Every once in a great while, nature gets her wires crossed and spits out a creature that scientists can’t explain. In the animal kingdom, such an anomaly might be a two-headed turtle or a chicken with antlers, but in our family, it’s my nephew.
Michael, my own flesh and DNA relative with an IQ of several zillion, just started freshman year at Massachusetts Institute of Technomaniacs on a full scholarship. He firmly believes quantum physics and calculus are hobbies.
Nobody knows exactly how this kid backflipped into a gene pool of musicians, writers and ADD, which means attention … deficit… I forget the last part. But here he is, big brain and all.
Michael’s mother, aka my baby sister, supposedly has a very high IQ, but she’s still a dingbat. I remember watching her walk home from school the day our mom learned she was genius material. She kept twirling her little lunchbox around her head until she got dizzy and fell into a bush.
My brother might be a musical genius, but his second grade teacher didn’t care after calling his name 23 times in a row with “no reaction from that insolent child,” who was performing a killer drum solo on his desk. During the dark ages of parenting, the prevailing motherly response to teacher complaints of delinquent daydreaming was twisting the insolent child’s ears like transistor radio dials until his brain got better reception. So my brother’s ears became very flexible.
By fifth grade, they looked like a pair of sourdough pretzels glued to his head. Fearing for the safety of other body parts, he meticulously mastered Mom’s swirly signature, in case any substandard test papers ever got sent home for her Mama Hancock. That seemed pretty smart to me, but they don’t add IQ points for initiative.
My personal Waterloo was science. Forced to enter a biology project in the high school science fair, I bought a pair of consenting hamsters, provided generous doses of cabernet and candlelight, and let nature do the homework. Of course, I had to conjure up some insightful biological revelations, such as “The offspring of Mr. and Mrs. Hamster inherited fur.” Somehow, I passed.
My nephew competes in science fairs all over the world. His last project had something to do with subatomic muon particles. Pretty dry stuff, but all the good hamster projects were taken. It still won him a free trip to see the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, which is like a demolition derby for atoms, or NASCAR for nerds. Inside the collider, two beams of subatomic particles accelerate in opposite directions, picking up speed with every lap until they smash head-on, Big Bang-style.
According to their website, “Collisions in the LHC will generate temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the sun. Physicists hope that … the protons and neutrons will ‘melt’, freeing the quarks from their bonds with the gluons.” And we all want what’s best for the quarks. Especially Michael.
So we’ve got a future physicist in the family. Even though he speaks in square roots and nobody understands a word he’s saying, we love him like our own two-headed turtle. Someday, when that enormous brain is contemplating the fundamental nature of matter, don’t be surprised if he falls into a bush.