I woke up from an afternoon nap remembering attending a Health Expo in Lincoln's Pershing Auditorium with my grade school class or Camp Fire Girls group in about 1965. The highlight of the expo was the cow with the porthole in it's side. Kids would dare each other to go look in the cow's stomach(s), and then go racing down the aisle of human body system plastic models and past the normally popular Resusci Annie. The auditorium was warm and crowded. The grass in a cow's stomach smelled funny. I expected it to be agitating like a load of laundry. A housefly traveled in and out through the window. A nursery song played in my head:
Go in and out the window,
Go in and out the window,
Go in and out the window,
As we have done before.
Go round and round the village,
Go round and round the village,
Go round and round the village,
As we have done before.
Stand and face your partner,
Stand and face your partner,
Stand and face your partner,
As we have done before.
Now shake his hand and leave him,
Now shake his hand and leave him,
Now shake his hand and leave him,
As we have done before.
Given my knack for locking my knees and fainting in the mid-1960s, I'm surprised I stayed upright. Must have been the peer pressure.
Neda Ulaby's report on Friday's "All Things Considered" probably set me off on this tack. It was difficult to ponder the ethical questions surrounding current science museum exhibits of plastinated human cadavers. The Dallas Morning News prints ads for the Houston Museum of Science engagement of Gunter Von Hagen's Body Worlds, the Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies. And I thought seeing the Dead Sea Squirrels at Omaha's Joslyn was scary! I admit I had to look up the definitions of flay and flail to get them straight. This kind of info checking takes up my time--time that normal people would spend watching "Dancing With the Stars," I guess.
Yes, dead bodies have been exhibited throughout history. I'm well acquainted with the photo of the shot-up Dalton gang after the Coffeyville raid. I was as fascinated with Egyptian mummies as most kids. I've been haunted this week by a print image I saw in some newspaper of large and small caskets draped with the Lebanese flag, lined up awaiting a mass burial. We are allowed to see these images, but not those of coffins arriving from Iraq draped with the U.S. flag.
Most of us can't hold onto all these images and current events around the clock. It's just too sad and infuriating. We have our everyday lives to lead, whether the fly goes in and out the window or not. If we didn't keep chewing our cud, we'd go crazy. The rhythm of the agitating washer drowns out the ethical questions and moral outrage.
About the same year as the bovine with the ruminal fistula, as cow portholes are known in the agricultural research world, I attended the Cub Scout Expo, also in Pershing Auditorium. My brother's scout den was exhibiting and selling the jewelry it made by frying marbles.
Fried Marbles
NOTE: This is a project that an adult should do FOR the child. The child should watch at a safe distance. This is an old-time activity.
Heat a single layer of marbles in a cast iron skillet on the stove until hot and then drop them in cold water. When you put them in water, you might want to try just a couple at a time in varying degrees of room temperature water to ice cold water.
What Happens
The glass inside the marbles shatters into shards and looks like shimmering crystal.
Why It Works
When glass goes from extreme heat to extreme cold, it cracks from the inside out.
I feel a bit like one of those marbles today, slightly cracked from the inside out. I hope no fifth grade boy picks up a marble and then races across the auditorium to drop it through the cow window. Boys can be like that. They put worms in Resusci Annie's mouth, you know. Then they grow up to be in a Yale secret society, doing pretend rituals with Geronimo's skull.
A 1966 marble is a terrible thing to fry. This is your 1986 brain on decongestants! This is a wasted afternoon in 2006.
*"A mind is a terrible thing to waste" was the excellent public awareness campaign for the United Negro College Fund beginning in 1971. The phrase was mangled by then Vice President Dan Quayle in May of 1989:
What a waste it is to lose one's mind.
Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful.
How true that is.
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