Going wide-eyed into my first-grade classroom when that important school day arrived.
It was a converted quonset hut on the side of a hill, surrounded by tundra, on the island of Adak in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. There was a big white polar bear rug on the floor (very politically incorrect thing now) and what seemed, to my young eyes, to be the most enormous fish tank in which a small octopus and other fascinating sea creatures lived.
Dressed in my pressed little green and black plaid dress, with wide wide collar, I joined less than a dozen other young children in what turned out to be, for me, the beginning of a love affair with nature and learning and language and travel.
What is your favorite childhood memory of, or with, someone "really old"?