When Tim and I were kids (it seems like I start every story with this), we used to “rummage around” in the attic to find neat stuff. One time we found an old microscope that we found out belonged to our father when he was a kid. It was in a wooden case with hinges and swung open. The microscope was black and came with a lot of prepared slides. After looking at all the slides, we decided to make our own. The one problem with the microscope was that it didn’t have a light underneath. Instead, it had a small round mirror and in order to see anything we had to manipulate the mirror so it would reflect light underneath the slide tray. Usually this was a time consuming and frustrating ordeal. When we finally got the right position on the mirror, it would light up with a very bright light. What usually happened was that one of us would accidentally hit the mirror then we’d have to start all over and adjust the mirror again! This worked best by the window on sunny days. On cloudy days, we usually had to suspend our “research” and wait for the next sunny day. I wonder now how many great discoveries we could have made if only the sun had been out. Which reminds me of an idea I’ve had for quite some time. I want to propose a mission to NASA to send a manned space flight to the sun. The people I mentioned this to say that’s ridiculous because the spacecraft and the astronauts would melt from the intense heat of the sun. I’ve already considered that and have the solution: They could go at night! At any rate, we would take a strand of our hair and look it at under the microscope, it would seem to be ¼ of an inch wide, and the edges were rainbow colored. Looking back now, I think that was the oil in our hair. We didn’t wash our hair very much in those days. After looking at countless strands of our hair, we graduated to more advanced and neat things like looking at a drop of our blood. I don’t recall how we got the samples, but in all probability, we used a straight pin to pierce our thumb. I doubt that we used the standard sterilization method for removing splinters by holding the pin under a lighted match. After doing this the pin was all covered with soot, which made me always wonder if the “sterilization” method was just as bad or worse as just using the pin as it was. These days when they take a blood sample or do anything, they always wear surgical gloves and a mask. It looks like they are ready for major surgery just to take a blood sample or even just to clean teeth, etc.! They say they have to be careful of AIDS. If I were them, I certainly wouldn’t be afraid of getting AIDS unless the patient had a lisp and his loafers were a little “loose”.

 

Sometimes in adjusting the microscope, we would go too far down and get the lens into the sample which made a mess of the lens and all we could see was some fuzzy unfocused image that looked like a psychedelic background for an acid rock band. Among other things, the coolest thing we looked at was a drop of water from our kitchen faucet. We could see all these weird shaped things swimming around in the water! It took a long time before I got over being “fidgety” about drinking our water. I figured that our water was the only water in the world that was full of swimming weird things. Since we used water from a very old well, maybe it was! Of course, now days if I would look at a drop of my water under a microscope all I would see is the molecular structure of chlorine and fluoride and whatever else Rural Water puts in it.

 

Another neat thing we used to look at was a thin specimen of an onionskin. It was neat to see the brick wall like cellular structure. We looked at a bunch of other stuff under the microscope such as soil, ink, cloth, dust, sugar, salt, pepper, and anything else we could think of in our curiosity to look at. We certainly saw a microscopic view of many different things.

 

Looking back, I wonder if I should have majored in Microbiology. Oh well, it’s just as well I didn’t, since I would have quickly tired of seeing human hairs, blood, water with weird little things swimming in it, and the brick walls of onionskins. My biggest concern would have been that while I was doing a blood count of white cells and getting interrupted. I can see it now. “One hundred twenty-seven thousand six hundred thirty seven, one hundred twenty-seven thousand six hun” ”Hi Mike, how’s it going?” “UUGHH!, One, two…”  Then there’s trying to adjust that goofy little mirror!!! I was much better off digging ditches because all I had to count then were the days until retirement and NOTHING ever distracted me from that!