DAY 85: Seeding the Clouds

When I was born, my mom wanted me to follow a life path of my own choosing.  But my father found a way around it.  For many years, a typical bedtime included lesson time; dad would come in and ask me to teach him something I had learned that day.  So I taught him about the letter R, the number 6, "twinkle twinkle", how to share...  He was patient with all of it.  Sometimes, we'd stare up at the bedroom walls, painted to look like heavenly clouds, and we'd tell stories of the things that lived there.

"What's that one?"  he'd say.

"Mop-mop.  It looks like the head of a mop!"

He squinted at it.  "I suppose.  What about that one next to it?"

"Go-gi!"

"I like that one.  What are they doing?"

"Gogi makes food for everybody in his restaurant.  And then somebody on the other side of the cloud calls in their order, and Gogi's delivers!  That's the delivery bubble over there."

"Wow.  There's a lot of delivery trucks on that cloud.  That's a big one!"

"That's Lisa's garbage truck.  She doesn't deliver food.  And it's bubbles!.  They're all bubbles!"

***

After placement testing in junior high, I was never in one grade again.  The year that I took eighth grade english and gym, I was also enrolled in ninth grade spanish and history, tenth grade biology, AP calculus, and played 2nd chair cello.  Mom also had me cook family dinner once a week.

It was in biology class that I learned one of my dad's tricks.  Our teacher was introducing us to the components of the typical mammalian cell unit, via a video presentation and a monotone narration.  "The cell membrane is the semi-porous outer boundary that keeps the organelles contained.  At the center is the nucleus, the cell's 'brain' ; this is surrounded by the endoplasmic reticulum (both smooth and rough.)  Enzymes are transported throughout the cell by vesicles, to or from the nucleus, the mitochondria, the golgi apparatus..."

That took me back to my room, and the painted ceiling; to Gogi and MopMop, to Lisa and Nuclearman and Mighty Condi...  As we watched archival footage of a typical single cell organism's life cycle, I saw a neighborhood that had been floating over my head for years.  I knew them, how they helped each other and why.  That class didn't teach me anything new about cell structure.  But it did teach me that my dad's a sneaky guy.



inspired by Discover Magazine article, "Immune Attack Up Close"