i was never very good in science. better in science than math but when you consider that i could add one plus one in several ways and get several answers, saying that i am better in science than math has no relevance whatsoever.
i had a science teacher once who all the kids thought of as "mean." when i came home from the first day of 9th grade and told my parents that sure enough, i got mrs. cook for science, they said that was great. "what's great about it," i said. "she's mean." they said that "mean" means she's a good teacher - that she would make me learn - that she wouldnt' let me get away with murder. and she didn't - let me get away with murder, that is. what she did let me get away with is burning myself half to smithereens and ruining one entire glorious teenaged summer when i could have been studying my own kind of science. if you get my drift.
what happened is, it was june. school had just let out. i had survived my 9th grade year with mean mrs. cook. i felt like celebrating. i had some friends over to spend the night.......
next morning, we threw on our bikinis first thing - the sun wasn't quite up but we were ready for the first ray. working on our tans was serious business.
while we waited for the sun to rise (in the east, by the way, which, ha ha, mrs. cook, i knew that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west way before i ever had you for a science teacher)..........while we waited for the sun to rise, we got hungry. someone said donuts. nobody was old enough to drive so we couldn't go to schuler's. my parents were health-and weight-conscious even back in that day, so there were no donuts in the house.
we decided to make some. from scratch.
and we did. we did. they turned out great. delicious. nobody ate more than one bite - because donuts are fattening - and the only thing more important than getting a suntan was getting a suntan on a thin body - but the donuts were great. looking back, i don't remember what we did with the leftovers. probably threw them away. but i hope not. my social studies teacher wouldn't have approved. and now that i'm grown and i recognize (notice i said "recognize," not "like")........now that i recognize that i am not the center of the universe and somebody, somewhere was starving and would have died, literally, for a single bite of a donut, well, i hope we didn't throw them away. i just hope we didn't.
but i digress. first time ever i have digressed.
so..........what happened next is where the not letting me get away with murder but ruining my summer comes in............
after we were done making the donuts, it was time to clean up. first thing we decided to do is take the boiling hot oil off the stove. good first thing.
second thing - not nearly as good - and before i tell you what it is, let me point out that mrs. cook never - never - never once said anything about what happens if you pour hot oil into a glass jar. never once.
so...........yeah. true story. i poured boiling hot oil into a big glass jar that i was holding in my left hand. and the whole thing exploded like your family at the table on thanksgiving, talkin' politics.
it burst into the air, my friends went running, and the grease went running, too. all over my hand, all over my chest, all over my stomach, and all over my legs. it didn't stop till it got to my ankles. and by then, i was in, literally, shock.
what happened next was worse than the burn itself. as i was lying in a semi-state of consciousness in the emergency room, i kept asking the nurses and the doctors and the thousands of other people who work in a hospital (and were probably eager to catch a glimpse of a teenager in a bikini) whether or not this meant that i wouldn't be leaving the next day, as planned, for mexico.
i was supposed to leave the next day, with my upcoming 10th grade spanish class (whose teacher was not mean), for mexico. we were going to be down there for 2 wonderful weeks, learning spanish. and learning about boys who speak spanish.
but, no, said the nurses and the doctors and the thousands of others........no. you are not going to mexico. you're not going anywhere. all summer. the closest you might get to going somewhere is getting off the couch to change the channel.
and so. the rest of that summer, i spent on my back. wrapped in gauze from my neck to my ankles. that hurt. when my girlfriends came back from mexico with the addresses of people named jose and pedro and raul, that really hurt.
but the point of this whole story is mrs. cook and how, even though she really didn't turn out to be mean (she actually ended up being one of my favorite teachers of all time), how she never bothered - not once - to teach us not to make donuts.
she also never bothered to teach us why ice is cold.
