes exotic animals got shipped into the paddocks for the vets who were practicing their zookeeping skills. We girls couldn’t wait to see what might visit us next, but watching chicks hatch in the incubators was equally fascinating. I really did feel like the whole place was my personal playground.

The vet school experience never inspired me to follow in my father’s veterinarian footsteps, but I have always followed him in the quest to know more and in the constant wonder of discovery. Wouldn’t Dad’s professors be surprised to know that they groomed me to be a more passionate teacher when I was only in elementary school!