As if a career in music isn’t perilous enough, American musician Robin Goldsby and her bassist husband take on a few critters roaming the German countryside. 

Thwack. Or is it thwump? Skittle, scratch, scrape, thwop. It’s a quarter to three and there’s no one in the place except you and me—thonk—and Dumbo? Has a baby elephant crash-landed on the roof? Thwunk. Bosh. Maybe it’s Batman. Sasquatch? A lost WWII paratrooper? Lord of the Dance? At this time of the night anything is possible.

I wonder if I should awaken John, my sleeping prince of a husband. He wears earplugs and misses most pre-dawn rumblings. ‘Round midnight he’s in slumber-land, oblivious to things that rattle the rafters in the wee small hours of the morning.  I could wake him, but I know if I do, he’ll go into Rodent Red Alert, a state from which he will not emerge until the intruder is caught and removed from the premises. Not anxious to encourage a late-night hunting expedition, I ignore the critter clog-dancing over my head. I retire to the sofa downstairs, leaving my sleep-diva man tucked in and dreaming of suspicious jazz chords. What he can’t hear won’t hurt him. I put a pillow over my head and hope whatever it is goes away—a time-tested technique for chasing away the heebie-jeebies.

**

My husband’s mission to rid the world of household pests began in 1964, when little John, age six, rescued his family home from an invasion of exotic creatures. Snug in his Louisville bed—this was before he started playing screaming loud rock and roll bass guitar and wearing earplugs to go to sleep—he heard varmints—scritch-scratch, scritch-scratch—eating away the walls, munching on the very foundation of his youth.

“Mother and Daddy,” he said with a charming little-boy Louisville accent. “There’s something alive in the walls. And it’s eating our house.”

Mother and Daddy, who couldn’t hear what little John heard, brushed off his warning, until, at last, little John threw such a big fit that they had to call either a exorcist or an exterminator. They opted for the exterminator. The verdict? Carpenter ants—tiny insects capable of taking down an entire homestead. Little John was vindicated. He saved the house and reaped the rewards of a grateful family.

Several decades after the carpenter ant episode, I met and married John. We got to know each other while playing at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, next to Grand Central Station in Manhattan. He logged seven hours a night with a jazz trio in a marble lobby filled with fountains, potted palms, and uncomfortable chairs; I played a Steinway five evenings a week in Trumpet’s (named after The Donald), a cocktail cave that looked like a leather-lined womb. We dealt with a lot of pests on the job, but most of them worked for the Food and Beverage department. That’s another story.

We lived in a small apartment in New York City. Most of our pals had hideous pest problems.  Mice. Rats. Roaches. Oh, the war stories we heard. My friend Patti told me about an army of cockroaches that carried an entire plate of rat poison back to their cock-hideouts—only to reappear the next morning, ready for more, more, more.  A girl I knew named Nina had a rat the size of a dog drop on her head when the acoustic tile ceiling in her bathroom collapsed on her just after she had gotten out of the shower. It’s hard for me to imagine anything worse—naked and attacked by a rat-dog. But our apartment was surprisingly clear of roaches and rodents. Aside from hearing the carpenter ant story about a hundred times, I had no idea how John might react to a household pest of his own. Then we moved to Germany.

Some people might say were asking for it. We built a small home on a piece of wooded property in a village thirty kilometers outside of Cologne.  We moved in with our two kids, overjoyed at having a place of our own. We marveled at the deer, even though they ate our decorative bushes for breakfast. The kids caught frogs in the garden and made goo-goo eyes at the hedgehogs.  Oh, the birds, the bees, the flora, the fauna, the wild boars—one morning we spotted eight (eight!) of them walking down the slope next to our house. The adult boars were bigger than any member of my family, which is saying something. They weren’t needy, they were nicely choreographed, and they didn’t whine. Fine. Just passing through, like a well-disciplined chorus line exiting stage left.

This, in contrast to the mouse in the sugar bowl. I spotted him one morning, flopping around on a white-sugar high, nose deep in the bowl, ass up in the air, tail shaking, re-enacting the cocaine scene from Scarface.  I screamed (I am strong, I am invincible, but I am, after all, an American blond). John rushed to my side. Rodent Red Alert! John’s eyes glazed over and he began plotting a trip to the local hardware store to buy traps.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Julia is not going to like this.” Our daughter has always been an animal lover. She has been known to hold funeral ceremonies for drowned wasps. Killing a mouse would have been like offing a close friend.

“We have to be firm about this,” John said to me. “Do you know how dangerous mice are? They can take over. They’ll even take bites out of small children while they’re sleeping.”

I didn’t argue, especially when he tried to convince me the mouse might be a rat.

That night at dinner, John, using The Voice— not the cool jazz cat voice, but the booming dad voice—told the family about setting the traps and how we had to band together to kill the evil and diseased rodent. Julia’s eyes filled with tears. “Dad,” she said. “How could you?”

Never underestimate the power of an eight-year-old girl’s protest. Julia printed out über-cute photos of country mice, wrote slogans like stop the madness and please don’t murder us in red crayon on them, and taped the posters to walls all over the house.

John went to Plan B, the live trap.

“We’ll get that little rat,” he said.

“It’s a mouse,” I said.

“It could be a small rat. You never know.”

The live trap involved peanut butter and a weighted cake pan suspended on a Popsicle stick. I heard the pan slam in the middle of the night. John slept through it, of course; he was wearing earplugs. I stayed awake with the pillow over my head, certain I could hear the mouse choking on peanut butter while he dragged the pan—like a suit of armor—all over the kitchen. The next morning, a look of triumph on his rested face, John drove to the other side of the valley, where he released not one, but two mice (they were not rats). We were saved. Victory for the bass player.

**

For the last week I’ve been hearing it.  Every evening, long after we’ve fallen asleep, there’s a resounding thump on the roof, followed by a flurry of commotion.  The critter must be leaping from one of the old trees near the house. But the closest branch would require Evel Knievel skills to cover the distance. I can’t figure it out. On the sly, I ask Julia if she has heard anything.

“Yeah,” she says. “Whatever it is, it sure sounds big and fat. But don’t tell Dad. You know how he gets. The last thing we need around here is another safari.”

A couple of times a year since that first mouse episode, we’ve had visitors. Rodent Red Alert has become commonplace. But whatever is thumping on the roof is in a different category. We don’t need a trap for this thing; we need a counter-terrorism unit.

I can’t sleep. I keep thinking of my New York friend Nina and that rat-dog crashing through the ceiling and landing on her head. Finally, I have no choice. I tell John. He removes his earplugs, stays up, listens to the racket, and proclaims a full-scale emergency. He confers with his good friend, Hans, a Dutch drummer with pest issues of his own. John and Hans, experts in jazz and critters, determine our roof dweller is a Marder, an American martin, which is a member of the dreaded weasel family.

Just what we need—a German weasel. We hear from neighbors that this particular weasel has been chewing on brake cables of parked cars down the street. He has also massacred and eaten the pet bunnies living next door to us. Julia’s friend, Maryam, is still heartbroken. She didn’t even have a carcass to bury. Julia nicely arranged a small memorial service.

“No more Mr. Nice Guy,” says John, using The Voice. “This is a dangerous situation. That weasel gets under the shingles and into the walls of the house, we’re in big trouble.” With a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for Protected Species. In this part of Germany, we have to be nice to the weasels. The weasel is our friend.

We buy an expensive device called a “Weasel-Schreck” which claims to make a constant high-pitched squeal—unappealing to members of the weasel family.

Doesn’t work. Perhaps the weasel is also wearing earplugs.

Following Hans’s advice, John buys an expensive live trap that looks big enough to catch one of the neighborhood toddlers. I spy John setting the trap with a cheese-topped cracker and an olive. Looks like a weasel cocktail party.

Doesn’t work. The crackers and olives are gone, but the trap remains empty. I suggest a pitcher of martinis.

We drink the martinis ourselves, call the Baum Meister, and spend hundreds of euros having him trim back branches close to the house.

Doesn’t work. The thumps at night grow louder as the weasel leaps from even greater distances. It seems we have a member of the Flying Wallendas living on our roof.

We consult with a home improvement center Pest Expert. He tells us there’s no legal way to get rid of a German weasel. Then he takes us aside, lowers his voice, and tells us to wait for a full moon, drink some Schnaps. “Go out on the roof with a shotgun,” he whispers. “Sit there until he shows up. Then blow the weasel to smithereens when he’s not looking.”

This won’t work for obvious reasons. In contrast to so many of our fellow Americans, we don’t own a gun. We don’t like Schnaps, we’re afraid of heights, and we’re skeptical about spending a winter night—even with moonlight—perched on a steep and slippery roof with a lethal weapon. And we have no intention of being deported for shooting a weasel, which is not only illegal, it’s just not nice. Remember, the weasel is our friend.

For over a month, the weasel on the roof dominates our conversations. In addition to Ritz crackers and cheese, the weasel also likes to eat wiring, plastic tubes, and insulation. I have a nightmare that he breaks into the house, eats my iMac, all of my groceries, and kidnaps the children.

Then, one night, it all stops. The weasel is gone. No more thumps or thwacks at three in the morning. I don’t think the weasel is finished with us, but he has evidently gotten bored with Project Goldsby and moved on to the next thing. I can’t say I miss him, but, as an artist, I sort of know how he feels.

**

Three months later, early spring:

“Robin, we have a situation,” says John. I’ve learned to dread these words.

“What?” I ask. “What?”

“There’s something frozen in the rain barrel. And it looks like a human head.”

“What? How is that even possible?” There was a lid on that barrel—we’ve always kept it tied down with cables and weighted with bricks. A small hole in the lid allowed rainwater from the roof of the garden shed to drip into the barrel—a perfect system for collecting water for the garden, not necessarily an ideal place to store heads.

“Nothing could have gotten in there,” I say, trying not to panic.

“Someone opened it and put the head—or something that looks like a head—in there. The lid was off. Here, look. I took a photo—”

“Nooooo!” I scream. The last thing I want to see is a photo of a frozen human head in my rain barrel. I swat John’s camera away from me before the image burns itself onto my brain. “Just tell me what it looks like.”

“Well,” he says. “It has gray hair and pointy teeth and bloodshot beady eyes.”

“That could be anyone,” I say. “Or—”

“You know what?” John says, as he studies the photo. “It could be an animal. Maybe some poor critter chewed through the cables, knocked the bricks on the ground, dislodged the lid, and dove into the water barrel. He drowned and then the water froze. What an awful way to die.”

Silence.

“The weasel?” I say.

“The weasel,” he says. “Brick-throwing. Cable chewing. Death-defying leaps. Think about it. This situation has the weasel’s name all over it.”

“What are you going to do?” I ask.

“Don’t know,” says John. “He’s frozen solid in there right now—I’d have to use an axe to get him out. Looks like one of those exhibits at the Museum of Natural History. Look at the photo—”

“Nooooo! You’re sure it’s the weasel and not a human head? I mean, maybe we should call the police or something.”

“Nope,” John says as he continues to look at the photo. “Not a human head. It’s a frozen dead weasel. We just have to wait for the weather to warm up so I can hack him out. But don’t tell Julia. She’ll want to have a weasel burial. And, sorry, but I just don’t feel like singing ‘Amazing Grace’ for a weasel.”

John sends the photo to Hans.

**

I think about the weasel a lot. He was nasty—killing those bunnies, making little girls cry, destroying brake cables on cars, and keeping entire families awake at night. But, you know, he was acting in character, just being a weasel and performing weasel-ish deeds. He was likely living here before we moved in, hanging out with the mice, the frogs, and the wild boars. We might have served a nice cheese, olive, and cable buffet, but we didn’t exactly drag out the welcome wagon for him. I feel a little sad about his gruesome demise. I still haven’t seen the photo.

So we go on: Man (and reluctant woman) versus Nature. A couple of musicians, trying to create something meaningful out of the mess of the day—raising kids, cooking dinners, practicing, writing, setting live traps, practicing some more, listening for noise in the walls and thumps on the roof, and trying to get some sleep.

I hope the wild boars come back up the hill some day.

***

Robin Meloy Goldsby is a Steinway Artist. She is the author of Piano Girl; Waltz of the Asparagus People: The Further Adventures of Piano Girl; and Rhythm: A Novel.  

New: Manhattan Road Trip, a collection of short stories about (what else?) musicians.

Please visit RobinMeloyGoldsby.com to sign up for Goldsby’s free monthly newsletter. A new essay every month!

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A women I didn’t recognize came up to me after class in the gym last year. “Are you Betsy from Brandeis?” Guess so. Turns out we were classmates, sort of. She had transferred into my class our sophomore year, but graduated a year after me, so I really did not know her. But somehow, she knew me.

I recently Facebook “friended” an old high school chum, someone a year older who had grown up across the street. “Holy moly, you look just like that girl who grew up across the street”, said he, after seeing my profile and other photos. He had seen me once in the intervening 48 years.

It is nice to get that sort of positive reinforcement. But five years ago, standing naked in front of my bathroom mirrors, I didn’t recognize myself. I had always been slender and now could not make that claim. I resolved before turning 60 in 6 months to rectify the situation. On Martha’s Vineyard that summer, I sought out a trainer who worked with me on exercise and diet. I cleaned up my eating habits and worked hard in the gym. Over the course of two years, I took off 18 pounds, joined a gym when I returned to Newton and kept up with a rigorous training program.

I have enjoyed the results until this past year. Time gets the better of us all. My eating habits have slipped a bit and I’ve put on a few pounds, but that is also due to injury. A year ago, I sprained a ligament in my back and had to take it easy for six weeks while it healed. This winter, I did the same on the other side, but worse. Even as my back healed, I felt pain in my left hip. I mentioned this at my annual physical. The doctor manipulated the hip, thought either there was swelling or perhaps a torn labrum and sent me in for an x-ray, then an MRI. No tear, so he assumed it was bursitis and gave me a shot of cortisone to reduce the inflammation. I haven’t exercised in weeks and I see and feel the difference. Age is catching up to me. Someone in one of my classes complimented me just weeks earlier on how strong I was and how consistently I came to class. Ha! So much for that! Also at this physical, I was measured. The doctor claimed I’ve lost 3/4″. Can’t be! That would make me under 5′ tall! Perhaps I just wasn’t standing fully erect. Good grief, I just can’t be that little!

My eye sight is terrible, I can’t see in the dark, have little cataracts growing, but it is too early to operate, so I just have to live with it. My internist said, “Welcome to aging!” No thank you…I am still railing against it, as best I can.

Technology makes everything move faster. It is great that I can stay in touch with my kids, each of whom lives 3,000 miles away, but it also makes me feel inept because I can’t keep up. I haven’t worked “outside the home” in 28 years, so don’t know the latest editors and on-line ways to do things.

On the other hand, I have lived through a fair amount of history by this point and have some sense of perspective. I would like to say about the current administration that “this, too, will pass”. Unfortunately, too much of what is being done can’t be undone in the areas of climate science because the effects are irreversible. We don’t get a “mulligan” on the environment. Same with the Supreme Court appointments, which are life-time appointments, so hang in there Ruth Bader Ginsberg!

I have always tried to keep a positive outlook on life. It helps to keep those pesky wrinkles away. I’ll keep trying that. Below, by the way, is my college graduation photo (it was 1974, so informal shots only). How am I doing?

My mother had great style and a certain elegance, but no self-confidence. In fact, she actively disliked her looks. She used to say she had the map of Jerusalem on her face. As a grown-up, I tried to disabuse her of this notion, but to no avail. She was a self-hating Jew. Nevertheless, she always had big walk-in closets, full of great clothing and accessories. I was a dreamy “girlie-girl” who loved to play dress-up with play clothes and whatever adult clothes I could get my hands on.

I spent long periods in my mother’s closet. She had a pair of clear, plastic dressy shoes to die for. I was sure these were Cinderella’s glass slippers. They were open-toed, sling-backed, with a great crystal bauble on each and I wore them all the time. Because they were sling-back, they sort of fit me and I pranced around the house in my overalls and the glass slippers. My mother did a lot of charity work and had occasions to go to fancy balls, so had wonderful ball gowns, which I loved to look at (I never tried them on). She also had a beautiful alligator purse (this was in the mid-50’s…we didn’t know any better). I loved the clasp on it and played with it often. I recently saw someone with a similar one. It is back in fashion.

I have a miniature version of my mother’s figure in every way. She was two inches taller than I am, she had bigger breasts, larger everywhere, so I really never fit into her clothing, except the slinky, bias-cut satin gown she wore on her wedding night. That I wore twice: once when I played the glamourous actress Irene Livingston in Moss Hart’s “Light Up the Sky” at camp in 1969. And to the New Year’s Eve party at the Playboy Mansion in 1981. That party is always a pajama party because Hef always wears pajamas and he likes his women in lingerie. I don’t own fancy lingerie, so I wore my mother’s beautiful nightgown. Here it is: it used to be pale blue, but since she wore it in 1946, it has faded. It remains gorgeous; something Jean Harlow would wear.

As she aged, she cared less and less about the way she dressed. When I moved her from her independent living apartment to the skilled nursing unit, where she spent the last two and half years of her life, I went through her large closet for the last time. She had become so paranoid and demented that she didn’t let the offered cleaning service come in once a year. The moths had eaten many of her lovely wool skirts to shreds. I saved some of her best suits, in wonderful jewel tones. Perhaps I thought a costume shop would like them, or maybe they’d fit me? They weren’t my style and just this past winter, more than six years after her death, I finally gave them all away. But I discovered beautiful purses and more gloves than any woman could ever wear. Those I kept and love to carry her still elegant purses, which I tell people are truly vintage. They are so well-made, they will never go out of fashion. Her timeless elegance stays with me. I try to forget the rest.

 

 

In 1987, the neighbor’s cat roamed around and got knocked up. They gave us the last of the litter, a sweet little female. David was two at the time and had a few children’s books about kittens; in each the protagonist was named Kate so bestowed the name on her. I’d had a dog growing up, so this was a new experience. She was friendly, interested in everything, was quite personable and loud. We had to shut her in the basement at night so we didn’t hear the crying and yowling. She and David fought over his toys. I asked the vet about that. “You have to understand, you have two at the same age developmentally”. Oh dear! At one point she got up on a kitchen chair and took a swipe at his head. I grabbed her by the scruff. “You are now an outside cat!”

She took to the outdoors. I called her in by shaking her treat box. I knew if I didn’t get her in by sunset, I wouldn’t get her that night and I’d hear her crying under our bedroom window at 5am. I once asked a close friend who is a world-reknown vet why she liked being out at night. Debbie answered, “That’s when the critters come out”.

I told her frequently that she was there for the amusement of my children. Jeffrey was the one who really loved her. He sat in his high chair as an infant and went rigid went she walked by. He squealed with delight at everything she did. His first word was, “kitty cat”. No “mom” for my kid. He just adored her. She allowed him to stroke or torment her. He cuddled with her. When he went to bed, she cried outside the closed door, so again, I had to move her away, as he was an incredibly light sleeper. Jeffrey told us that calicos could only be females, due to genetic markers. He knew everything about her and loved her with all his being.

She still spent much of the day outside, hunting. She was good at it, often bringing home trophies for Mom (me), including birds and chipmunks, dead or alive. After having left her in the care of my men, while away for a few days, I found a striped tail on the foyer rug (a fancy beige, Frank Loyd Wright-designed number). “What’s this”, I inquired, mystified and horrified. My husband conceded that Kate had eaten a chipmunk and regurgitated it once inside the house…on the lovely foyer rug. He had tried to clean up, but had left the tell-tale tail!

On a lovely autumn day, I left the door from the porch to the house open to let in fresh air. The outside door was always open so Kate could come and go, and still come onto the porch for shelter and howl at the inside door when she wished to gain entry; sometimes often, as if toying with me. This day, I got laundry out of the dryer in the basement when I heard a thud on the stairs above me. I rushed up and saw our pet had brought a LIVE chipmunk into the house as a special treat for me! Good lord, what would I do. I had planned to go pick up the suit I was to wear to David’s bar mitzvah, only a few weeks away. I knew I couldn’t leave these two creatures alone together. It would not end well. Mine is a large, basically one story house; a few steps down to the living room, a few steps up to some bedrooms, but no doors on most of the rooms, just large open spaces and all beige carpets. I did not want critter blood anywhere. Kate seemed quite pleased with her offering and made no attempt to do anything more. She left it up to me to figure things out. The chipmunk was stunned but not hurt. Once it regained its composure, it ran. I got my oven mitts and decided to try to pick it up and get it out of the house. For a moment, I had it cornered in a bathroom. I picked it up. It screamed (who knew chipmunks could scream) and so did I, dropping it in the process. I hadn’t thought to close the door and it ran out of the bathroom, into the living room, which is down two little steps. The fireplace has a black marble surround. Evidently, chipmunks can’t see that well. It took a flying leap at the black marble, hit it and slid back down. It tired that a few more times. I am screaming obscenities at it…things like, “I am trying to save your f***ing life, you stupid creature.” I also wondered where “America’s Funniest Home Video” was when you really needed them. I finally had the brilliant idea to herd it. I used the potholders to swat at it, first one way, then another, getting it to move in the direction I wanted until I had it out on the porch. Kate followed all this with a certain fascination…”I never knew what a goof my human was”. She had already divined was I was up to and awaited us on the porch. What happened after that, I cannot say. I shut the door and went off to run my errand, regaling my children with the story at school pick-up. I suspect the chipmunk took a flying leap out the door and made its escape.

Kate remained an increasingly fat, happy fixture in our lives for almost 17 years. David went off to Stanford, Jeffrey relied on her companionship. In February, 2004, I noticed she wasn’t well and took her to her vet, who felt a tumor and immediately sent me to our wonderful large, local animal hospital. She had lymphoma. They assured me she could have surgery and still be with us for as much as another year. Jeffrey was in a very bad place in his life. He had just started a special education school, 18 miles from our house, was in emotional shut-down. He needed his cat. We went ahead with the surgery. And a blood transfusion. At every step, the news was bad and expensive. Jeffrey was home with a bad cold when I got the next call from the hospital. They wanted to start chemo. From the next room, I heard the plaintive cry, “Don’t let her die, Mom”. We did all we could. We were told that she would never have proper bowel function and I set up plastic sheeting in her room in the basement. We brought her, battered and bedraggled, home the same day David came home for Spring Break from Stanford. She had been his cat originally and it seemed, waited for him. She passed away at home that night. Jeffrey wanted her ashes, which are still in the little urn in our basement.

He was desolate. “She was the only one in our house who was never angry with me. When I was sad or crying, I buried my face in her fur. What am I going to do?” My heart broke for my special child. We started looking for a new cat the next day, but none could ever replace the special bond Jeffrey had with Kate.

I must confess that I have never been very interested in science. Conversations on scientific topics tend to make my eyes glaze over.

My only good science experience was in first grade. We had a lovely teacher named Miss Garcelon, who had just graduated from teachers college, and we were her first class. She decided, for whatever reason, that she was going to teach a bunch of six-year-olds about the human body. So she borrowed a model from the local high school, since they apparently weren’t using it, a human torso that opened up and you could see all of the organs inside. Our first surprise was that a human heart wasn’t shaped like a valentine heart. Also, the heart wasn’t way over on the left, like where you put your hand when you are saying the Pledge of Allegiance — even though that is called putting your hand on your heart — it was actually right in the middle. Further discoveries amazed us. And she taught us a song, to the tune of Witch Doctor, that went “Esophagus and heart, windpipe, stomach and lungs.” Try it, instead of “Ooh eee, ooh ah ah ting tang, Walla walla, bing bang.”  It works!

In my seventh grade science class, we each had to construct a chicken skeleton. This meant going to the butcher shop, buying a whole chicken, cooking it, recovering all the bones, and then putting them together into a full skeleton. I don’t know how we fastened them together. I have a feeling everyone’s parents did most of the work. It was a grueling experience, and I have not liked eating chicken very much ever since.

In high school, I managed to take only one science class in my whole four years, which was Biology, and I didn’t do very well in it. My main memory of that class is sitting there looking at my long hair and biting off the split ends. (My husband, a Yalie, is amazed that I could have gotten into Radcliffe with only one science class on my transcript. I point out that I had five years of Spanish and four years of Latin, which surely made up for the paucity of science.) I loved math, as well as English, history, and languages, but science just did not do it for me.

In college, I foolishly decided to get my Nat Sci requirement out of the way freshman year. This was a bad decision because if I had waited, I would have learned about the various science courses that were geared to non-science types like me, such as “Rocks for Jocks” and “Physics for Poets.” My freshman adviser, who was pretty worthless, suggested taking Nat Sci 5, which was a biology course, since, after all, biology was the one science I knew something about. It was taught by George Wald, who had won a Nobel Prize the previous year, and a lot of my friends were taking it, so it seemed like a good idea. It was a disaster. Wald spent as much time as possible reminding us about his Nobel Prize. For instance, when he was lecturing about Watson discovering DNA, he said “and he won HIS Nobel Prize for . . .” Also, it turned out the course was not just biology, it was actually biochemistry, and assumed some knowledge of chemistry. I had absolutely none! Help! We had to memorize the 20 amino acids, and the Krebs cycle, and god only knows what else. It made absolutely no sense to me. On the final exam at the end of the year, there were 10 questions, worth 10 points each. I only understood 3 of the questions. The other 7 might as well have been written in Greek, they were completely incomprehensible to me. So I answered the 3 questions that I understood. I also wrote a note in my blue book begging them to pass me, because if I flunked I would have to take another Nat Sci course, and that would be too awful to contemplate. I ended up getting a 29 on the final, and a D+ in the class, which was good enough. Actually, I was very proud of that 29. Since I only answered 3 questions, the highest score I could have gotten was a 30, so a 29 was pretty close to perfect!

After that I never had anything more to do with science. If the kids needed help with any of their science classes, I turned them over to my husband. And even now, if somebody starts talking about Higgs Boson or other such topics, my mind just shuts down. I don’t get it, and I don’t want to!

Whether Oscar Wilde or Chrissie Hind in “Message of Love,” said it, I have always found astronomy an escape into imagining the universe beyond our mortal realm.  I was able to get through physics and chemistry because of science teachers who truly loved their subject, but astronomy was the one that caught on for me.

Professor Andrew Franknoi, a Carnegie Professor of the Year, an Annenberg Award winner, and my community college teacher back in the 20th century, still teaches astronomy at Foothill College. He was (and obviously still is), passionate and easily excitable when teaching astronomy. Better yet, because he wanted his students to get excited, he accentuated the stories and the gee-whiz facts, not the complex math, physics and chemistry behind the subject. One thing he did to help us get through the hard science was allow a 3×5 index card “cheat sheet” for tests. I crammed everything I knew onto that thing and did really well on the exams.

Mr. Franknoi excelled in visual and verbal drama for the subject. He was constantly moving and his voice would get loud and soft as the story required. What I began to sense was the complex relationships between the stars and us, these insignificant life forms on a lonely planet. I learned we are all made of the same stuff.

The pleasure I still derive in looking though my fancy backyard telescope at the rings of Saturn, or the Orion Nebula or the Pleiades, or right into the craters of the moon – I never get tired of it. There’s so much at the edge of our vision! I thank Professor Franknoi in Astronomy 101 for that.

 

“If you believe in eternity, then life is irrelevant.” Gregory House
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