![]() ![]() Using a toothpick like a hockey stick, she'd brush the supple spheres toward one another until they almost touched. A minute later, my mother would drop to the floor despite her arthritic hip and begin corralling the balls. ![]() Lying there with the glass stick under my tongue, I would answer an imagined question out loud, and the thermometer would slip from my mouth and shatter on the hardwood floor, the liquid mercury in the bulb scattering like ball bearings. Being sick always gave me another chance to break an old-fashioned mercury thermometer, too. I didn't mind staying home from school and medicating myself with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce. I came down with strep throat something like a dozen times in the second and third grades, and for days on end it would hurt to swallow. This habit led to my fascination with the periodic table the first time I was left alone with a thermometer under my tongue. As a child in the early 1980s, I tended to talk with things in my mouth - food, dentist's tubes, balloons that would fly away, whatever - and if no one else was around, I'd talk anyway. ![]()
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