“Touch it and check its temperature”, said grandfather to mom who
at the time was holding a three year old me in her arms. Unaware that he was
addressing mother, I instinctively reached out and planted my palm flat on a
steam iron. My anguished cries of “HE TOLD ME TO DO IT” brought the ceiling
down and earned a visit from the neighbours. A week later, seeing dad work with
a soldering iron melting metal as though it were sorcery caught my attention
and he had me begging to learn. “Hold it in your hands”, he said, and I did
exactly that. I put in the deathly grip of my half-inch fingers the searing hot
iron, ignoring the dainty yellow plastic handle, which called for another round
of worried phone calls.
I have been
fortunate enough to have a family that fostered my curiosity. By the age of
seven, I had stuffed jewellery in a desktop to see “where the pretty lights
came from” and used a laptop to iron a soaking wet napkin. I was never
reprimanded, instead they asked me to figure out why these fascinating things
were unfavourable plights for said items. Never did I receive a direct answer,
for those lived in the World Book set of 1994, within which I searched for all.
Like my
family, I rebuff the phrase “I don’t know” because logically, with enough
effort one will find that the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42.
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