The other morning I awoke to an awful smell. It was one of those smells that are all too familiar to anyone who ever misspent their evenings drinking multiple pitchers of Michelob Dark on the porch at Alpine Pizza followed up by a 3AM Denny’s Grand Slam breakfast run, (eggs over greasy). It was the kind of smell that, for many people, is reminiscent of the last week of school (or, depending on what kind of a student you are, the first); the kind that, in all probability, hastened the invention of the bathroom fan by a good twenty years. In short, it was a smell I had hoped to never experience again, and one that I certainly never expected to be emanating from the confines of my son Clyde’s room–at least not for another ten years or so. (Dear God, I thought–if he’s already drinking cheap beer at age five, what’s next–a Lego bong at age nine?
(Un)Happily, though, it turns out that Clyde was not, in fact, attempting to break the Drew Barrymore record for earliest entry into the Betty Ford Clinic–it was just Day 2 of his science fair experiment–and there were still 12 more days to go.
His experiment was fairly simple: do bean seeds grow better when given water, soda, or milk? In theory, this was a great project: not only was it simple enough for a five-year-old to do, but it also had the added benefit of promoting healthy living. Smugly, I pictured myself at the end of the experiment, one arm draped benevolently around Clyde’s shoulder while we gazed down together first upon the shriveled “soda” and” milk” seeds, and then upon the vibrantly healthy “water” seeds. Using my best Robert Young voice, I would point out to Clyde how obvious it was that water was healthiest for all growing things–bean seeds and little boys alike. And then I would nod in approval as Clyde solemnly vowed to never touch soda again (and maybe milk, too–after all, if he ever hopes to date any of the hippie chicks in this town he had better start learning to drink soy lattes).
Unfortunately, my plan failed on two counts: not only were the soda and milk seeds failing to shrivel and die, but they were also responsible for creating a smell so pungent that it could have been used to hide meth labs. Normally this would have been enough for me to call a halt to the experiment, but this was Clyde’s first Science Fair project–one he had come up with all on his own–and so I was hesitant to stop it mid-session. After all, I reasoned, what if by doing so I was stifling the future career of a brilliant medical researcher? How would I feel if one day, years from now, I were to overhear Clyde glumly saying, “Yeah, I used to be interested in science–until the day my Mom tossed out my science fair experiment. By the way, you want fries with that?”
And so we toughed it out until the end–nearly two weeks of walking into the house every day and yelling at the cat before remembering where it was that smell was actually coming from. Hopefully it will all pay off, and someday, when Clyde has discovered the cure for leprosy, or malaria, or even dandruff, he will thank me in his Nobel acceptance speech.
I do, however, still have one nagging concern: what if the point of the whole experiment was not, in fact, to see whether beans grow better in milk, water or soda, but rather to see how long I would put up with the smell? What if what Clyde was actually doing was some kind of twisted sociology experiment–with me as the subject?
Eh. I’m sure there’s still a Nobel prize for sociology, even if it is the evil sort.