remembering

Lately I have had to laugh at myself each time I recall, as I have been only very recently, my eighteen year old self as she started college.  For most of my college years, I believed that I could only consider myself educated when I would know all the references that all the writers/thinkers that I read for my courses mentioned. I didn't just read the reading assignment. I would spend almost all my non-class time in the library. Studying, of course, but also trying to read all the material mentioned in all bibliographies.  I don't think I have ever told this to anyone before, that I thought a well educated person would have been familiar with all the thinkers annotated in bibliographies. 

I slogged it out pretty well, actually.  During my late twenties, I socialized with a circle of married couples (I was married too) who got together to play games. Most often we played Trivia. Everyone wanted to team up with me because I knew more trivia than anyone else in our circle.  I remember one woman in that circle  being amazed when I knew the names  of so many artists. My mom had taken me to a world class art museum once a month, every month, until I left home for college. My mom had gone to college while I was in high school and I read all her texts. As my mom often remarked, I would read the dictionary if it was the only thing available to read. I also read all my brothers' books, throughout my childhood. I felt furtive reading boy books and my older brother forbid me so I read on the sneak.

My most intense reading was my first year of law school and, imho, law school is amazing training in reading philosophy. Many of our great jurists on the Supreme Court were great writers and the law is philosophy, after all is said and done. In the first year, most law students are expected to read 300 to 400 pages a night and since first year law students are not accustomed to legal jargon, legal philosophy or much of anything related to the law, reading all those pages well enough to report fluently on what one had read was time consuming. Things eased up in my second year. That first year, I would look up, it felt like, every other word in my fat Black's Law Dictionary and even after reading endless definitions of legal terminology, I wouldn't really comprehend it. But I summarized every single case, identifying the facts, the holding and a brief summary of the legal analysis used by the judge to arrive at his holding/decision. Law profs would make seating charts and you had to sit in the same spot daily so the prof could call on you out of the blue, know who you were and where you were and if you could not summarize any case in that day's assignment, it affected your grade.

I learned in law school that I had, and still do I believe, an amazing ability that not many people have. I could read the U.S. Tax Code when in a tax class. From my college habit of reading all the footnotes and following up on them, I read all the endless annotations in the U.S. Tax Code, the U.S. Bankruptcy Code when I took Bankruptcy Law and the Uniform Commercial Code, which is the driest of all these very dry areas of legal code. I would read these things and not really think I comprehended anything but when asked a question in class or on a test, it was like my brain had uploaded the 'software' of what I had read and I could run the program and spew out accurate answers.

What made me think of this weird aspect of me?  And why did I just all it weird. I am proud of my ability to inhale massive quantities of dry material and, somehow, retain what I read.

I liked the law prof who taught most of the tax courses, so I took a lot of tax courses. It was an opportunity to use my unusual skill. When he learned I could inhale tax code almost as easily as a computer uploads software these days, he urged me to go into tax law, or bankruptcy law or some area of the law that relies heavily on financial reliance on legal codes. Yech, such a career sounded so dull to me but I remember feeling some regret that I could not show off.

I have an unusual capacity of memory.