A Love Letter to an old 'John Bircher"

Note:  the promised final installment in the "Clearness for Writers Groups" series will be posted in a couple of days.  For now, this is what is on my mind:

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I have loved science my entire life.  No one can ever be entirely sure what starts these things - are they innate tendencies, or nurtured into existence?  Who can know?  I do know, however, that my

earliest memories of science-love go back to a neighbor who lived on the opposite side of the block from my parent’s home when I was a child.  The back entrance to his house was just across the alley from my parent’s back gate.  Early on, I simply knew him as one of the large, towering men who came to the backyard barbeques my parents would have in the summer, and the father of a teenage boy the same age as my oldest sister.  He also ran a sharpening shop out of his garage, which faced on the alley, and often I could hear the whine of the large grinders drifting up to my open window as he worked at sharpening someone’s knives or scissors or lawn mower blades.

I don’t remember how it happened - maybe his wife invited me in for cookies (not unusual for the mothers on that block) or maybe he and I talked as he worked near the open door of his shop, but, one day, I found myself standing in his living room, looking at a small wooden bookshelf filled with identical volumes - The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science.  I stared, until a voice over my shoulder asked if I’d like to see.  I nodded, and Mr. Ostroot - he of the whining sharpening blades - stepped forward, pulled a volume from the shelf, and crouched down to show it to me.  He opened the pages, and, suddenly, spread out before my nine-year-old eyes, was a panoramic picture of swirling galaxies.  

I must have gasped, or perhaps I automatically reached for the book, I don’t remember, but what I do remember is that day, and many others, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Ostroot’s living room, pouring over the pages, volume after volume, reading, touching the pictures, studying the Table of Elements until I thought - until I got home and realized I was wrong - that I had it memorized.  

I can feel the hard wood of the floor under me, my ankles crossed, a big volume in my lap, and the silk feel of the glossy pages as I turned one after another, day after day.  I would run my hand over equations that explained chemical reactions, study the pictures of molecules, looking like some smooth brightly-colored variation on tinker-toys.  I would read of archeological digs, of the evolution of  Man, of the vast distances of space.  There were times when Mrs. Ostroot had to come rouse me because she heard my mother or my older sisters calling for me as evening fell.  

All of this was at a time and in a place where girls were not encouraged to become scientists or mathematicians, no matter how good were their grades.  Mr. (and Mrs.) Ostroot cared about none of this - I was a child with a curious mind, and they were more than happy to oblige my curiosity.  All of these years later, they have my appreciation and a strange at-a-distance, through-time form of love.  

I also owe them for my love of science fiction.  During this time of cross-legged wonder with the Illustrated Encyclopedia, I was taken by one of my older sisters to the local library to get my first library card.  Wandering the stacks that day, my eye fell on a label at the end of one aisle:  Science Fiction.  All I saw was the word ‘science’ and my feet turned down the aisle.  I still remember the two

books I took home that day.  One was a young adult novel called The Forgotten Door, about travel between dimensions, and the other was an adult sci-fi novel called When Worlds Collide.  As I excitedly summarized the latter to my older sisters a few days later at the dinner table, they declared it to be “an Everyman story” - which sent me off on research into archetypes in literature that I doubt many nine-year-olds (certainly few at that time) had done.  So, in a way, Mr. & Mrs. Ostroot are also responsible for my love of literature in general, and research.

My love affair with their science encyclopedia ended a year or two later.  One day, as I sat there reading through an article on Newton’s Laws, Mr. Ostroot approached me with a plate of cookies to take home to my sisters, and a sheaf of papers - brochures - that he wanted me to give to my mother.  They were brochures from The John Birch Society.  I dutifully took it all home, and delivered both cookies and brochures as directed.  My mother, a devout liberal Democrat, glanced at the brochures and asked me where I’d gotten them, and I told her.  She asked what I was doing there, and I told her about the Encyclopedia, and how I would go read it when my other sisters were outside playing.  Her lips pressed tight, and, later that day, she pulled me aside and told me I was not to go back to the Ostroots.  Ever.  The John Birch Society, she said, was evil, and she did not want me around people who supported it.  

For some time, I mourned the loss of my beloved Encyclopedia, until one day my mother took me to the basement and showed me the dusty old case contained twenty volumes of The Book of Knowledge that she had acquired years before.  It was seriously out of date, especially as compared to the brand-new, glossy, colorful Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science, but I was mollified, and spent many a long afternoon reading those volumes, until I discovered that I could get even more up to date books on real science (and more sci-fi books as well) from the library.  I then learned to live there, and for many years, totally forgot those hours on the Ostroot’s floor with their expensive, shiny-new, beautiful volumes on the glory of science.

My mother worried about exposing my impressionable young mind to political views that clashed with what she believed was right.  In the effort, though she didn’t know it, she almost blocked my exposure to one the main sources of youthful passion:  pictures, stories, illustrations, articles, graphs explanations - all about science.  Between the library, the Book of Knowledge, and the way the works of the likes of Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein, and others expanded my mind to what the world of science might some day accomplish, to the mystery and wonder and apparently unlimited potential of science for explaining the world around us.  I took (and got As in) every science course from high school through college.  Microbiology and physics, astronomy, discrete mathematics and oceanography.  It was like playing.  My love of all things scientific - the scientific method, the rule of reason and logic -  has stayed with me my entire life, and, in a variety of forms, makes its way into my writing.

The message for writers?  Whatever was your passion as a child, never lose it, or, if you have, drop everything you’re doing now, and beat a path back to it, in any way you can.  If there is anything that every writer needs to bring to their work, it is the one thing that ignites their passion.  Remember it.  Sink into it.  Let it guide you.