nce upon a time...
there was a young girl who liked to help her dad with maintenance projects around the house. On most Saturday afternoons (after helping her mother with housecleaning chores), she looked forward to joining her dad in the backyard, where -- at the age of ten -- she learned to use a hammer and run the power mower. With her innate dexterity and love of grown-up activities, she quickly became her dad's apprentice, helping him paint kitchen cabinets or install acoustic ceiling tiles on the weekends.
        Today her friends call her Anjali.
        Although she didn't know it at the time, Anjali was becoming a real "craftskid." Of course, that word didn't exist when she was growing up -- and doesn't exist today -- but you get the idea. By learning to use paint brushes, screwdrivers, tape measures, and T-squares, little by little, this curly-haired young girl was planting the seeds that would one day grow into deeply rooted skills as a graphic artist.
        Other interests, such as tap dancing and playing the accordion, also emerged in Anjali's first few years of life. But these budding interests quickly went dormant, and it would require at least two decades before she rediscovered her hidden talents as a dancer and an accordionist in the dance of life.
        Even as a child, working with her hands was one of Anjali's favorite pastimes for which she occasionally earned a decent wage. Her dad used to pay her one dollar for mowing both the front and back lawns. And, in elementary school, she won one dollar in prize money for designing the best poster advertising the school carnival.
        With her visual and manual skills, little Anjali could have grown up to become an excellent designer of buildings, but her knack for languages and the written word put her on a path toward becoming what the twenty-first century calls an "information architect." Indeed, her work as a freelance copyeditor began at the age of twelve, when she offered to edit her father's poetry, and then expanded with her use of red and blue pencils. Years later, her knowledge of English grammar contributed greatly to her successful career -- first as a typesetter and production artist in the seventies, and more recently as an editor and writer for a management consulting firm and a brokerage firm.
        Her strong language skills became a solid foundation for learning foreign languages in high school, where Anjali was an A-student in French, German, and Latin. Eventually her love of French led her to the Sahara desert where she lived and worked for two years, speaking French every day. This once-in-a-lifetime experience turned Anjali into an avid francophile, and to this day she continues to visit the south of France, where she feels completely at home.
        Anjali likes to describe herself as "eclectic," not only because she likes the sound of this word but also because she feels it accurately communicates a little about who she is. In brief, she views herself as someone who -- while adventuring down life's many paths with specific goals in mind -- discovered that she is a woman who has learned to stop and smell the potpourri along the way.
        In 2000, the potpourri fragrance of foreign language learning was again coming her way. Due to her love of language and love of cross-cultural living, Anjali started taking Spanish lessons in her own backyard. Little did she know that, in the twenty-first century, she would understand the lyrics of the Latin music that she's been dancing to for decades: salsa, rhumba, cha-cha, tango! What's more, her love of living abroad also sprang up. As a result, she is now a certified teacher of English as a second (or foreign) language and is longing to travel again some day soon.
        In the meantime, Anjali the Earth Angel is following her heart and, one of these days, she will fly away!

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