Woman of Science
By Joy
Wells
The Thanksgiving I
was ten my sister brought her college roommate, Margreta home for the
weekend. Margreta was studying chemistry
and told us
about her classes and the latest projects.
I had never met a Woman of Science. Up
to that time I thought science and old men
in white lab coats was a formula for boring. All
weekend I listened to her stories about
the problems she was investigating and the things she was learning. She was smart, and I wanted to be intelligent
like she was. My dream of being a baseball player was shattered,
forever
displaced as I sat at her feet, a disciple.
Soon after that I came across my
sister’s high
school
biology textbook: “Biology: the Life
Science.” Just the word – biology- was a wondrous mystery to my eyes.
What did
it mean? The cover was a green photograph across the whole front and
back
showing cells mutating. I would read
this. I took it into the closet with
a flashlight, sat down, and began pouring over the pages.
Photosynthesis, cells, atoms, all just a
bunch of words I couldn’t even pronounce, I went through the first
chapter. The middle part of the book was
about human anatomy and displayed in color see-through sections of the
body –
skeleton first, lymphatic system, organs, muscles, and finally skin.
Kinda
spooky, looking inside of a body. I felt
hunger, a hunger to know what it all meant, how all these things fit
together
to form life.
My parents noticed my newfound love.
One day I came home, ran into my bedroom and
found a little pine box about one foot high sitting on the floor by the
closet.
Dad poked his head in as I knelt down beside it. “I
got that at the college for you. Hope you
like it.” Then he went about his
business and left me alone to discover what was inside.
I undid the fasteners, took off the cover, and
found my own real microscope. I was in awe.
I’d never had such an amazing gift.
Something I truly, down deep desired.
The bottom of the box was the permanent
base of
the
microscope. The body was gray and silver
and the lens was attached to the base with a waxy substance. What a thing of beauty. The
large knob for focusing the lens moved
smoothly up and down. There was a box of
glass slides sitting on the base tucked against the lens. I clipped a
slide
under the lens and turned the knob forward, looking into the eyepiece
and
trying to focus the slide. The lens
didn’t have a safety bar and turning the lens too far to the top, I
broke it off
of the housing. Oh no, I felt sick. I had broken my new microscope in the first
five minutes. I got it back on it’s
hinge and found it would still work fine as long as I didn’t take it
too far up
– the wrong direction anyway.
What’s that? Creepy spidery things were
moving
across the
glass – my first glimpse of something in the lens.
It was alive! This must be something, they
were moving wildly in all directions. Realizing
these were my eyelashes was only a temporary disappointment.
I was now focusing on pollen grains,
something I’d
never
seen before, something so small it could not be seen with the human eye. When I got the grains in view, I thought for
a moment: the eyelashes were more interesting.
This is dead stuff, it doesn’t move. Yet
I was busy investigating my fifth slide when Mom called me for
dinner. This was no toy, this was
serious. Science should not be disturbed
by the mere need for food.
From that point forward I knew learning
was inside
of me. The world was mine to discover. I was not to become a scientist, and there
were many detours from my first love, but I approach life and work with
an
investigator’s eye, and I will never give up searching.