how things work

Growing up, I was not allowed to wear a bikini. My mother told me that bellybuttons were a private part and should be kept hidden at all times. This may be part of the reason that, when I was in elementary school, I thought girls got pregnant by pressing their bellybuttons.

I decided that I would marry my friend Beth and we would have children - but I was told that it did not work that way. I put alot of thought into this. Since a person got pregnant by pressing their bellybutton, why couldn’t girls have babies with each other? There must be something I was missing. Eventually, I had the realization that (of course), a boy had to do the bellybutton pushing. And, you had to be married for it to work. I was very proud of the fact that I was able to figure out this big mystery all by myself. The bellybutton system worked for me. I was happy with it. I did not feel the need to ask questions.

I was in middle school before I learned about the vague generalities of sex. I was fifteen before I learned the specifics. I made an offhand comment to my mother and she realized that I did not have a very clear idea about the mechanics involved in procreation. I remember her telling me how it all actually fit together. I was very upset about this knowledge. Sex as she described it was so much more clinical and invasive than I had imagined it. Before this talk, I pictured sex in terms of metaphors and impressions - it was all based on things I saw in the movies or scraps of e.e. cummings poetry and song lyrics. Sex that came with a soundtrack and a fade to black. The things I cared the most about had been lost in her scientific translation: beauty, wonder, mystery. I felt sad.

Science has always just generally pissed me off. I hate it. From elementary school on, I never wanted to learn about things like gravity and atoms. I would have been happier not knowing that water and sky are not really blue - they just reflect blue; and that somehow there are not really colors - it is all just white light and frequencies or prisms or something. Science teachers start talking, and explaining, and I just want to put my head down and cover my ears. I don’t want to know. Really.

I don’t want to know about atoms and DNA and genes. I took botany in college and it was the only class that I ever failed. I just could not handle it. I took botany because of trees; I thought I would learn to name them and identify their leaves. But it was all science, and labeling parts, and how pesticides worked, and grafting plants together to make new plants. The professor got to the glow-in-the-dark corn hybrid experiments and I stopped going to class.

In high school, I was put on the AP track. I made it through the first semester of AP biology before I broke down. We were dissecting starfish. I thought I was going to die. Seriously. It was awful. I cut open the starfish and I started crying.

I cried, and I begged them to take me out of AP science. I did not want to dissect anything else. I did not want to tally up fruit fly deaths and births and count the ones with red eyes. I did not ever want to take chemistry. I wanted out of advanced science.

They ended up letting me take the general science classes, and I was happy. Instead of chemistry, I tool “ecology”, which was taught by a white-haired hippie that had a side-business making wooden dulcimers. He would bring his dulcimer to class and let us try to play it. I made a model of a solar-powered cabin. I did a report on recycling old buses and turning them into houses. It was the only science class I ever made an”A” in.

When I had to do science fair experiments, I always came up with topics that were basically excuses to get pet mice. I did one project on the effects of rock vs. classical music on mouse behavior. The next year, I put their cages inside of different colored boxes and recorded their behavior. Did the mice in the red box behave aggressively? Did the blue boxed mice seem sad? It was very scientific.

After two years of mice escaping from cages, my parents said that I was not allowed to do any more experiments involving animals. So, I did my last science fair project on ESP. My hypothesis was that ESP ability would decrease with age. I went all the way to state with this experiment- not because it was a well-done experiment - but because I was the only person in whatever category ESP fell under. I resisted actual science. I resisted learning about the way things work. I just wanted to know how things felt.

I understand that some people, science people , enjoy learning this stuff. It makes them happy (and if any science-type people read this site - God bless you). I just could not do it. I cringed when I walked into a science classroom. I wondered what mystery was going to be ruined for me that day. I tuned out. I wrote on the desks. I put my head down and fell asleep. I tried to block all the answers out. I wanted to hold onto the magic of it, to keep believing in oceans and skies painted blue by something too wonderful to explain. I wanted things held together by Love, not by protons and neutrons.

And so, when I found a coffee table made out of an old science desk - I fell in love with it. I think it is beautiful. Years and years of kids trying to escape science, and carving their names into the desk. I know how they felt. Scribbling frantic lines on the sides, where the teacher could not see. Trying to get the hell out there. Thinking about graduation, or who they loved. Writing song lyrics, or poetry. Using their dissecting instruments to dig words into the wood and black.

I bought this table. I am going to buy an Exacto knife and a drawing compass. When friends visit, I am going to ask them to carve their name.

I am going to make this table a reminder of everything mysterious and wonderful about the people I know.

I will look at it and smile. I will run my hand over the names and whisper prayers. I will wonder at the mystery of it all.

And I will say that we are not science. We are art. We are held together by Love.