expanding universe

I never had a good memory for recitation, Dave, but I was doing dramatic readings almost sixty years ago. 

   

A bunch of us would get together in the shade of a big sewer pipe, in the sweltering Oklahoma summer, and I would read Poe and other weirdos to the other kids.  Short stories and poems.  That was fifth or sixth grade, I think.  In the seventh grade I discovered sex, and stopped giving public readings for the next fifteen years.  (At which time I may have discovered that one can serve the other.)

    

Even earlier than that, I was giving science lectures to the other kids for a dime a throw, Kool-Aid served to those with ID’s.  I’ve written about that here.  The most impressive demonstration was melting a tablespoon or so of potassium nitrate in a test tube and tossing in some flowers of sulfur on top of it.  White-hot flare for about ten seconds, the test tube impressively melting, thick plumes of sulfur trioxide flowing out to poison young lungs.   Jay Amshey’s mother coming to the door of the basement saying, “What on Earth are you children doing down there?”  (Just practicing up for my career as a college professor, Ma’am.)

   

Its funny to remember that at that time I was painfully shy under normal circumstances.  Give me a page of notes, though, and some chemical apparatus or a microscope or telescope, and I was a chatterbox. 

When I was by myself I mostly wrote and drew.  When I was eleven, my father relinquished an unimaginable $49.95 and bought me a 4” reflecting telescope – and my universe expanded much faster than the speed of light.

Joe