WATCH ME

WATCH AND LEARN
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This a core behavior that I have.  From the time I was a small child until now.  Some of the early things I remember, but many, I do not because I was so young. I don't know where I got it and I don't know, to this day, what I got from it.
What made me think of this?  I caught myself doing what I do best, again.  The Voice from the Kitchen asked me, "Why are you standing there watching me stir the pot?"
The answer to that is, "Because I have always done this."  Since the earliest days of my childhood, I have been a watcher.  Some would even bring themselves to say, "gawker."  It doesn't matter what someone is doing and it doesn't matter whether I know what is being done or not.  All I know is that if you are doing something in my vicinity, I will watch you.
I grew up watching people.  My mother, her mother, my father, my mother's father, my uncles and my aunts and anybody who was doing anything any time I was awake and I could see it being done.
I watched my mother in the kitchen.  There was always something going on there.  There was potato peeling, vegetable cutting and sorting, babies baths being given, diapers being changed and a variety of other things.  How could I miss out on all that action?  This was good stuff.  Let me tell you something, I learned a lot while being this inveterate watcher.  I learned to stay out of the way.  I learned how to make people think that they were teaching me something.  Of course, it was not that complicated in my smooth mind.  In the growing-up process, all I knew for sure was that I could watch but I had to stay out of the way. 
When I say that I would watch anything, I mean it.  I would watch my father as he calculated the quotes that he was going to present to the potential customers of the machine shop where he worked.  I knew what a blueprint was when I was six years old.  As I grew up I saw that there were numbers that were decorated with a string of preceding zeroes.  I saw slide rules and compasses, micrometers and a whole host of things that my younger, non gawking siblings missed.
I watched my one handed grandfather turn over the sod for a very large Victory Garden.  When I grew older, I helped, but he always did the lion's share.  The one thing that I did very well in the garden was to pluck the tomatoes and eat one on the way to the baseball field.  If there were no tomatoes, there was always rhubarb, or carrots or radishes, or corn,etc.
I watched that self-same grandfather do some of the most amazing carpentry work that I had seen then and have seen since.  When my grandfather was doing carpentry,even EFR Dion would join me in the peanut gallery.  We knew better to keep our distance until the artist gave us the sign.  We knew better than to let him think that we doubted his ability to one-hand his way through life...even artistic life.  
When I went to work, my tendency to stand and watch worked against me a lot, of course.  But it also helped.  I could stand and watch silently without distracting the professionally able people.  It came in handy when I volunteered for the third shift.  Then I could practice what I had seen the well-practiced operators do.  
So, hey, you want to keep me silent and out of your way, just do something.  I'll gladly oblige and give you an audience.  I'm that way.  I can stand there all day and never tell you how to do something.  I just absorb what you're doing into my own space.  I can sit in the passenger's seat for thousands of miles and never once tell you, the driver, what to do.  
I told this to the Voice from the Kitchen as she was cooking some dessert stuff tonight.  She suggested that I tell it to our sons.  They are not watchers.  They are escapers.  They know that I am a watcher.  They also know that I don't get in the way.  They like that.  
You know what?  I wish I could watch them doing something every single day.  I really do.