Newsletter – October 23, 2026
Oops, my bad. I burned the formica.
…50 years ago.
It all began with a Christmas gift. What do you get a boy who’s good with numbers, has a healthy curiosity, but isn’t quite as focused on schoolwork as his older brother?
Well, if you’re a Professor of Chemistry you get him a chemistry set!
(After all I had played a lot with my magic kit. I even put on a magic show for my dad’s graduate students.)
DAD, here’s your first clue, your son’s into performing. Second clue, one of your grad students invites him to perform his magic for his child’s birthday party. And he jumps at the chance. Third clue, he’s memorized every lyric to musicals from HMS Pinafore to Mary Poppins, and sings along with the records enthusiastically.
Now that I write that, I’m thinking Dad might have been trying to steer the HMS Enthusiasm into calmer waters, somewhere I could learn to make a decent living.
One day when I was complaining about having nothing to do, my mom reminded me that I had a chemistry set downstairs that I had never played with. She was right, so I went downstairs to open up the booklet that came with the set and started looking for something interesting to do.
Smog. I had heard about it on the TV news almost every night. There was, at that time, no such thing as unleaded gasoline. A few years later, my cousins who grew up in Los Angeles told me about how the skies were dark green with air pollution. Smog was literally on everyone’s lips.
So here was a way to make smog. It must be safe to do, or why include it in the chemistry set? I followed the recipe, mixed the dry chemicals and heaped them onto a tablespoon that I held over a flame.
The smoke streamed from the spoon in a very satisfying cloud and rose to the ceiling while I watched. Suddenly my mom ran down the stairs yelling at me.
“What are you doing?!” she cried.
“Making smog,” I told her.
“Well stop it!” she yelled, running around the basement to prop open the window wells.
Somewhere in my rush to stop the smog machine I managed to burn the formica near the edge of the sink. And it remains to this day, the blackened remnant of my chemistry creation, about the size of a quarter and a nickel melded together.
I lost all interest in my gift after that. When I got to high school, my father helped me with my chemistry homework but we never discussed the affair of the mad scientist and what he did in the basement.
Oops! My bad.
TTFN
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My middle grade novel, The Most Amazing Museum of Los Angeles is available through The BookBaby Bookshop at https://store.bookbaby.com/book/the-most-amazing-museum-of-los-angeles
