Hydra

OK. I swore I would post something before the week was out, so here I am. I've had a million entry ideas in the past week, but nothing cohesive, so here's just something I've been thinking about:

When I was a junior in high school, my biology teacher was Mrs. Phelps. She was a woman in her 40s, very tailored and together looking, but she always looked slightly nervous.

One of Mrs. Phelps's favorite projects for her junior students was the raising of hydra, AKA sea monkeys. I'm not sure why this project thrilled her so much, but it did. She talked about it from the first day of class, and I remember thinking that those hydra must really be something special, the way she looked forward to raising them.

Finally the project came around. We dutifully filled our petrie dishes with distilled water and dried hydra. And nothing happened.

"It may take a while for the hydra to show movement," Mrs. Phelps reassured us.

We checked the hydra each day. It was kind of pathetic, watching Mrs. Phelps go from petrie dish to petrie dish, every once in a while saying, "Oh, I think that one just moved!" or "There! Something's happening in that one!"

But on the fourth day, we all knew that absolutely nothing was happening in any petrie dish, and so did Mrs. Phelps. And it was pretty sad, but also? Funny. We could barely contain our evil snickering. I don't think we tried very hard to hide it.

About halfway through class that day, one of the janitors came in to let us know that a gas leak had been detected in the building, and that we all had to evacuate. As we filed out of the building and waited on the grass outside, I looked around for Mrs. Phelps. I spotted her on the other side of the building.

Mrs. Phelps was crying. Not just sniffling a little and dabbing at her eyes, but sobbing and snotting and bawling all over the place. I heard her say to another teacher, "I don't know why the hydra won't grow. They just won't grow! And now we have this stupid gas leak. Today is just awful."

So anyway, this has a been a very long, long way of telling you that I have been thinking about Mrs. Phelps and how she looked that day, and how at that time I couldn't imagine letting something as stupid as inactive hydra make me flip out and cry. But now that I'm older, I can.

Mrs. Phelps, wherever you are, I can totally relate.