did you know...

…that gas is heavier than air? just a little trivia for ya. you learn something new everyday. actually, i think i knew that before today and just never stopped to consider the knowledge. haven’t really needed it much. but last night we ran out of gas – don’t ask, it’s a winter thing – anyway, they couldn’t deliver until today. so this afternoon began the relighting of pilot lights and the reading of warning signs on the side of the hot water tank and the inside walls of the furnace.

the relighting became a scene and it made me think of chemistry class, junior year in high school. that would make me 16 at the beginning of the year and 17 at the end. my teacher was mr. engle and he looked like a smushed up frog. his face was round and even when he smiled it looked like he was frowning. he had glasses that took up half his face, covering his cheeks and making his eyes look like two tiny slits. but, it was the early 90’s and glasses were still big and round, at least the man didn’t have a comb-over. don’t get me wrong – his hair was wildly wrong, just not a comb-over. slightly balding in the front, part on the side, long short hair, a little shaggy with gray starting at his temples, slowly working its way upward and around the back of his head.

he was a bastard of a teacher. but i liked him. my brother had mr. mason for chemistry the year before and i had hoped to do the same. mr. engle taught chemistry as if we were freshman in college. i wasn’t the only one in the class who thought he was standing up there speaking a foreign language most of the time. but i liked him. i thought he was fair. do your homework, try in class, do the labs and you just might pass. i flunked both my mid-term and my final. i’m not ashamed to say it – straight up F’s. but somehow i managed to pass that class with a C.

i paid attention. i came to study groups. i tried to do my homework – damn, it was hard. even my brother had a hard time helping me. he tried to defend me to my dad. i’ll never forget that. my dad and i were fighting because i was doing so badly on my tests. when my brother told him that even he couldn’t do some of it my dad back off, a little. that was one of the few times in that i can remember him defending me like that. it was a nice feeling.

my favorite part of class was lab. i loved the experiments, watching things change color. i even liked that strange after-smell of the choleric acid. it gave me this weird metallic smell way up in the back of my nose. anyway, there was this one time…i apparently flaked out. this is really not a good thing to be doing in lab. again, anyway, i wasn’t thinking and i picked up a beaker full of boiling water with my bare hand. didn’t even think about what i was doing, and it even took a few seconds to register as i held this fucking boiling beaker in my bare hand. and i heard mr. engle’s voice from across the room say, ‘drop it’, and i did. i’m guessing this had happened to him before because he was so calm. he was nice about it too, very paternal in running my hand under the cold water and checking how severe the burns were. so, wherever you are mr. engle, thank you for passing me, and for trying to teach me something, and for knowing that tests aren’t always a measure of one’s full potential, and for helping me know that too.

wow, all that from relighting the pilot light?