“Never panic.  Chicken Little never made a good decision,” I say, full of wisdom, and already thinking of all the tee shirts I’ll sell with that slogan.

“That’s a bromide,” says Dr. Ciderman, applying a tourniquet to my creativity.

“What’s a bromide?” I ask.

Our chemist friend, Dr. Lampwick, chimes in with his soft Nebraskan drawl,   “It’s a compound of bromine and some other element, or it could be a positive organic radical.”

“That’s what I thought,” I say, because I always agree with his chemical pronouncements.

Ciderman laughs and says,  “A bromide is also a hackneyed or trite phrase.”

It’s too bad that The Birdman of Halcatraz isn’t at the table at the moment.  He’s a master of the English language and could grab these two guys by the necks and run them through the linguistic wringer.

Or, Sigmund---if he were at the table, he’d probably start analyzing the dynamics of our conversation and tell us how our learning styles differ.

I’ve chosen to plunk myself down in the middle of a gang of friends who chose the academic life.

They tolerate me as I serve a useful purpose as a dead spot in the orchestra hall.  Without one dead spot, the symphony would endlessly echo. 

These people have convinced me of the “use it or lose it” theory of mental activity. Their curiousity and expertise extends so far beyond their often narrow range of academic study that I can write any topic on a clay pigeon and toss it high in the air and someone will shoot it down.

One of my neighbors, a mathematician, is an expert on wildflowers, plays the guitar, speaks several languages, constructs intricate paper pop-up cards, and in her spare time designs computer programs that create written versions of previously unwritten languages.

My buddy Sharky, one of  the world’s leading experts on shark mating behavior, is also a whiz on the history of World War II history in the Pacific, fly fishing, hunting, photography and loves to ride his Harley Davidson motorcycle.

Dr. Reagent spends his sabbaticals at Oak Ridge National Laboratories standing over some kind of strange cauldron cackling, “Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble.”  Then, he comes back here to teach not only chemistry but the history of science, to sing in the choir and to tend to The Tree That Ate Mingo Street, which he has raised from a baby.

I could go on and on, talking about Dr. Cyclotron and Dr. Megahertz and Dr. Strangelove, and Dr. Gino, Gentle Doug and all the other guys whose academic knowledge amazes me and whose minds and ideas enliven my days, but let me just give you an example.

On yesterday’s bicycle ride, Dr. Reagent, Dr. Ciderman, Dr. Routemeister and I pedaled 25 miles and also spent over an hour eating breakfast and drinking coffee in a restaurant at the half-way mark, and our conversation for the entire time was all about one topic about which not one of us had any formal training. 

But, we probed the subject to its greatest depths.  We plumbed its inner chambers and explored its secrets.  It was a serious topic, but we probably created over 100 bad puns and 300 other witticisms, all on this single topic---I can’t remember what it was, and that doesn’t matter.  The point is, these people are capable of elevating the most mundane and pedestrian of conversational topics to the highest levels. 

I salute them. I just hope I can learn something along the way.

                                  Jim Whitehouse

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