Hi everyone,
Today I’m in Atlanta, or at least that was the plan when I wrote this yesterday. I should return Tuesday night.
Those of you who visit my blog often may have noticed that our friend Silindile Ntuli has been silent lately. Silindile’s health is fragile. She is often too weak to get much work done and she’s nearly always in pain. Her mother, Nomusa, also has health problems but has managed to be a strength for Silindile as well as her other children and the family. Several weeks ago Nomusa was hospitalized with a painful condition that has prevented her from coming home. She will finally be released this weekend so you can imagine the joyous reunion awaiting her. I asked Silindile for permission to tell you about this. I know she misses everyone. She reads your comments as often as she can and promises to join in again as soon as she feels stronger.
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My mother’s house finally sold after being on the market for 3 1/2 years. When going through some old books, I ran across my master’s thesis from Emory University in Atlanta, which I hadn’t seen in a long time. The title? Are you ready for this? THE GROWTH OF THE RAT TAPEWORM, HYMENOLEPIS DIMINUTA, DURING THE FIRST FIVE DAYS IN THE FINAL HOST. The thesis became my first publication when it appeared in The Journal of Parasitology,October, 1961. My wife typed the thesis and swore off forever. In those days we used typewriters, onion skin paper, and carbon paper to make copies as we typed. Make one mistake and we had to start over. Sandy was a Spanish/English major. You can imagine how she loved typing passages like this:
“Calculations for area, given in table III, were made on 401 worms in the same six age groups. The worms showed area increases of 1.3 x the first day, 4 x the second day, 4.2 x the third and fourth days, and 2.2 x the firth day.” Or how about this? “Prior to the use of the scraping method for recovering young tapeworms, only 0.4 percent of 1,500 cycticercoids given to 10 rats were later reclaimed as worms.”
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Lovely? I thought so then! If you don’t care for tapeworms, how do you feel about mice? Here’s an excerpt from my second publication, printed in The Pharmacolgist, Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 1962. Mom kept it too. By then I was a pharmacologist and spent my days in research. The name of this one? A STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF MOUSE MOTOR ACTIVITY DATA AS RECORDED WITH THE NUTATING ANNULAR ACTIVITY CAGE. But you probably guessed that. And here’s some of the sterling prose from the abstract. “The total activity counts of 500 mice given 0.9% saline were distributed in a log normal curve at 60′ and closely approached it at 30′.” Well, you get the drift.
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So now you know how I became a children’s poet. My education and early profession led me directly to it.
David
Children's Author David L. Harrison's Blog 