I promise you this: it’s quite humbling to stare at a grape for two hours. You’ll start noticing. You’ll notice the contrast in texture between stem and fruit, the fine indentation and discoloration at the connection to the pedicel, the odd finish of the skin—skin that is both dusty and shiny at once. Charcoal in hand, I tried my very best (which, at that point, was fruitless) to capture the precise mottling of this oblong and the diffuse shadow it cast upon the linoleum table. Here I was, day one of Beginner’s Botanical Drawing, a class I took on Wednesday evenings last fall at the Boston Center for Adult Education.

My paternal grandmother—braiser of brisket, champion of Chicago, my absolute idol—took continuing education classes at her senior care facility until the week that she passed away this past February. When she retired from her law practice, she had the will and the tremendous privilege to enroll in the University of Chicago’s Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults, a liberal arts program that replicates, in part, the core curriculum for which the University is known.  When my grandmother went to college and law school in the late forties and early fifties at commuter schools in Chicago, she worked part-time to support her family. She wanted to be a journalist but pursued law instead because she thought it was more practical. But law was not more practical for a woman of her time; she faced routine harassment as one of few women in the courtroom but still wanted to seek justice for her clients by trying cases. She served as a civil litigator who earnestly defended truckers and trucking companies for an insurance defense firm prior to starting her own civil firm with my grandfather. On her road to becoming a lawyer, my grandmother didn’t get to take a lot of the courses that she wanted to take. She was mighty persistent in her old age to continue to expand her mind and learn, through reading, writing, and classes, the skills and the texts for which she hungered.

My grandmother’s voice in my head pushed me to sign up for the drawing class—to pursue something I was interested in, but not yet good at, for the sake of potential growth. It can be hard to put ourselves out there when we live in a society that most often rewards us for pursuing what we’re already good at. It can be risky to devote time (and, sometimes, money) to learning a new skill. And doing so certainly challenges the ego. But what got me to stay in the class was my experience with that darn grape.

As I sat there, trying to shade the slightly irregular tip of the berry, staring until I had trippy thoughts (This thing that resembles glass grows from the ground? And can turn into wine? AND a raisin? I honestly snarf handfuls of these bad boys without even looking at them…)—I was struck by one of those realizations that knock the wind right out of you.

Something so small contains multitudes.  There’s so much I don’t yet know.

I’ve definitely had this thought before, such as when I was first learning ballet and Ms. Lilette would rotate my leg a centimeter to meet turn-out and then smile at the fix. Or when my dad tries to discern amongst six ochre shade varieties to identify a particular stamp he has just added to his collection. Or when my mom swears by the difference between kosher and sea salt. Or when my sister names the tiny bones in the ear.  Or when I stumble upon my grandmother’s spidery handwriting in her annotated books of poetry that I will forever keep close. From her marginal notes, I know she wondered about some of the same lines in Seamus Heaney’s Field Work that puzzle me.

Something so small contains multitudes.  There’s so much I don’t yet know.

And now that my grandmother is gone, I have this thought when I recall one of the few memories she never lost and would instead share over and over again to my now-shameful impatience. My grandmother loved recalling her joy at taking me, her first grandchild, out in a stroller on long fall nature walks through her neighborhood. She would smile as she shared how she had liked to stop every so often and pluck a leaf from the ground and show it to me, how she let me feel the waxy surface and trace the veins. She always remembered talking to stroller-aged me and telling me all about the leaf, its shape, its color, where it came from. In her memory, it was always a leaf. While remembering, she would always rub her thumb and middle finger together slowly—I wanted you to hold it. To learn.