The only thing I didn't seem to be able to learn was Italian.  After I retired, I took three different classes in Italian, and I've been to Italy three times as well.  But I  don't remember a single word except "Telefono."  Telephone.  Italian doesn't seem to stick to my brain.  I made an A in all three classes, but it is a meaningless grade.  It just means that I can follow directions.

When I was teaching at NEO, I could arrange my classes so that when I wasn't teaching a class, I could enroll in something on campus that I hadn't taken before.  Which I did.  Every semester I took something.  I completed all of the engineering classes that way.  Eng. Physics I and II.  Statics and Strengths, Dynamics, etc., etc. And then took sabbatical and went to OSU and took upper devision engineering classes as well.

What was I thinking!!  I was way past my mid forties and still enrolling in classes for the fun of it.  One day, I was driving back to Pryor from Stillwater and it occurred to me that I had never decided what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I didn't want to be promoted.  I loved the classroom, and being the head of some department--which would be the next step in a career path--sounded like being sentenced to a torture chamber.

I was in my fifties.  Once I started college, I had never taken a break--mainly because if you took six hours for credit every semester without taking a break, you didn't have to pay back your student loans.  So that's what I did.

I was lucky, in that, Ken encouraged me to do whatever I wanted to do.  And also, that I didn't have to get a job when I was in my twenties and thirties--so I could go to school any time I wanted to.  That was a blessing.  The only difficult part was raising four children while driving 55 miles to work every day and being home when they were.  I managed.  It all worked out.

So here I am.  seventy-nine years old.  Enrolled in a class--it's probably an incurable sickness.  But it makes life really interesting.