Fifth grade maybe? Young enough that I never actually had a chemistry class. What I knew of laboratories came from Saturday afternoon black and white movies shown in the UHF channels. The smoke pouring from beakers. Coils with electric sparks bouncing around them. The scientist, always mad, always male.
I didn’t have a plan for something I wanted to discover or invent; I just wanted to see what would happen, what all the heating and mixing gets you. The process seemed both dangerous and intelligent at the same time.
Everything else on my Christmas list that year was token. Mom kept telling me I was too young for it. But on Christmas morning, it was there, a big white metal box. When I open it, the very names of the chemicals intoxicate me: aluminum sulfate, cobalt chloride, potassium chloride, sodium carbonate. Reading them, I was already smarter and I hadn’t even touched them yet. A microscope, slides, and the iconic test tubes. Mysterious litmus paper. And joy of joys--a burner!
As we would say today: the shit’s about to get real.
I set up a lab in my parents’ wet bar: a tiny space covered in wood paneling. The cabinet was filled with dusty 10-year old bottles of liquor from the party they had when we first moved into the house. In other words: a tinder box. But I was not a reckless child, just curious. I pulled out the burner and followed the instructions for heating up some crystals that would turn colors. I mixed potions and tested them with litmus paper. I examined and compared this and that under the microscope.
I had no idea what I was doing. I loved it.
I never blew anything up, though secretly and in the name of science, I wished for a small explosion. I didn’t burn my eyebrows off or cut my thumb on a broken test tube. I never tasted something labeled poison. I never spilled a toxic liquid for the dog to find and lap up.
But I could spend an afternoon asking, “What happens if…” and though the answer was almost always “not much,” I never grew tired of the possibility.
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