Thanks to my father growing up our house was living in a science library. I had my own chemistry lab which led to being a child science prodigy. Many of the thing I did came about due to the actions and decisions of parents and teachers, not by me. I could not say how many of them happened. A big one was between my sophomore and junior year in high school. I received a National Science Foundation grant to study organic chemistry at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1965. We lived in a dormitory with house parents, a man and a woman professor. They were married and about our parents’ ages. We were a horrible group of children. I knew we drove them crazy. That was the summer Eric Burdon and The Animals released “We’ve got to get out of this place if it’s the last thing we ever do.” No iPods, no MP3 players, but when it came on the radio, we opened all our dorm room doors and turned up the volume. But we didn’t really hate being there.

            We loved the afternoon lab. This next recollection cannot possibly be accurate. My memory tells me we were in a classroom lecture every morning from 8-12, lunch, then lab from 1-5PM. Could it have possibly been that intense? Well, yes, they only had one summer to turn us into scientists. I do not know how we could have been bored, or maybe one of the other guys and I just wanted more pocket money, but there were part time jobs in the school cafeteria. We took the jobs. I had never worked. I needed to get a social security number. Social Security numbers are regionalized. If I had gotten my first job in Florida, my number would have started with a 2, but because it was in New York State it began with a 1. The irony is that I had been born in New York, and what is the chance that I had been born in NY and got an SSN for the same region I had been born in, not having been there since I was 9?

            One day in the cafeteria I’m complaining that I could not stay awake during the lecture.

“Drink coffee,” a friend said.

So I got a cup, started to drink it, and spewed it out.

“G-d, that is so bitter.”

My father had never let me drink it as a kid:

“It will put hair on your chest.”

Well, that happened anyway without the coffee.

“Put milk and sugar in it”, my friend said.

Once I got enough sugar and milk in it I said,

“Hey, this tastes like coffee ice cream!” which was my favorite.

Most of my friends will not believe this, but it has been proven that there is a huge diversity between people in the number and density of the different types taste buds in your tongue. I have been tremendous blessed with a surfeit of the taste buds sensitive to bitterness (the TAS 2R38 gene). I got home and my father said,

“What are you doing?” when I took a cup of coffee.

“I’m drinking coffee!”

Then he saw what I put in it. He drank his black.

“You don’t drink coffee, you take drugs!”

I said,

“No kidding! Trimethylxanthine!”

I had just spent the summer studying organic chemistry. That is the name of the formula for the yellow dye called caffeine!

            I’m not proud of the fact that when I was growing up I sometimes went along to get along. There we were in Rochester one year after the very bad race riot. One of the guys said,

“Let’s make some water balloons, go up on the roof and see if we can drop them on some people and cause trouble!”

Well, probably for the best, not one single person passed underneath us to be a victim. We got bored and gave up.

            The other memory falls into the woo-woo, you know, the supernatural, category. One of my favorite lines from Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’:

“There are more thing under heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.”

While I did actually spend many years of my life as a scientist, I have had enough inexplicable experiences to convince me that there is a hidden dimension. I’ll write a post about one such experience when Janis and I went to Fayetteville, GA for her to get an alternative medicine diagnosis. That one was a mind-blower!

One Friday night, just that once, three of us Jewish boys decided to go to synagogue. Boy, we MUST have been bored. We got dressed up and asked for directions. It was a small synagogue in a house in a residential neighborhood within walking distance. As we turned down the street (Oddly enough, I remember it was a right turn!), up ahead we could see that there were some old men sitting out in front of the house. As we came up, we asked if this was the synagogue, they looked at us and asked if we were Jewish, and my G-d what a reaction! In Judaism, certain observances required a minyan, ten men. We were three, they were seven. They said G-d had answered their prayers. You tell me why on that Friday night all summer the three of us decided to go to synagogue? Woo-woo!