I need to tell you this story. When I was a little boy I came across (I guess it was at the library) a book published by UNESCO; it had hundreds and hundreds of science experiments and techniques for all sorts of cool things. (I think this might have been where I got the idea to cut glass jars by plunging a red-hot poker into them while they were full of cooking oil; it didn't work, but my grandmother--my father's mother--yelled at me for wasting the oil (it was her oil). She estimated that the oil I'd ruined cost about $2 and asked me if I had any money. I was, like, 9 or 10 years old at the time. My mom didn't approve of her yelling at me and I got off scot free aside from the yelling.)
Anyway, one thing I remember from the book is the part about making an egg incubator. I don't remember if I ever actually made one, but I certainly never successfully gestated any chicken eggs, and I'll bet that if I tried to, they were just eggs from the grocery store. But the point is that I would flip through this book and daydream about all the cool experiments I wanted to perform, and in the back of my mind I knew that I'd never really get to do them because they were so sophisticated and expensive and dangerous and I was just a kid anyway. I always had a vague thought in the back of my mind, "Someday I'll be able to do cool stuff like this." I spent a lot of my time daydreaming as a kid.
Years pass and A____ and I break up. She works at P_______H and I've quit Dell so I have a lot of time to kill. One day I'm in Barnes and Noble looking at childrens' science books and I see the UNESCO book. I'm so excited--I had no idea it was still in print. It's basically the very same book I read as a child, just with a new publisher and a new cover (a dust jacket--fancy!) with bright colors and a photograph on the front.
I want to buy two copies, but I figure that's kind of silly. Now that I know it's there I can go get it whenever I want, right? But I do buy a copy for A; I figure it might be a good resource for her to use as a science textbook editor. I give her the book and I'm sure I tell her a little about the story of my encounter with it as a child.
Anyway. I work at PH and A has quit (we worked together for about a year; she was my boss at PH until she quit). One day I'm looking on my boss's shelf for some reference book or other and I see the UNESCO book up near the top. I figure, "Wow! I don't know why I never noticed before that he has it too, but that makes sense. It's obviously some sort of classic." Every time I go looking in his bookshelves I find something cool anyway, so I figure, mystery solved. This book isn't such a rare and personal gem of my own so much as it has an objective sort of value to the bigger world. This makes me feel good as it's basically evidence that I'm not an idiot. [*idios* Gr., own, private] I leave the book on the bookshelf for the time being because I have a lot of work to do.
A couple weeks pass and I have nothing to do. It's lunchtime on, I think, Wed. Nov. 13 of 2002 and I remember the book so I go grab it to read at my desk while I eat. I open the book and see A's full name on the first sheet, in her handwriting. This is the copy I gave to her. This is the copy I bought for her and didn't buy for myself because I couldn't afford to buy two. It's been in my boss's office for how long, I wonder?
Well, after I get finished crying, I hide the book under my editor's desk. For some reason I remove the dust jacket and squirrel it away somewhere on my bookshelf spine in so no one will see what it is.
When I leave work that day I bring the book home (with the dust jacket) and when I curl up in bed to read it I open it and see her name again. This just isn't going to work so I tear out the page (there's nothing printed on this sheet--it's a blank at the very beginning) and burn it in the toilet. Now the front of the book has a jagged remnant of a sheet there, but at least I won't see her name every time I open it up to read.
[700 Science Experiments for Everyone, compiled by UNESCO. ISBN: 0-385-05275-8]
posted at 6:54 AM |
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