Essays and Assays

First in a new series— Letters to my Eighth Grade Teacher by Chris Baron copyright 2002 All Rights Reserved

In Eighth Grade, Mr. DePrado read us The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. When he read, we rode on new wings through time and space—Mr. Deprado would act out the whole book through his thick black moustache and the wrinkles on his balding head would scrunch up when he imitated the terror of the Morlocks, and his eyes would open wide gesturing as the Eloi might have—simple and naïve.

"Morlocks and Eloi" he told us, "it’s that simple. It’s about balance. Dark and light. The Eloi, who live in a simple, graceful society—live in fear of the night because of the subterranean Morlocks, who only live in darkness, groping around in the dark, struggling, plotting, waiting to emerge."

Balance.

Mr. Deprado’s goal was to make sure that we understood that life was a quest for knowledge, and that every thing we read, saw or experienced was an important component of a "world system." He believed that nothing was isolated and that everything we did influenced something else—like when we rode our BMX’s through the wash, we were disrupting the direct trickle of the runoff, redirecting the waterway so that the water filtered into cracks in the wash feeding otherwise neglected roots, which then sprouted life into weeds which sprung up and out and spread their seeds that the prairie dogs fed on—but he made us think about what impact we had when we tossed orange peels into the estuary, or blew away ant hills with high pressure garden hoses—made us think about balance, whether we were Eloi or Morlocks, or whether it was okay to be both.

Mr. Deprado was "that" kind of teacher. A teacher like we have all had—or
wanted to have. Mr. Deprado knew everything. Any question we had from science, to history, to English, he knew the answer, and he spent as much time as we needed answering our questions. When we asked—what does it mean to have an "Achilles Heal" he would take off his shoes and demonstrate how Achilles was dipped by his mother into the water that made him impervious to all except for the ankle where she held. When we asked him if there was life on other planets, he would drop coffee beans into a giant metal bucket, then empty it and drop them in again for an hour. He would do this and then say, "and that’s just number of stars in the Milky Way!" When we asked him who the greatest basketball player of all time was, he took us out to the playground and lined us up like opposable action figures all around the basketball court and we would reenact the time that Larry Bird stole the inbounds pass and passed to a cutting teammate to win the game in the final seconds.

And if we asked him to teach us about music—he would sit our squirming bodies down into a circle, ask us what we liked, smiled when we said, "have you heard Wham?" And "do you like Duran Duran?" He had an old record player and he put on Mozart and Coltrane, and told us it would take us 6 minutes and 42 seconds and then we would see. So we waited, and we squirmed and we giggled, but he was right.

It was the last day of Eighth Grade.

The girls dressed up in their white and red sundresses and the guys in their Miami Vice gray blazers, white shirts with the collars pulled out. The coolest kids wearing silver necklaces while they took last looks at themselves in the low mirrors of the Middle School bathroom. And we sat there in a circle—our last circle with Mr. Deprado. He told us that it was important that we talk to him before we "Went out into the world".

He looked at us in a way that we had never seen him before, his face, all of a sudden, smooth and youngish. He looked at all of us, about 12 total, and thanked us for being such a good audience. We thanked him for knowing everything. "That’s just the point" he started, "you see," he leaned in, and like good kids, we all leaned in too. "You see, I need you to do something for me, "there are some things in this world I don’t know." We weren’t shocked, but this was the first time that the tightly woven security blanket of my young life had begun to unravel a bit. "I know that you are all capable of discovering even more than I have ever discovered, and that’s why I need you to go out in the world and find these things and then, all I ask, is that at some point in your life— find me—and tell me what you found."

So Mr. Deprado, this is for you.

I am excited to tell you that I have already found many things. Some of them are simple facts, like did you know…

Healthy people laugh 100 to 400 times a day, 25 times an hour, 2,800 times week 146,000 times per year.

Babies laugh over 600 times a day and the average adult laughs less than 20 times a day.

Earth does not take exactly 24 hours to rotate about its axis. The exact amount of time taken by it is 23 hours 56 minutes, and in that time there are insects moving everywhere consuming 10 percent of the world's food supply every year. Not the snails though. The average snail moves at a rate of approximately 0.000362005 miles per hour.

Frogs. They are dying mysteriously all over the world--from the brown toads in Yosemite--to the golden toads in Costa Rica. They are being swallowed up by the earth, disappearing, being pressed down. Scientists say that the hole in the ozone is allowing ultraviolet radiation to seep through and reduce the frogs’ immunity to parasites, pesticides and fungi. I have never worked in a coal mine—have never seen the frail yellow-birded canary singing in the dark passages until odorless but deadly carbon monoxide floated in quietly and squashed them—the birds' death warning miners to flee.

What if the frogs are the canaries for our entire world? Even if we realized this in time, what would we do? It seems like we have given up on prophecy now, and so I guess we can just look at them as dying frogs. Nothing else.

I can’t remember the last time I hunted tadpoles in the pond, collected them into bowls and watched them sprout their silly legs. A miracle you thought. And you were right, this tiny green teardrop exploding into a fitful hopper, a half-land, half-water, rock-shaped croaker. In the summers, in upstate New York—you couldn’t even drive when it rained. Those frogs hopping desperately across the road yellow headlights cut by streaks of rain turned upward by jumping frogs. Have you ever seen a frog that’s been run over? Perfectly flat, perfectly smooth, perfect. Maybe they aren’t really dying, maybe we have gotten really good at seeing how it might not matter that a species we are so interactive with, that is so common and humble, is disappearing.

The world is alive. So Mr. D, thank you for this journey that is just beginning—I am going to spend the next few weeks, months, years, maybe as long as this column is running, to tell you a few things at a time, a little bit each week—and ask you if you know about these things.

Some of these things are important, some obscure, all are from heart and mind. Maybe my letters will filter down to you. Maybe, in the way that displaced water filtered through to find the neglected roots, someone reading this will pass on my discoveries to you, wherever you are.

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