Dis the Scientist

 

This is a recent portrait. Go back seventy years to late spring. Picture me in short pants bringing home a snake after school and scaring Mom up onto a kitchen chair. My inner scientist was in charge. To give Mom credit, she forgave me the snake, a concession to youthful curiosity, just as she forgave the menagerie in the basement: spiders, praying mantids, grasshoppers, crickets, salamanders. For a few days that summer, there were two large crayfish in the sinks beside the washing machine. After they died and began to smell, I tried to preserve them in salt. It didn't work, so I decided to switch from biology to chemistry. 

My first experiment in chemistry was an acid-base indicator made from red cabbage. After a few weeks, the bottle exploded filling the basement with a smell not unlike dead crayfish, so I switched to physics.

During my electrical period, Poppy, who was a retired railway engineer, gave me his textbook. Unfortunately, the book was out of date. I mean, it was written before the electron made it into the railroad engineer curriculum. My inner scientist needed electrons because I already knew the current was going from negative to positive, so the book went to the dump following the crayfish and sauerkraut.

Dad knew I was messing with electricity and warned me to be careful. I had been asking him to fix the light socket above my workbench in the basement. It took him a few weeks to get to it, and when he did, he found the light socket was working. I had to explain that I had fixed it. "Did you remove the fuse before working on it?" "No, but I was careful." 

It came Hallowe'en. The youth were putting on a chamber of horrors for gory fun and we needed a dead body. We got a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans, stuffed them to make a dummy, and left it on the basement floor near my work table. When Dad saw it there, he was sure that I had been electrocuted doing one of my experiments, and he nearly died of shock himself.

There are lots more stories, but that is enough to make a point. I am trying to show that a scientist without an inner poet is a bit of a jerk. His thoughtless actions distress his parents. He has no feeling for the creatures he has collected. He does not respect his ancestors because he knows more than they do. He is unaware that his children will know more than he does. He is a jerk.. 

Never fear. Life will show him things that are not in the latest textbook. He won't get far before his inner poet awakes. Then look out. 

You thought he was a noxious jerk before.

He's now equipped with rhyme and metaphor.