The Big Picture

I find it interesting how, when I was a child, it took a mini-mouse alarm-clock, multiple knocks on my door and a shoulder shake from my mom, and as a last resort, the Everly Brother’s Wake Up Little Suzie turned up to 10 on the downstairs turn table to get me out of bed Monday through Friday. And on Sunday mornings, it took an act of God to get me into my dress and out to church on time for mass. But on Saturday mornings? I was up at the crack of dawn sitting on the couch with my brother and bowls of cereal watching Scooby Doo, Bugs Bunny, Fat Albert, The Pink Panther and Hong Kong Phooey.

  School House Rock zapped me with interest in electricity and Interplanet Janet and by the time I was in third grade, I became a mad scientist. I started by directing a magnifying glass toward love notes from that disgusting Douglas Pittman until they burst into flames on the driveway. My mom never made it through a full bottle of Tab before I’d created an eruption with baking soda on the back porch.

  That Christmas, Santa brought me my first microscope and I was deep into the details of butterfly wings, fly heads, bread mold and pond scum. For my 9^th birthday, I got a Chemcraft Science Sorcery Magic Lab complete with litmus paper and test tubes. It was recommended for ages ten and up, so I was clearly advanced.

  My fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Jones, was a mad scientist too. We generated electricity with potatoes, pennies and screws. We did the egg drop challenge on the playground, making parachutes from plastic bags, toilet paper rolls and balloons, tossing them off the monkey bars and the 10-foot tower of tractor tires on the playground where the fifth-grade boys played "King of the Mountain." There were at least half-a-dozen broken arms each year. Likewise, our challenge resulted in a lot of broken eggs.

  But the experiment with the lasting impact was the pinhole camera. A parent who happened to be a photographer came in to demonstrate. She spray-painted a Quaker Oats canister black and cut a square out of one side. We poked a pushpin through a piece of aluminum from a soda pop can to make the tiny aperture and then created a shutter flap with black electrical tape. We went into our makeshift dark room in a reconfigured gym equipment closet and carefully placed our photo paper into the canister.

  Now here is what you’re not going to see coming. The day we were set to take our photo, we had a visitor. I guess he was a friend of our teacher. I think they’d grown up in Mobile, Alabama together. But there on the blacktop next to the tower of tractor tires at Henry Adams Elementary School was Henry Hammerin’ Hank Aaron standing with a group of 18 fourth graders and their mad scientist teacher, captured for posterity by a volunteer parent and a Quaker Oats pinhole camera.

  I remember being squeezed into our darkroom with all my classmates as we watched the image reveal itself in a tray of vinegar-smelling liquid and the photo with baseball royalty that magically appeared and was pinned to the bulletin board by Mrs. Jones desk for the rest of the school year.

  When I showed my father my autographed Milwaukee Brewers baseball card at dinner that night, I got a more positive response than I’d ever received when I presented a perfect report card, though he said he wished Mr. Aaron had visited the class a year earlier when he was still with dad’s favorite team, the Braves.

  I wasn’t as awed that day by meeting a legend, I was more moved by the revelations in the development of the pin-pricked image. That volunteer parent had no idea the little light they’d shined on my imagination. That Christmas Santa brought me a Polaroid Camera.

  And I became my family historian.

  Up until I took over, we had the square images from mom’s brownie camera then the rectangular shots from the Kodak Instamatic with the slide-in flash. Every canister of film took time to develop the memories. But not my Polaroid. It was like darkroom magic only a lot easier and less smelly. And I witnessed the delight when I captured a moment for my parents and for friends.

  By high school the only chemistry I was interested in was between me and the boys. And it had gotten cumbersome to lug around my Polaroid, plus the instant film was expensive, so I graduated to a Disc camera, sleek and slim. Automatic, point and shoot with 15 images per cartridge and a built-in flash. Sometimes I borrowed the school’s Nikon SLR camera, but I liked the convenience of something that fit in my purse and the auto-focus. My photos made it into our yearbooks. A few that are in my scrapbooks might have caused career scandals, at least before pot was legal.

  And I am still the historian for my family and friends. I have decades of well-organized photo albums on my shelves and of course my own children’s lives are well documented.  When they got to school, I became the classroom chronicler, capturing memories from years of field trips and science fairs, book reports and talent shows. When Mac computers added iLife in the early 2000s, I experimented with iMovie and made sure every kid in my kids’ classes had a starring role. I gave all their classmates DVDs put to music on the last days of school. But since it was the last day before a long break, I rarely heard if they were appreciated or even watched.

  So, time passed. I’d kind of forgotten about those class videos. Until a couple months ago when I was at the gym and a young man came up to me.

  “Are you Maddie‘s mom?”

  It was Steven. From my now 28 year-old daughter’s second-grade class. I remember him when he was 4 feet tall. Now he’s 6’4”.

  “It’s so funny that I would see you today!’ he said, “My girlfriend and I watched our 2^nd grade video last night and she couldn’t believe all the cool things we did in Mrs. Derry’s class that year. Thank you so much for all those memories.”

  Then last week, my husband, son and I went to dinner with one of my son’s friends and is his dad. The boys met in first grade and recently started working together. Us parents hadn’t hung out since the kids were in elementary school. We talked about the paths our boys have taken through college to their recent reconnection.

  “You know,” the friend’s dad said to me, “I give you a lot of the credit for where he is today.”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  “He came home from one of those career fairs you organized and declared he wanted to be an engineer,” said the dad.

  And it was then that I remembered that year’s class video, the last one I ever made. I’d asked all the fifth graders what they wanted to be when they grew up.

  My son declared, “CIA agent.”

  His best friend said, “An NBA player.” Other friends proclaimed “Doctor, teacher, actor, stuntman.” I think they all found other dreams.

  But this friend said, “I want to build rocket ships that go into space.”

  Sure enough, he became an engineer for SpaceX and did just that.

  So much like that mom with the Quaker Oats camera, I too had no idea the little light I’d shined on another kid’s imagination.

As shared at Story Salon on March 25, 2026 when the theme was "Experimentation."