Inculcate - to implant by repeated statement or admonition

I have a friend named 'Fast' Eddy Epperson, who developed Easy Street in the 70's. We live on Easy Street, which has become somewhat of an anomaly around our house these days, considering we have a gaggle of girls to put through college and life can seem a little chaotic at times. In fact, we live in the house that Ed built for his family.

I enjoy having coffee with Ed to hear stories about Austin and to discuss life from the perspective of someone nearly 25 years older than myself. (I am 51.) Ed is in fantastic physical condition. He plays tennis nearly every day, participates in strenuous yoga classes, goes on an annual ski trip where he skis 30 straight days in Colorado, and rides a motor cycle. He has no diseases and all of his joints and bones work extremely well. While some of this is just good genetics, there is no doubt that much of it is in the way he chooses to take care of himself. He is a retired veterinarian, and gives much of the credit to what he learned from taking care of animals.

Today we talked about the Andre Agassi autobiography, Open, that I wrote about last week. Ed made the interesting observation that Agassi was inculcated from a very early age as a pugilist and a defender. Agassi's father was an Olympic Boxer (of Iranian and Syrian origin) who trained his son literally from the crib to hit a tennis ball. Agassi remembers watching his father once get out of their car and fist fight a man who had cut them off in traffic, his father getting the better of the man. Agassi displayed these scrappy and defensive characteristics throughout his career with the best return game of all time, and some of the best baseline ground strokes ever.

It makes me wonder what I learned from my parents and what my children are learning from me?