Books and Career Choices

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Nancy from Traverse City, Michigan.

Hello, Nancy. How are you doing?

Hi, Nancy. Welcome.

Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant. Wonderful.

What’s cooking?

Well, I’m calling in response to a show we heard on our way home from church a couple Sundays ago

Where you were discussing names and how a person’s name influences their career choices.

And as I mentioned, my name is Nancy.

See, when I was in about kindergarten, my parents gave me one of those little golden books, Nurse Nancy.

And it was just wonderful.

I remember taking it for show and tell because it had real Band-Aids inside.

It did?

Yeah.

No kidding.

And Nancy was a young girl in the neighborhood who would take her little red wagon and her medical bag wherever there was emergencies, such as skin, knees, and that sort of thing.

And she would transport injured neighbors in the little wagon,

And you would take those little Band-Aids,

And she put the Band-Aid on her little friend’s knee,

And I just thought that was so cool,

And now I’ve been a nurse for more than three decades,

And it is one of the huge definers of who I am.

That’s amazing, and it’s really cute, by the way.

That’s an amazing, sweet story.

What if they’d given you a Nancy Drew book?

Would you be a gumshoe now?

Well, I did read a lot of Nancy Drew and a lot of mysteries.

Didn’t stick like the Nancy Nurse did.

Nancy Nurse, that’s for sure.

Yeah, that’s a great story.

I wonder how many of us, if we think about it, can trace back our lives now to early influential books.

Well, you know, there were all those Martha books about the dog, but fortunately, you know, the Martha Speaks series, but that came out after I was a kid.

Yeah, there were no grants in any of my books until well into the 2000s.

Interesting. But, you know, I think it’s really interesting to think about books that influenced your career choices when you’re young.

I mean, that a book would have that much power on the rest of your life.

I think you make a great point, Nurse Nancy.

Well, thanks.

I’m thinking about in my own experience, it wasn’t a book.

Well, I read a lot of the Encyclopedia Brown mystery things.

But then the one that really influenced me when I was a kid was by Herbert S. Zim.

He wrote a bunch of books for kids, and one of them was Codes and Secret Writing.

Oh, nice.

Oh, wow.

Yes.

And my friend Ingrid Siegert and I, in fourth and fifth grade, we’d carry around these little notebooks like Secret Agents,

And we would make up our own little codes based on the stories in that book.

And, you know, I think about it now.

I mean, I spent years studying ancient Greek, you know, trying to get to the bottom of a code.

And I think it really did influence me.

That whole ciphering and deciphering sort of thing.

Exactly.

I mean, that’s what we do every week.

Did you have a book like that, girl?

I did some of that.

Most of the influence for me came much later.

I had a grandfather who worked as a janitor in a school, and he would often bring home books that they were discarding,

And they would be dictionaries and encyclopedias and textbooks.

Oh, lucky.

And I loved the glossaries in those and actually cut them out and compiled them all together.

You did?

And then years later, I became a dictionary editor.

But a lot of dictionary editors have similar stories.

They do.

And there’s nothing unusual about that.

But the love of languages probably came from J.R.R. Tolkien, the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings and the big appendices.

They’re just loaded with linguistic information.

And all this stuff he created based loosely upon old English

And other forms of ancient speech, runic speech and runic writing.

And just mostly from there, just trying to puzzle out what he was writing.

Wow.

Well, Nancy, I’m betting that we’re going to hear from a lot of other listeners

Who had similar experiences.

Did you read a book as a kid that influenced the path you took

In terms of a career in the rest of your life?

Call us and tell us about it at 877-929-9673 or send it in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Nurse Nancy, we are grateful that you called and shared that story.

Well, thank you.

It’s been a pleasure and an honor to be on your show.

Oh, thank you.

How delightful.

Congratulations on a long career.

Thank you.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.