I recently blogged about a particular scar I received as a child during one of my many crazy childhood antics, and as an aging Gen Xer, it started me down a nostalgic path, imparting on me a strong urge to write about some other childhood tales. You know, sort of get them off of my chest, confess, but most importantly, relive those daring days of old; shocked as all get out that I'm still breathing and all of my appendages are in tact after all.
When my twin sister and I were in the third grade we were living in a quaint little town in Georgia (I won't say the name because I don't want to bring shock and embarrassment to the town). Our very best friend from across the street, Jenny (that is her real name; I don't think she would mind me using it) was a tomboy and so were my sister and I, which made getting into trouble altogether easy. The three of us were inseparable and we played outside literally from sun up to well beyond sun down on the weekends and when we weren't in school. Our parents usually had to come and find us to come in for bed at night. We were also in constant trouble. By trouble, I don't mean insignificant negligible things like accidentally running into the neighbor's car with our bikes (though we did do that), forgetting to take the garbage out when it was our turn, leaving my little brother down the street (we did those things too), etc. I'm talking about precocious, cheeky, avant-garde escapades that should never enter the mind of 3rd graders.
You see, as members of Generation X (thought that term didn't exist when were 8), we thought the world was at our feet. We we were determined to be important female scientists when we grew up, so we wanted to start early by doing our own experiments, creating concoctions made up of every household cleaner we could find (we even created our own rocket fuel, but I'll write about that later), documenting everything we did to improve on our experiments, etc. We even had our own science lab in the woods at the end of our street (our street, Elder Drive, was a dead end street with acres and acres of woods at the end). We chopped down small trees to make a clearing. We cut steps into the Georgia clay dirt to give our lab a split-level design. We had notebooks and pencils and a cheap toy microscope. We even had a mason jar with change we collected in order to buy "supplies" for our lab when needed. It was this science lab that got us into many predicaments and the cause of much of our parents' and neighbors' vexation.
Our first order of business one Saturday morning, as up and coming scientists, was to find something we could study under our microscope, because after all, isn't that what scientists do? From TV, we learned that scientists usually look at blood under the microscope so after a long day of brainstorming, we agreed that is what we needed to study. The question was whose blood would we "study"? We didn't think we needed to look at our own blood because we were the scientists after all, so we decided that we would get blood samples from kids at school on the playground during recess.
The next Monday, during recess, we started asking kids if they wanted to be part of an important scientific test. Much to our surprise, we had a few takers. The problem was that we didn't have any glass slides for our microscope, so we had to find some glass. We got some sticks and began to dig up pieces of broken glass we found in the dirt on the playground. The glass was mostly from soda bottles, and it was clear glass, so we were in business. We wiped the dirt off the best we could and began to round up our victims, I mean test subjects. What we didn't know was the word spread around the playground about our important scientific work and many kids wanted to be part of it. We weren't just budding young scientists, we were also little capitalists in the making, so we decided we would charge these kids 25 cents to let us get a sample of their blood.
We began making small cuts on the fingers of those who wanted to be part of history with the broken glass we found. We smeared the blood all over the glass (it really wasn't much blood, so don't be too concerned). By the end of recess we had made enough money to buy ice cream for the next day's recess and we had some blood we could study under our microscope. Alas, like most 3rd graders, our attention span was short, and by the time we got home from school we were already bored with the microscope idea and we never viewed our blood samples. But, there is good news. We (the Elder Drive Scientists) were so popular with the gullible students now because they thought we were big time scientists in the making that we made enough money to buy ice cream at recess for many, many days.
--Fortuitous Observer
