Image by jurvetson via Flickr

I use a lot of science.  I use science, and am used by science.  My life is full of science, from the blind flipping of light switches, so I can find the computerized cellphone that has fallen off the nightstand, to surviving ingestion of anything not actually moving in my refrigerator, death-dealing bacteria having been thwarted by scientific application of preservatives.

I wheel to work, encased in a rolling kettle of scientific breakthroughs, power this and power that, Steve Earle’s “The Revolution Starts Now” blasting from state-of-the-science speakers.  An idiot light on the instrument panel tells me that onboard computers have detected a problem that won’t be covered by the warranty, and will cost most of next weeks pay.  Yes, science is all around me.

White lab coats, and scrubs of many colors have ushered me through my existence, as though I were a microbe in a test tube.  I have nothing to do with any of this; I am zipping around in a centrifuge, like a kid on a carnival ride hoping that the grizzled old guy sleeping next to the control doesn’t wake up and stop the ride.

I didn’t start out thinking I would have absolutely nothing to contribute to the Space Age; initially, I thought I’d be doing my part.  I kept up, in early years, with identifying life in a drop of pond water, under lenses of the primitive microscopes we had in school.  I asked Santa for, and received, my very own Gilbert chemistry set (something today’s Homeland Security folks would probably have a field day with), and this is where I made my own scientific breakthrough:  I discovered that, as with all things mechanical, I would never be anything but an end user of someone else’s endeavors.

I was done in by the sweet science (no, not boxing, though that was another humbling experience).  A mere step-and-a-half from rocket science, my carmelization of C12H22O11 (sugar) experiments did me in.  Terminally blackened test tubes were all I created, along with sweet toasty-smelling smoke.  Despite all the contra-indicators, and until I ran out of clean test tubes, I still thought I was on my way to one of those coveted lab coats.

I was convinced that my work with powdered iron was a thing of beauty.  If my parents had ventured to the basement during my mad-scientist days, they would have had conniptions.  Basically, we (”we” includes most of my buddies who went through the same thing) made “sparklers”; we glued powdered-iron onto little metal rods, let them dry not-quite-long-enough, and then, at dusk, lit them and threw them all over the neighborhood, miraculously not duplicating the work of Mrs O’Leary’s cow.

None of this promising early work led to my hitting tee-shots on the moon; as soon as I had used up all the easy stuff in my chemistry set, I lost interest and returned to my much surer climb to baseball immortality.

Formaldehyde.  I let the word waft around me, as did that god-awful smell in every science lab I was allowed to enter.  I recall my singular frog and worm dissections, in those grungy battered little baking pans that were filled with something we fondly referred to as hardened earwax.  Generations of primitive graffiti and scratchy initials were etched, with dissecting scalpels, into each pan, sort of old-oak-tree meets old-school-bathroom-wall, underscoring all my pitiable attempts to neatly pin open fetid amphibians and annelids.  I got used to teachers look at my work, and shuddering, making me wonder if it were possible that I was somehow torturing these poor long-dead specimens.

I can’t remember what all we might have accomplished with our gas jets and Bunsen burners; I do know I added to my test tube charring exploits, having missed the class on flame adjustment.  Experiments and projects that other kids pulled off without a hitch were dangerous adventures in my hands.  I may be the only student (class of 1971) in the history of Bishop Denis J. O’Connell High School to cook his chicken incubation project.  In this fiasco I was ably assisted by my younger brother, Steven, another highlighted entry on NASA’s never-hire list.

image via wikipedia

The assignment involved an hour-long trip to Olney, Maryland, which had some kind of monopoly on the incubation cage market.  There, every kid in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area got his or her first clue that eggs weren’t laid, by machines, in stores, neatly and by the dozen, in cardboard cartons.  We rented our equipment, bought our eggs, and trooped back to our suburban poultry basements, much to the delight of our parents.  The cages were heated by a single light bulb, and temperature, which had to be kept in a very narrow range, was monitored with a mercury-filled thermometer.

About a third of the way through the two-and-a-half week mission I had to overnight for a ballgame, and I left bro in charge of keeping an eye on temps in the cage.  Of course, during my absence, we were hit by a storm that knocked out the power, and suddenly my poor brother had a situation on his hands.  He reacted well, getting a flame going in the living room fireplace.  Then, swaddling the cage in blankets, he gently carried the awkward contraption upstairs and to the hearth, where the boneless chickens were kept warm and comfy.

Now, it’s a funny thing about those old mercury thermometers; you look at them from one direction, and the temperature looks different than from another direction.  Well, lab tech Steven diligently watched over the eggs, tossing logs into the fireplace, and he made sure that red line didn’t drop below the safe range.

This all happened in a time before the cell phone was even a gleam in Ma Bell’s eyes, and I didn’t learn about the power outage until I returned home.  Steven proudly showed me how he had protected the eggs, which was when we found out about thermometers.  What appeared to be a temperature in the safe range was actually a tube that had blown its top, and what should have been specimens of embryonic development were instead pretty good examples of how not to poach eggs.

So, it was another visit to the Olney egg mafiosi, for more ova, and a new thermometer.  Don’t ask me what happened to all the little blobs of quicksilver from the first thermometer, but I know my brother and I played with that stuff til the droplets got too small to deal with.  I know that the watershed leads to the Potomac River, and I know that future shad and herring runs weren’t what they should have been, but. . .

I still ponder how I managed to not only get through my science courses, but occasionally pull an ”A” or a “B”.  I think it came down to my uncanny stippling abilities.  Stippling is the poor cousin of pointillism, in which dots are used to create shape and shading.  My own modest genius was the result of years of rigorous doodling in the margins of almost every schoolbook I’d ever possessed.

Whenever I pause to contemplate other paths I might have chosen, my thoughts, mercifully, do not include visions of myself in a starched white lab coat.  And, unless NASA comes up with a need for professional stipplers, I don’t see myself moving to Houston or Cape Canaveral anytime soon.