“Physics” The Afterparty

By Helen Black

MOTHER’S DAY OUT Vol.2, No.2 February 15, 2010

Fig.1. Creative Destruction of Literary Bread

Occurring when youngest Scriblet, left to own devices, applies butter knife to loaf in
perpendicular fashion while big brothers and Dad bicker about who exactly it was that snapped
cute mixing bowl picture adorning “Physics from Scratch”

Greetings, Gentle Readers! I was so surprised by the swift and positive reaction to “Physics
from Scratch” that my bangs nearly caught on fire. Thank you! I am thrilled that it made
Phantomimic’s wife’s coffee come out of her nose, and honored to get ten stars from Brian
Porter. But I have to admit I had more trepidation about “Physics” than any of my other little
romp-ettes, and it’s no coincidence I only buckled down to it after whisking my Eagle Scout and
two eaglets out of the house for that winter campout on Mt. Hood.

Because…well…like I said: my husband is Mr. Science. I mean, he was one the very few
people, when everyone was saying they’d read Stephen Hawkings’ new book “A Brief History
of Time,” actually did read it. Also he once corrected Merriam-Webster on a definition of a rare
orchid. Would you want someone like that hanging over your shoulder? I ask you. And as for
the boys, their favorite pastime right now is telling me what I’m doing wrong…or what I’m
about to do wrong…or what I should be doing instead of what it is I am actually doing (wrong).
I don’t take it personally. It’s just a phase. A really, REALLY long one.

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But even after I packed them off, procrastination was ruling the day. And I was down by four,
because an additional child had gone on a sleepover. And #3 (Miss Literary Omnivore Junior)
was tangled up in long hair and blankets on the couch devouring Sharon Creech’s “Walk Two
Moons” thus causing me absolutely no trouble, and #5 (poster baby) had fallen asleep on top of
my bed and was definitely out for the count. Almost snoring. I was free!

But no. I was not free. I was underneath the couch, hunting for the lost sleeve for the rental
DVD of Madagascar 2. Then I was sorting into little separate piles everything else I’d dredged
up full fathom five (candy wrappers, missing socks, the shiny green beads from a broken sting of
Mardi Gras beads). For some reason (the neon green beads?) that made me think of my mother’s
70’s Op Art polka-dotted apron that said For this I spent four years in college. That led me to
the laundry room, where I counted the total accumulated number of knee patches needed for
navy uniform pants, and wrote an indignant customer service letter in my head (c’mon, I know
you do that too) to the Menace Uniform Company (affectionate nickname) stating that if they
THOUGHT that by some misbegotten act of semantic legerdemain they could actually
CHANGE the definition of DOUBLE KNEES from “two actual layers of heavy-duty cotton twill
fabric” to “a tissue-thin white patch on the inside of the knee that curls up and falls out on the
first washing,” and that NO ONE WOULD NOTICE, they were SORELY mistaken.

And other little housekeeping things like that.

Finally I forced myself to boot up and type the title of the piece. I tried to regain that moment of
midnight inspiration about black holes and dark matter. When I came to, about an hour later, I
found I’d been surfing around on Scribd for, well, about an hour (hey--I know you do that too!)
THEN I had to forward campingbloggers post on winter camping gear to Daddy in the car on his
way to Mt. Hood. Then I put the cute mixing bowl picture underneath the title, and sat gazing
adoringly at it until my husband called me. They’d arrived, and because he couldn’t get a cell
connection, he had just downloaded Skype and was making his first ever internet telephone call,
and wasn’t that cool. Then he told me that they were sleeping in a chalet with 170 camp beds in
it that the Boy Scouts built and rented out to the Minnesota Ski Club all summer long and wasn’t
that cool. And I said yes, and can I go now, and he said suspiciously “what are you doing?” and
I said “polishing up my resume” to put him off the scent.

Then I fussed with the font size of my title.

Then I got a call from sabakuviolist, who was free to chat because her husband had gone to the
grocery store, and taken all the kids with him. (How does she DO that??) I told her I was trying
to sit down and write this article, and she said, “What on?” and I said, “Science,” and she said,
“Well that won’t take long.” With friends like that who needs relatives? And then she said that
if they were not sleeping in tents, the weekend event could not properly be termed a winter
campout, but was instead a MCE (Mountain Cabin Experience).

I said, “thank you” only a little bit tartly and hung up. Then I called Dad. “You are not doing a
winter campout, you are having a Mountain Cabin Experience.” He said, “You’ve been talking
to Katherine.” Then he said, “I never said it was a campout.” And then he said, “Where’s the
fruit leather?”

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Exactly three-and-a-half hours later he called to tell me that #2 had thrown up all over the place
and should they come home. (I’m supposed to get any writing done when they suck my brain
like this?) I did a differential diagnosis over the phone. “If I’d eaten a lot of fruit leather,” I
said, “then gone tobogganing like a wild man on a tire for three hours so that my head was
entirely soaked with sweat, and then bolted two quarts of spaghetti, I’d be throwing up all over
the place too. If he’s stopped throwing up, and his cheeks are pink, just put him to bed.”

Two hours LATER, when I was trying to remember the correct order of Newton’s Three Laws
without googling it, he called up AGAIN, to tell me that the surgeon-dad he’d just been
stargazing with turned and asked him if he’d (#2) hit his head, whereupon he (Dad) had
anxiously shaken him awake to ask him if he’d hit his head, and he’d said no, but he was just
calling to tell me that so I wouldn’t worry. And did I think he should bring him home.

So I did another differential. Wild man had, in fact, gone right back to sleep without missing a
beat, so I said, “Okay. Don’t wake him up again. And leave me alone.” He got suspicious again
and said “What are you doing?” I said, “Still polishing up my resume,” and he said, “Wow,
honey! You ROCK.” So then I had to spend some time polishing up my resume.

But really what was holding me back was the fact that because I participated in a hippy
alternative program in high school which allowed me to do whatever I wanted, I sashayed off to
college without a SINGLE science course under my belt (which also, parenthetically, goes a long
way toward accounting for my Apparently Eccentric Knowledge Base) and therefore have a
MASSIVE inferiority complex in this area.

So I finished and posted it late at night. When I got up in the morning and discovered that
nobody had written in to say I’d gotten Newton’s Three Laws in the wrong order, which meant
I’d actually gotten them in the right order, I was stoked. Bolstered by that, I fired up the laptop
and positioned it in on the kitchen counter when my weary warriors came home.

First they dumped sixty cubic feet of dirty clothing in front of the washing machine, and then
they took their showers. And then, clean and sweet-smelling, hair identically slicked back, they
pulled up stools side-by-side, and assumed identical Earnest Reading Positions (elbow on table,
chin parked chin on hand). #2, aka Mr. Hollow Leg, cut thick slices of bread, toasted them, and
ate dancing from foot to foot behind them, dripping butter on their shoulders. I stood on the
other side of the counter watching their little smiles blooming and fading simultaneously until #1
said “Stop it, Mom, you’re creeping me out!” When they finished, they all had the same
comment: “That was good, but you know, you got that wrong! It was me who took that
picture.” That’s when the bickering started. So I went downstairs to start running the sixty cubic
feet (n.b. laundry mass= size of male x duration of campout, squared; bears no relation
whatsoever to volume of clothing prior to campout). When I came back up, Scriblet #5 had
exercised his creative genius on the bread. Mom was the one who took that picture.

At least they said it was good! I’ll take what I can get, and soldier along my own imaginative
path. Mothers look at the world in a certain way, and writers look at the world in a certain way—
and in this house, at least, EVER the twain shall meet!