Brave Old World

One of the purest joys of my childhood was also an unmitigated disaster. I never wanted anything more than that chemistry set when I was 7 years old, probably because I liked picturing myself in cerebral jobs like a writer, geologist, or absent-minded professor. Maybe the latter because of the influence of Jerry Lewis in his hit “The Nutty Professor”. Wikipedia reports that you can be so engrossed in your study that you can neglect things like, oh, maybe a paper route? Sounded good to me. It could also be an excuse to be subpar in other areas, like athletics:

"The absent-minded professor is a stock character of popular fiction, usually portrayed as a talented academic whose academic brilliance is accompanied by below-par functioning in other areas, leading to forgetfulness and mistakes.

One explanation of this is that highly talented individuals often have unevenly distributed capabilities, being brilliant in their field of choice but below average on other measures of ability. Alternatively, they are considered to be so engrossed in their field of study that they forget their surroundings."

Maybe I’m overthinking it. I was also intensely curious in what things looked like under a microscope. It was a way to see what is invisible and what could possibly be cooler than that? Who wouldn’t want to see God if they could?

I worked long into the morning of Christmas Day and came down with an allergic reaction necessitating a hospital visit. So the mini-disaster.  That was the first and last day I got to use my chemistry set. My potential career as a scientist ended abruptly. 

But what makes me think of this is how they would never market a chem set to kids nowadays for threat of lawsuit. In fact, if the statute of limitations wasn’t up I could probably sue now and afford that vacation home in Hilton Head...hmmm....

We lived in a braver time, a seatbelt-less world of courage and fortitude free from the iron grip of lawyers. When I think of Ohio during the '60s and ‘70s I think of the unofficial motto of Miami University: "To think that in such a place, I led such a life”.... And lived to tell about it.