Sorry, it's not what you might think. I'm filled with yearning, but it's not for the usual thing. But it comes, as it often does, from reading books. I am currently reading a book by one of my favorite authors, Alan Lightman. He is a physicist who became an author, and his writings are often about scientific subjects. I have not read many of his prolific writings, but I've liked everything I've read so far. This one, A SENSE OF THE MYSTERIOUS, is both autobiographical and scientific. I haven't read much yet, but have enjoyed reading about his early life as a young scientist-to-be.

One thing that I seem to find in almost all the biographies of scientists, at least the physicists I've read about, is that they start very early with experiments and tinkering. Lightman talks about his (often dangerous) childhood building rockets, electronic devices, chemical solutions, and electrical concoctions. I've read the same thing about physicists as different as John Wheeler and the frightening Carlo Rubbia. They fooled around with scientific stuff long before they ever got into formal scientific study.

This is where the yearning part comes in for me. I had my moments as a naturalist (as I described in an earlier Electron entry) and looked through microscopes and binoculars at the world, but I never built anything, never tinkered, never did any woodworking or carpentry or three-dimensional craft work. And no rockets or explosions or anything remotely dangerous. I was surrounded by electronics as I grew up, I used stereos and tape recorders and electronic music synthesizers, but I never built anything electronic, not even a "crystal radio set," and I never opened up one of my electronic playthings to see how it worked. I never worked on cars or anything mechanical. Why? Because I was a girl, of course. In the '60s, in my social class, girls didn't do these things. It was inconceivable to me that I could do any of that stuff, and so I never asked to do it, never wanted to do it because it never occurred to me.

My father, however, was a whiz at tinkering and doing all sorts of electronic and household appliance fixits. He could fix just about anything. There were always parts of tape recorders and stereo receivers and turntables and mini-synthesizers all over the house, things he was working on. I used to watch him work on these things, with electronic innards all over the kitchen table. But I never imitated him nor asked to do what he did. Father was also a great woodworker; many of the furniture pieces he built in the mid-sixties are still in service at the old homestead, and an art table he built is still going strong in my own studio. But he never taught me to work in wood. I didn't ask, most of the time; my attention was caught up in the inane pop culture of the time, in Star Trek or comic books or my own science-fiction fantasy universe. The one time I did ask whether I could do carpentry, my father simply replied, "Girls don't do carpentry." And that was that. I didn't ask again.

Now it is forty years later, and I am wondering whether it is too late for me to take up the tinkering that I missed in my childhood. Other women my age are busy doing appropriate middle-aged lady things like volunteering for social service, or wearing red and purple hats and discussing their divorces, or getting makeovers and facelifts. But I want another makeover entirely. I want to be the boy scientist tinkerer I never was. I have wanted to do this for years and years, but have not had the courage, or the foolishness, to actually do it. How does one start, when one has never done anything like it before? I would like to build things, whether electrical, electronic or wooden or, nowadays, cybernetic. I don't care whether it has a purpose or not. I have a soldering iron and a needle-nosed pliers, somewhere. I even have one power tool, an electric drill. Some years ago I asked my father for it as a present, just to shock him, since most tools were considered far too dangerous for me to use in my childhood. He gave me the Sears Craftsman, and I use it, though rarely, to put together things like display stands or picture frames. I'd like to use it more often.

Posted at 3:09 am | link