My Mirror Image From The Past
Though I remember little before age 21, the boy's persona aligns with my own scant recollections and what others have told me of myself. When I was a child, we lived for several years with Miss Carolina Royer in Monticello, Ark. Like oversize dandelions, old-fashioned water faucets on two-foot pipes sprouted in her yard. And as a curious one-year-old, I saw it my daily duty to toddle to each one and spin it full open.
Miss Royer objected--and attempted to thwart this wee water waster by unscrewing the handles. These she tied to strings just long enough to dangle them down into the tall grass around the faucet bases, there to hide. It didn't work.
As I grew, focus shifted to Miss Royer's old Victrola whose crank handle would spin the record turntable. Dissection inevitably followed, and the whirling, silvery fly-ball governor regulating turntable speed was soon irreversibly extracted.
More intricate mechanisms followed as gears and springs disengaged from the innards of alarm clocks entertained me for hours. Careful dismemberment of old radios revealed that transformers were no more than miles of fine copper wire tightly wound around curious E-shaped metal plates.
My shirt pocket soon bristled with pens, pencils and small rulers, all neatly tucked into a plastic pocket protector. And what a thrill to learn to use the two-dollar mail-ordered slide rule. Geeky indeed.
Still, I don't recall unscrewing the tops on any salt shakers. But there were experiments--many with an old Model T spark coil that could crack the air with long blue sparks. One experimental failure (thankfully) involved wiring the coil to a row of metal lockers to disperse congestion in the area. And the erroneous belief that exhaust from our car might contain sufficient raw gasoline fumes to explode with the spark yielded another abortive trial.
But John Ben Posey and I did manage to formulate a crude form of gunpowder from sulfur, crushed charcoal briquettes and potassium nitrate. We blasted projectiles into nearby pine trees until the pipe that functioned as a barrel gradually bent semicircular.
Mirror images from the past remind me, perhaps with a chuckle, that I used to be just that way. But current images bring chills. Watching a father speak harshly to his child, for example, instills a cringe of uncomfortable recognition that I am too easily distant and short-tempered. For sometimes I am that father.
The geeky lad of yesteryear is far beyond my reach, but the person I would yet long to be, even at my age, is not. Painful mirror images are our friends, reflecting our lives back to us so we can grow and change.
Copyright 2003 James McAlister
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