So far the pieces of my life which I have presented in this blog have no coherent thread, except perhaps in the mind in which they come bubbling up.  In a way they are like puzzle pieces waiting for some connections to be made.  I will break with this “tradition” now by picking up the thread from my presidential scholar story, which took place in June of 1970, the summer before I went to college.

I frankly don’t remember much of that summer, except for one (ironically) unmemorable experience occasioned by a phone call from a woman who had a radio show in Hamden CT.  She had heard that I had been selected as a presidential scholar, and she wanted to interview me on the air.  I remember going there (I probably hitchhiked) wearing a tan army shirt and carrying a backpack (did I actually own a backpack then?  I hadn’t yet bought my handmade leather shoulder bag.  That was later…), climbing a shallow knoll up to the station, which was in a small building at the foot of a tall radio tower.  The woman was an appearance-conscious person who carried herself with a show business air.

The show was disappointing.  I had resolved to tell truthfully about the experience and my misgivings about it, but whenever I was about to say something significant, she would cut to a commercial.  This happened many times, and when we came back from the break she would “summarize” my previous statements in an entirely inaccurate way,  making me seem to be a very conventional student.  I left the interview feeling that I had not expressed a single one of the real thoughts and opinions which I had resolved to share.

So much for that incident.  Besides that, I went to visit Kate (this time with a car) at her house, and we took a short hike to an isolated and beautiful lake.  She showed me her special spot to sit and look out at the water, and told me that she had written a poem about this special lake.

I felt drawn to her, but had been crushed the year before when I learned that she had started going out with a senior, a tall boy with long blonde hair and an aristocratic (certainly not Jewish) sounding name.  So I let her take the lead, and the visit stayed platonic.  We talked about the strange experience in Washington, and she spent some time consoling me for my shame in accepting the award.  She had accepted the award too, but had been resigned to the fact early on that resistance would be futile (to quote the Borg from Star Trek).

The rest of the summer I worked again in the chemistry lab at Yale where I had worked the previous summer, and made a splash as the pimply-faced prodigy who was doing graduate level work as a 15 year-old.  (The grad student I worked with actually included my name as a co-author on the paper he published, although my contribution had been that of a highly-trained monkey more than a collaborator.)  I found myself being annoyed by my advisor, who I found to be self-centered and odd, and I ended up accidentally breaking the same delicate, expensive piece of equipment (it was a mercury-based Toppler pump which was designed to create a near-perfect vacuum) not once, but multiple times.

I remember when I was doing an experiment (a Grignard reaction) which was highly exothermic (heat-generating).  I was under the hood wearing protective goggles and gloves, quite nervous about the prospect of messing something up.  When everything was set, I started started the reaction, but just before doing so I decided to put the ice bath, which I had prepared to slow the process in case of an emergency, under the reaction vessel (a round Pyrex flask).  The reaction started up, and as it bubbled up it started to get out of control.  I immediately reached for the ice bath, but found it already underneath the flask, the ice already melted by the heat.  I panicked.  At this point the boss yelled “it’s gonna blow!” and ran out of the room.  Sure enough, the reaction exploded out of the top of the flask and shot into the ceiling of the hood.

I was saved by Jack, one of the grad students, who, cigarette in hand, came over and turned off the magnetic stirring bar, which was promoting the reaction.  “Maybe we should slow this down” he said in his understated Midwestern way.  The reaction immediately came under control.

After this embarassing experience (which no one but me blamed me for) I found myself keeping a low profile in the lab.  I had proven myself the previous summer, and was going to be starting college in a couple of weeks, and my emotional energy started to direct itself there.

(continued in “I make a load of friends at…Yale!)