Cherry Pits and Goldendoodles
A former student peeked into my empty room last week. I was expecting a current student, worried she’d forgot to make-up her final exam. She wouldn’t pass without it. It was a Thursday, the first of two planning days in 2019 following winter break. You might wonder how a student could forget such a thing. She took it Friday, a day later, and passed.
It’s always a little jarring when a former student returns, a mental struggle to place them in time and space, awkward when their name is lost too. Superior name recall was once a source of pride, but the waves of students over the years have cured me of that. Minutes after she’d left, it came to me – Roopsha. Only been two years after all, a unique name (the double o, an assonance rhyme with poodle) and she’d returned once before. I should’ve remembered. Would humanity be better off if we remembered everything? If you could switch on the gene for photographic memory, would you?
First, you’d have to believe there is a gene, or gene combination, for photographic memory. There isn’t. How do I know? Because there is no such thing as photographic memory. An article in Scientific American, “Even a winner of the memory Olympics still had to keep sticky notes on the refrigerator to remember what she had to do during the day.” I once had a parent call me on the last day of school to demand I add points to her child’s final grade, points her child deserved that I’d supposedly promised and failed to deliver, this mother telling me she believed her daughter over me because her daughter ‘kept a thorough system of sticky notes at her bedroom desk to keep track of such things’.
Some take pride in never forgetting a face, but most of us remember faces better, we remember visual material better than non-visual. Seems we all have a kind of photographic memory. It’s the few who combine intense study over years with better-than-average innate ability who seem to possess a remarkable skill.
I remember Roopsha had impeccable study habits: intense attention, note-taking, kept an agenda, planned ahead. She stood out for the type of question, less about physics, more about logistics, like the classic, ‘how many questions on the test?’ Or, ‘can we round 9.8 to 10 for gravity?’ Or ‘is pen ok?’ Explaining the hard stuff, how to think about the physical world, can wear a teacher out, but the easy stuff, the sheer volume, is tiresome too. Politeness and sincerity matter. Roopsha oozed both and I came to enjoy her earnest questions, unnecessary as I felt them to be.
Today she’s a sophomore at MIT majoring in biomedical engineering. Roopsha’s high school science fair project won acclaim at the County level and maybe the State too, I don’t remember. She’d been an intern at the time and assisted a researcher at Georgia Tech. Or Emory.
Now she’s researching the human genome, cataloguing proteins, a challenge shrinking her library of proteins. She mentioned protein folding and synthesis, cellular somethings-or-other, microbial mish-machinations and I nodded along like it was all very interesting and made perfect sense.
On MIT’s website, there are many young women in the images wearing lab coats and latex gloves. No Roopsha though. On MIT News, an article discussed a gene form that’s been linked to Alzheimer’s. “The researchers also found that they could eliminate the signs of Alzheimer’s in brain cells by editing the gene with CRISPR.” Roopsha had referenced CRISPR technology and I said, “That reminds me of a short story I’d read over the holidays.”
It’s a story set in a future world where CRISPR gene-editing technology is mass-marketed to humans for the purpose of selecting traits for their lawn, pets, and children.
Roopsha said, “You know there are reports the Chinese have used this technology to clone a human baby. I don’t know if I believe the story or not.”
“Healthy skepticism is the hallmark of a good scientist. T.C. Boyle mentioned the Chinese pioneering the CRISPR technology in his story.”
Pulling out her phone, she asked, “What’s the title?”
“Are We Not Men?”
Roopsha said, “You should check out the movie, ‘Gattaca’. And a novel called ‘Beggars in Spain.'”
In 2011, NASA published a list of its most scientifically plausible science-fiction movies. Gattaca (1997), starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman made #1. The theme is eugenics, a society where children are born with predetermined genetic traits. The fictional society in the novel, ‘Beggars in Spain’ is split between the non-genetically modified (The Norms) and the modified to not need sleep, the sleepless gaining unfair advantage.
I jotted her recommendations thinking I’d need to forfeit sleep to get to these.
***
CRISPR technology is touted as ‘democratized gene editing’ because the technology makes it super easy to snip DNA segments. In effect, any old plumbing researcher with a pair of microscopic scissors and tweezers can mess with life’s fundamental building blocks.
You don’t need a lab coat, a petri dish, and university funding to mess with life’s fundamental blocks.
On Christmas Day at my sister’s I met McBaker. Or Mick. Or Baker. Or Machine Gun. Depending on who you ask.
My sister Rose’s husband picked the puppy up Christmas Eve at what he’d hoped wasn’t a puppy mill in a northeastern Ohio town I’d never heard of – Dundee – a town whose existence I briefly doubted; Dundee exists alright, it’s there in Wikipedia, 71 miles south of Cleveland in Tuscarawas County. Tuscarawas is a Native American word meaning ‘open mouth’.
The puppy gnawed on my nephew’s socked foot with a weak jaw.
Poodles are apparently crossed with any breed. The naming convention is biased toward oodles, doodles, and poos: Malamoodle, Giant Schnoodle, Dalmadoodle, Eskapoo, Jackapoo, Poovanese, and Pootalian. The list goes on: Poodle, Woodle, Foodle, and Saint Berdoodle. From a list of 112 Poodle mixes on dogbreedinfo.com, I counted three that excluded -oodle or -poo from the name, for good reason: Rattle, Rottle, and Daisy Dog.
Poodles crossed with Pit Bulls are Pit Boodles.
The hairless red pit bull, a taut muscular hide the color of a ripe maraschino, has a great name: Cherry Pit. Cherry pits do not exist. They’re the pigment of fiction writer T.C. Boyle’s imagination, bred to be germ-free in his short story, “Are We Not Men?”
Inside her home, my sister followed her Mini-Goldendoodle bent over with a spray bottle of pee-be-gone in one hand, damp sponge in the other.
The puppy needed a name. Baker Mayfield-mania has overtaken northeastern Ohio as well as my sister’s household of three teenage boys.
Their last two dogs were named O’Malley and Finnegan. The puppy’s working name was McBaker. Shortened to Mick, or Baker.
My wife said McBaker wasn’t Irish, it’s Scottish. How would she know this, I wondered? Last year, my wife had submitted her own DNA to ancestry.com. She knows things.
I like Peat. Not Pete. Peat. Peat bogs are in Ireland. Peat is burned to keep you warm (and cuddly). I texted Rose my idea. You could call him Peaty. She texted back, “Dog’s don’t recognize their names for 12 weeks. There’s time to change. The boys have settled on Mick.” The dog seller called, “How’s Charlie?” Rose wondered, “Who’s Charlie?”
In a Sam Pickering essay collection, “Letters To A Teacher”, in the very first chapter on the first page, he writes of the value of forgetfulness:
“The heartache of being human is that often when we act selflessly and with good intentions we bruise others. For teachers surrounded by children who at times seem sadly vulnerable the heartache rarely ends. No matter how well intentioned teachers are, they will bump those about them. Two things enable teachers to cope. The first is simply forgetfulness. Life pushes so much at us that a specific event rarely clogs the mind for a long time. In Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Mole and Ratty search for Portly, a lost baby otter. They rescue Portly, finding him sleeping between the hooves of Pan, the deity of the natural world. Pan bestows the gift of forgetfulness upon Mole and Rat, “lest,” Grahame writes, “the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and light-hearted as before.”
The second thing that enables teachers to cope, Pickering writes, “the real effects of teaching remain mysterious, something that complicates attempts to define good teaching. Almost never do teachers know exactly how their words, or actions, affect students. Moreover, if we really believed that everything we said shaped students, we would be too terrified to speak.”