My five-year-old has taken a sudden liking to rocks. He has a pamphlet on rock types and a couple days ago, he watched an internet video about rocks over… and over… and over again.

This got Min and I to talking about spurts of interest. As adults, we’ve narrowed our focus. Rightly or wrongly, we don’t watch random internet videos about rocks. We’ve already eliminated geology from our mental lists of fascinating subjects. But as a kid… you can choose to learn anything.

This got us talking about what we did choose to study, as kids. Min apparently spent months reading everything he could find about the Bermuda triangle. This, in turn, led to researching alien abduction.

I remember reading about spontaneous combustion in a Time-Life book at my Grandpa’s house, and then searching for everything possible on the subject, mostly to ensure I wasn’t going to burst into flames in my sleep.

I also spent an entire summer reading biographies from a specific rack at the library, mostly stories of children battling cancer and bringing inadvertent wisdom into the lives of their parents. (This makes me wonder, now, what the town librarian was going through. There were a lot of these books on the rack.) And then, in high school, there was the astral projection phase…

It’s amazing Min and I turned out normal. Or at least sort of normal. I think my son is safer, so far, learning about rocks.

What peaked your interest, as a kid?