A Science Guy’s Almanac #15. A miscellaneous collection of thoughts from my childhood

I was born when I was very young. As I got older I grew up.

I always liked school. However, I’ve never liked camping. I think if God would have wanted humans to camp, He would not have created hotels and motels. But that’s beside the point.

This is a collection of stories, remembrances, and excerpts from my life, including the 39 years I taught science at Monte Vista High School in Spring Valley, California, Point Loma Nazarene University, in San Diego, Ca, and Great Oak High School in Temecula, Ca. There is no overall theme. There is no attempt made to do much of anything chronologically. There was an effort made to “clump” certain types of stories into mini-collections within the whole, but that effort eroded to dust.

If I ever publish all the posts about teaching as my memoirs, they will be titled: “A Room With Tables.” You may want to know why my memoirs would be titled thusly. I’m afraid you’ll have to keep reading. Somewhere in this labyrinth of stories is the reason. As I write this, I’m not even sure where you’ll find it.

I suspect I can remember nearly all my teachers because I’ve always liked school. Kindergarten was Miss Klostmeyer. She was a single woman. If my memory holds, she got married sometime during that year. However, the real story of kindergarten ends with this: we moved to Bremerton, Washington, when my dad was stationed while his ship was being overhauled. 

The only real memory of kindergarten is one where the class was doing some type of interpretive dance. After I did some sort of maneuver, Miss Kilostmeyer said, “Charles, that was very nice, will you please show the whole class what you did?” Of course, I had no idea what I had done or how to do it a second time, and I was never again asked to demonstrate any terpsichorean innovation I might have developed.

Part of the reason for my lack of kindergarten memories is the move to Washington state. At the time, Washington did not have kindergarten, so I have only one “semester” of kindergarten. My mom often reminded me that part of my problems in life is that I only had “half a year of kindergarten.”

While they have nothing to do with the rest of the content of this book, I do have three recollections from living in Bremerton. I include them here to replace those memories lost by missing half of kindergarten.

My first memory is clam chowder. We lived in Quonset huts while in Washington—and I suppose those are probably my real first memory. A Quonset hut is a corrugated metal building shaped like one-half of a giant pipe cult longitudinally. I suspect the one we lived in served as barracks for sailors during WWII.

Here's a Quonset Hut complete with what looks like a Navy wife hanging laundry outside it. While the boy in the sailor's hat isn't me, I might have been in a photograph just like this one in 1956.

My dad and I suppose several Navy buddies went clam digging and returned with at least one huge bucket of clams. My mom cooked them up and we had both clams on the half shell and chowder. The smell of the clams, both while in the bucket and while being steamed, was enough to keep me from even trying those on the half shell. However, my parents managed to sneak some clam chowder down my gullet, and I still like that to this day. That's memory #2.

My third recollection of Bremerton is the smell of the place in general. I think there were paper mills across the bay from our Quonset hut and the pungent odor of those mills wafted over the saltwater and attacked our olfactory cells.

Final memory. One day I was running down a hill, tripped, and fell, catching my hand in a drainpipe. My wrist bent backward. The radius split in what is known as a greenstick fracture. 

This shows both radius and ulna fractures. 

All other traumatic details of the fall and broken arm have been erased from my memory. But, I remember the cast. 

This isn't a plaster cast, but you get the idea.
It's on the "right" arm, though. 

It was a plaster and gauze monstrosity that kept my right elbow bent at what started as a 90-degree angle. I did not have what could be called “good cast care technique.” When it came time to remove the cast after six weeks, the doctor used scissors instead of a saw because the six-year-old boy wearing the cast had just beaten the tar out of it. By the day it was removed, the cast was so soft it could be squeezed and would remain depressed. Looking back, it was like collecting temporary copies of my fingerprints in the plaster.

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