Dreamtime: A Happy Book

Research

8 Research Connecticut takes pride in being a “Tier I” research university, and an archipelago of centers and institutes surrounds the library and athletic fields. Reefs of specialized learning bracket many of the islands, and I have never explored the Institute of Material Science, for example, with its Electrical Insulation Research Center and its Center for Advanced Deployable Nano-Sensors. I pondered wandering into a meeting of the New Literacies Research Team, but then I read that the group concentrated their energies on new information and communication technologies “central to full civic, economic, and personal participation in a globalized community.” Unfortunately I inhabit a localized community and have little use for new technologies; old ways of knowing and doing having served me well. The Center of Excellence for Vaccine Research with its focus on the biology of mycoplasma pathogens intrigued me. Besides being the “etiologic agent of Chronic Respiratory Disease,” which costs the poultry business in the United States $700 million annually, Mycoplasma gallisepticum “emerged in 1994 as a cause of conjunctivitis in free-ranging house finches in the mid-Atlantic region” of the United States. Anything to do with birds sets me aflutter, and I mulled exploring the center. But then I, too, was a trifle free ranging, if not quite so far wandering as Carpodacus mexicanus, and I realized that before being allowed to roam the center I would be subjected to a regimen of inoculations, not something appealing to a person of my mandible. I do much research, all solidly based on happenstance, my tools curiosity and studious habit. Recently I learned that the first king of Abyssinia was a serpent and that nilder-nalder meant dally. “Dirt,” I read in a nook in the library, was “only matter in the wrong place.” Plumbers in small towns, I discovered this summer, do landfills of business during holidays, especially over Christmas when relatives return from out of state and Research | 9 swell families, not only taxing hospitality but also drains, plugging traps and clogging fittings. Last week I found a broadside pressed between the pages of a hundred-and-thirty-year-old number of the Rural New Yorker. Printed on rough rag paper and measuring nine and a half by six inches, the broadside announced the appearance of “Chas. Worcester’s Elfin Star Troupe.” Admission was twenty-five cents, with children under twelve admitted for fifteen cents. Featured in the show were “New Songs, Dances, Negro Farces, Contortion and Acrobatic Feats, Burlesques, Pantomimes , Dramas, Music.” At the top of the broadside in bold black letters appeared “$500 reward! boylost.” “missing,” the account read, “from about the third of next month, 1870, a tall complexioned young man, about five feet six inches of age; hight thirty-seven years; had on when last seen a pair of swallow tailed sealskin trowsers, with sausage stripes, fashionable mutton chop waistcoat, with cast-iron trimmings, double-barrelled frock coat, with stripe collar and tobacco lining: watertight canvas boots, with patent leather tops, laced up the side: is deaf and dumb of one eye and hard of hearing with the other; is slightly pockmarked at the back of his head, stoops upright when he walks crooked; has a slight impediment in his look, and wears a Grecian bend on his upper lip; whiskers cut off short inside; was carrying an empty carpet box in each hand, and a wooden leg in the other, containing screw steamers, railway tunnels, and blacking; was born before his young brother, his Mother being present on the occasion.” When measured on a nanometer scale, my discoveries don’t amount to much. But when measured by inches, feet, and yards, my research rises square rigged, enabling me to tack unperturbed like a frigate bird high above any archipelago. Who wouldn’t want to know that the lost boy had a pocket book in his possession “containing a Ten-Dollar Gold Piece, One Silver Watch, Two Large Hams, One Barrel of Flour, One Load of Wood, One Rocking Chair, 2 Setts of Glassware, 10 Setts Cups and Saucers, 4 Dozen China Plates, 1 Washtub, 1 Stove, 1 Pig, and 50 other beautiful presents”? “Selections” from the list, the broadside informed passersby, would be given away during the troupe’s performance at the “Public Hall.” I have long planned the arbitrary course of my studies. Occasionally, however, my doings seem indulgent. The Office of Undergraduate Research , a flyer explained, provided “research-related opportunities . . . to students interested in...