Sarah stretched luxuriously in the familiar bed, enjoying the fact that she didn't really have to get up now. It was great to be home from college, her first year successfully behind her, a week of laziness before she started her summer job. Right now her mother was probably fixing her something special for breakfast — toast, eggs, bacon. She watched the dust motes dancing in the shaft of June sunlight. Something was wrong. She didn't smell any bacon, or anything else cooking for that matter.
As Sarah came into the kitchen she confirmed that, indeed, nothing was cooking. Her mother was sitting at the breakfast table studying a large book.
"Pour yourself some cereal, Dear. The water on the stove is hot if you want a cup of coffee."
Sarah poured bran flakes in a bowl, added raisins and milk. Without much enthusiasm, she made a cup of instant coffee. What was her mother up to this time? As long as Sarah could remember, her mother had been learning about something or other. She had never finished college; as if to compensate, she had spent the rest of her life studying one thing after another — Latin, Elizabethan drama, micro-economics. What was it now?
As she folded up the newspaper, she glanced at the book: Calculus with Analytic Geometry. Why in the world did she want to study calculus?
"I'm so glad you're up. There is so much in this book that I don't know where to start."
"Why do you want to learn calculus? You are not thinking of going into engineering are you?"
Her mother looked at her sharply. Sarah's father was an engineer, and her mother was always asking questions -- usually good questions, often difficult ones. Occasionally her father became exasperated and said that, if she wanted to know, she should become an engineer.
"No," her mother responded, "I'll leave that to your father. I want to understand what Malthus was talking about. How do they make these predictions about population growth? You know about all this I guess." She shoved a magazine article in Sarah's direction.