by Alan Ross
Chapter 4
Field Trip
Claire woke up with the sun and was immobilized by pain. Her legs were numb from the ankles down, and her joints screamed. Most mornings were painful. This was an intense reminder of her need to lose weight before she lost her feet due to poor circulation. Forcing blood to her head to block the pain, she slowly pulled herself sideways and pulled her legs off the bed, willing the blood to flow south. Her Christian upbringing forced prayers from her mouth, although the words did not match the beliefs anymore. Steve was up, which wasn’t odd, since sleep always came in short fits for him.
As the feeling in her feet returned, she struggled up and walked to the bathroom, ready to start the day. Her eyes were clear and her hair didn’t look bad--pretty impressive if you ignored everything below the chin. Once her makeup was on, she smiled in the mirror and felt better than she had a few minutes back. She thanked God that they lived in a ranch and hobbled to the kitchen.
Steve was sitting at the table, showered and dressed, reading the newspaper. “Morning,” He quietly said, and continued to work the crossword puzzle.
“Morning, did you sleep last night?”
“About the usual; you have a good rest? What’s a five letter word for doled?”
“Slept well, sore this morning, I’ll bet rain is in the forecast. Try meted.”
“Sorry to hear you’re sore, thanks for the word.” He worked the puzzle, mumbling to himself.
“You better hurry up or you’ll be late for school,” Claire said as she filled his travel mug with coffee. “And don’t forget your tie.”
“Don’t worry, teacher, I should be on time, and I’ll bring an apple in case I’m a bit late. Rob should have taken this trip; he’s the one who agreed to do the demonstration for the little brats.” He finished the crossword, folded up the paper and put it neatly down for her to read after school.
“Never know, the next Steve Pfister might be in that class and your demo may be the reason he or she chooses to major in chemistry.”
“More likely someone will ask how easy it is to synthesize drugs like ecstasy or crystal meth.” “Such a great attitude, Mr. Sunshine. How many times have I told you that teaching follows the 90/10 rule? 90 percent of the benefits come from 10 percent of the students. Not everyone is cut out to be a scientist, but for the ones that we can influence, especially in middle school, our influence can be great.”
“Ok, I will keep an open mind today.” Steve lied. “I better run, see you after work.” He pecked his wife’s cheek and walked out the door. He was back in the house thirty seconds later to grab his tie and coat.
“My absent-minded professor, enjoy your day.” Claire chuckled as Steve went back out the door. She was right behind him, headed to Lincoln middle school, where she taught eighth grade English. She enjoyed the benefits of a short commute, with the school just a few streets over from their house. Steve and Claire loved the city they lived in and had nice neighbors – typical Midwest suburbia.
Steve drove to the freeway and merged into traffic, running through his demo out loud. He was grateful for the invention of cell phones, because to anyone driving by, it looked like he was on the phone. The truth was he talked to himself all the time and wasn’t a fan of cell phones, didn’t even own one. He cursed Rob again for passing this task on to him as “an opportunity to connect with some kids and help push a few minds into the field of chemistry.” Foundation Chemical Products prided itself on community involvement; and outreach was more than encouraged, it was mandatory that all employees spend some time volunteering. At least this little field trip, along with his work in the Explorers program, would help take care of his obligation for the year.
As he exited the freeway and headed toward the school, Steve tried to remember what it was like to be a teenager. Not having kids had disconnected him from the younger generation almost completely, and he had trouble remembering what his teenage years had been like. He thought back to growing up in upstate Minnesota and the challenges of a rural community and those long winters. His most vivid memory was wanting to get out of there and never go back. The military gave him the opportunity to get out and get an education, but also gave him a free trip to Vietnam, which brought its own set of challenges. Steve quickly left that thread behind and concentrated on getting to the school. He found a visitor’s spot out front, grabbed his briefcase and the box that contained his demonstration equipment and tried to steady his nerves as he approached the front door.
“Hi, my name is Steve Pfister from Foundation Chemical, and I’m here to give a demonstration to Mr. Baldwin’s science class.”
“I was expecting a Mr. Bailey today, are you filling in for him?” The secretary asked.
“I work for Rob. He had a last minute meeting today and asked me to come in his place.”
“Do you have a background check on file with the school system? We require background checks for anyone interacting with the students.”
“I have one on file with the county due to my work with the Boy Scouts Explorers program. Is that good enough?”
“I will take your word for it, please fill out the line on the visitor’s list, and I’ll get you a temporary badge. Can’t be too safe these days.”
“Totally agree,” Steve muttered as he filled out the form and grabbed the badge. “Where is Mr. Baldwin’s classroom?” he asked the secretary.
“Down the hall, first right, third classroom on the right, room 118. Please come back to sign out and turn in your badge when you’re done.”
“Will do, thanks.” He collected his stuff and ambled down the hall. Schools and hospitals had the same effect on him, they both give him the creeps, though he wasn’t sure why. He ran through his little speech one last time, took a deep breath and knocked on the door.
A rumpled little man with a long brown beard ambled over to the door and opened it for Steve. “Welcome to 8th grade chemistry! My name is Chris Baldwin.”
“Steve Pfister from Foundation Chemical – filling in for my boss Rob Bailey, who sends his regrets,” Steve replied as he handed his business card to the teacher. He followed Mr. Baldwin to the desk at the front of the room. The class was pretty full and the kids were a bit restless, but for the most part, they were interested to know what was going on. Or, more likely, they were just happy to be relieved of another boring class.
“Class, I would like to introduce our guest today, Mr. Pfister, who works at Foundation Chemical Products as a chemist. He is here today to tell us a bit about what it’s like to work as a chemist, the type of work he does, and the products that Foundation Chemical produces. Please give him your undivided attention and be on your best behavior.”
“Hi everyone, my name is Steve, and as Mr. Baldwin said, I work as a chemist. How many of you think chemistry is exciting?” About half of the class reluctantly raised their hands. “You with your hands up are wrong, working in chemistry is like doing homework eight hours a day.” The class laughed.
“We spend most of our time working on reports and analyzing results from our experiments, and then repeating our experiments again and again to prove the results we’re seeing are right. Before you all give up on being chemists though, there are some very fun and exciting parts of being a chemist. Do you guys have questions, or would you like me to just stand up here and talk for the next hour?”
One of the boys raised his hand and Steve mentally rolled his eyes. The kid looked like a little skateboarding troublemaker. “Here comes the drug question,” Steve thought.
“What is the most important thing that chemistry is going to provide for the world in the next twenty years? Will it be alternative energy, pharmaceutical, or something we haven’t thought of yet?”
Steve froze for a second, staring oddly at the kid, never expecting that question. “Well, I’m a bit opinionated because some of my current work is related to disease control and prevention, but it could really come from anywhere. Good question.”
The
re were a couple of other general questions about working in the lab, common things like explosions, fires, etc. Steve didn’t feel like trying to extend the conversation, so he pulled out his demo gear. “Going to show you a little magic now.” He lifted the beaker up and swirled the clear liquid around for the class to see. There was interest in most of their eyes, but some of them were daydreaming. “Anyone have a pencil? Trade you for a company one?” A few kids raised their hand, including the skateboarder. Steve pointed to the kid and he came up to trade pencils. “Don’t want you thinking I’m pulling a fast one with a special pencil. This is very special liquid, even though it looks like water.” The kids were paying a bit more attention now, wondering what was going to happen next. Steve put the pencil in and began stirring around the perimeter of the beaker, the liquid swirling. “If we add some energy from the pencil, something fun might happen. What are your favorite magic words?”
The class was shouting different ones at Steve and he took the opportunity to use the noise to cover him breaking the ampoule with the pencil. “We’ll stick with abracadabra.” He stirred vigorously and the glow started to spread through the liquid, more concentrated in some places than others. He could feel the fast acting epoxy hardening, stirring was becoming a chore. The class was ‘oohing’ and ‘aahing’, everyone paying full attention now. It took only another 30 seconds and the epoxy was set. Steve took this moment to let the epoxy finish hardening. “Everyone like my little magic trick?”
Mr. Baldwin was appraising Steve, wondering as much as the rest of the class what had just happened. “Class, do you have any questions about the experiment?”
“That looks like a glow stick.” A girl offered. “I love those, can you teach us how to make them?”
Steve smiled and passed the beaker to the first kid. “Part of this trick is to have it colored like a glow stick; the other part was to make the liquid turn into a semi solid material. Pass this around but be careful and don’t touch the material. See if you can stir it.”
The kids took turns looking at the beaker and pulling on the pencil, everyone ten times more engaged than when the talk started. Steve, pleased, thought this wasn’t a complete waste of time, though he wasn’t going to tell Rob or he’d have Steve out every month doing these dog and pony shows. “Anyone care to guess what my trick was all about?”
“All of your ingredients were in the beaker and activated when you mixed them up,” someone guessed.
“You’re partially correct, but not all the way.”
The skateboarder was thinking hard, trying to figure it out. He asked to see the beaker again and slowly rotated it in his hand, examining it closely. Spotting a few shards of broken glass in the solution he ventured a guess. “You had another glass container in the beaker with some of the ingredients and used the pencil to break it.”
Steve’s face broke into a devious smile, and he enjoyed the suspense a few seconds longer before responding. The other kids were grasping the idea and several were nodding their heads in agreement with the hypothesis offered by the other student. “Very good observation, want to see how I did it?”
The class was fully engaged as Steve pulled out the spare beaker with the ampoule already cemented in place. “There are two chemical reactions happening at the same time in the beaker. The active ingredients are put into this glass vessel, called an ampoule, and then I cement that to the beaker. The glass is very thin and the chemicals are transparent so unless you came up and looked very closely you wouldn’t notice the ampoule.”
Steve passed around the beaker so the students could inspect the empty beaker. “The first reaction is for the glow stick effect, which is a combination of hydrogen peroxide, phenyl oxalate ester and fluorescent dye. When they combine, the reaction puts off excess energy that shows up as light, which was the purple color. The second part was a quick-setting epoxy, which is made up of two parts: a hardener, polyethylenepolyamine, and bisphenol-A, which is an epoxy resin. When the two of them are combined, they create a plastic-like substance, which is why the pencil ended up getting stuck.”
“Class, remember our discussion about potential and kinetic energy? Which do you think these reactions represent?”
Most of the class had confused looks on their faces; it wasn’t easy to grasp the concept of kinetic and potential energy. “Mr. Baldwin, do you have a rubber band I could borrow for a minute?” The teacher nodded and fetched one from his desk, handing it to Steve. “Here is an easy way to remember the difference between potential and kinetic energy. It was taught to me by a chemist who inspired me when I was about your age, and it has stuck with me all this time.” Steve looped the band around his thumb and stretched it as far as he could toward his elbow. He then pointed his thumb at Mr. Baldwin’s head and said, “This is potential energy. There is energy stored and ready to be released. Anyone care to guess what type of energy it would be if I let the rubber band go?”
Mr. Baldwin’s lip was pursed and he was staring out of the corner of his eyes, hoping that Steve didn’t release the rubber band in a display of kinetic energy. The kids got the basic idea and were starting to get excited, hoping for a demonstration. Steve relaxed the rubber band and handed it back to the teacher, who unconsciously let a big sigh escape his lips. “That’s all I had to show you today. I wanted to let you know that Foundation Chemical teams up with Boy Scouts for a program called Explorers. The purpose is to get high school kids interested in science and math partnered with people at the company to help them learn and grow their interests. You don’t have to be a Scout to be in Explorers, and I am involved with our chemistry program, so hope to see some of you in the future.”
“Please thank Mr. Pfister for coming and sharing his demonstration with us today class.” The class clapped as Steve packed up and left. He signed out and sat in his car for a couple of minutes, catching his breath. Even though he’d appeared calm, he’d been nervous for most of the time and it had taken a toll on him. A few minutes of silence helped a lot and before long he was on his way to work. It was still only mid-morning, but feelt like it’d been a full day.
The lab was quiet and Steve didn’t bother to wonder why, but instead settled into his spot and enjoyed the solitude. He needed to get back to work on the bio-reabsorbable material development, and needed to improve his material or be stuck on the project for a long time. Not wanting to try another batch of what had recently failed, he decided to try something a little different, and moved to a carbon-based polymer. He racked his brain and searched a couple of journals before deciding to try a combination of dextran and polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE for short. The gel-forming and rheological properties of the two might be a good combination and provide some of the key attributes needed, especially the time degradation. He was in the midst of synthesizing the polymer when his team came back, Rob leading the way.
“So how did it go today? Did the kids like your demonstration?”
“It wasn’t too bad, there might even be a future chemist in the class.” Steve turned his head away from Rob and focused on his work. He didn’t want to give him too much, and hated being interrupted.
Rob walked to his office and the others settled in to their work. When he thought the polymer was at the right thickness, he started the process of forming the spheres that would hold the dye, hopefully for thirty days. Maybe it was his optimism, but this new material seemed to be forming quickly and consistently, which was encouraging. The team was going to lunch, and Tom came to invite Steve, who decided to tag along. On this day he had experienced more social interaction than he normally got in a week. He even participated in a discussion about the Indians, even though he didn’t follow sports. He’d been to a few games at Jacobs Field when Claire dragged him to some event or another, but other than knowing some of the basics, he was lost.
The conversation drifted to the meeting that Steve had missed while he was at the school. Some upcoming budget cuts were going to stop some projects and maybe even create some la
yoffs. The table was gossiping about which projects and people they would cut if it was their choice, focusing primarily on management. Steve ignored this discussion and focused on his food; he didn’t like to get caught up in this kind of chatter.
The remainder of the afternoon was pretty mundane. Steve wrote his status report and a summary of the last batch of testing. There was another batch that was due next week, and he hoped that there wouldn’t be a dye leak. Steve had enough experience to know that it was likely to fail like the previous batches. He thought the new batch might be the key.
The house was empty when Steve got home, and he remembered that Claire mentioned a meeting after school. He thought about the computer but looked outside and wanted to take advantage of the great weather. Wiping the dust off the seat, he checked the tire pressure on his bike and took a ride, letting his mind go back to the simplicity of childhood. He and his brother used to ride their bikes whenever possible, taking them places that beat television or books. His brother had found trouble after Steve went to Vietnam and had been killed in prison. Steve tried to shake the memory of what it had been like to get the notice that his brother was dead:the hurried trip back to the states for the funeral, his mother and father inconsolable. He lost track of time and distance and, before long, was several miles from home. Stopping the bike to get his bearing, he saw the prison, surrounded by razor wire, on top of the hill,.Steve was flooded with memories, his own plus ones of his brother. He wondered about moments like this, when the mind and the body collide, without any conscious thought or planning.
The ride home was uneventful, and Claire was home when Steve arrived. They spent the waning daylight on the front porch, reading and enjoying being together.