Wrinkly Bits

A Blog by Gail Cushman

Levers and Fulcrums

In about 1959, I had the biggest crush on my science teacher, Mr. Jasper. I was fourteen years old, scrawny, pimply, and always at a loss for words when he called on me in class to answer a question. I never knew the answers because his handsome face and body had preoccupied my thoughts and distracted me. I remember him, of course, but remember little of eighth grade science because I preferred ogling Mr. J. and besides that, what did fourteen-year-old girls in the fifties and sixties need to know about science anyway? But now, sixty-two years later, Cowboy Bob has reminded me of the importance of simple tools. Fulcrums, levers, wheels and axles, and pulleys. I think there are a few more, but I’ll be darned if I can think of the others. I’m sure someone will remind me. Thank you in advance!

I finally am over Mr. J and it’s a good thing because he would be about a hundred by now. I have used many simple machines throughout the years, but never really thought about them until Cowboy Bob rang my bell. Fulcrums are all around us, scissors and pliers and all kinds of handy tools. Even toe-nail clippers and bottle openers. Imagine trying to open a can or bottle without an opener! And the cowboy made a pulley for exercising my shoulder, which is now loosy-goosy and feeling fine. Life is full of simple machines that help us with everyday life.

Combining two households required some heavy lifting and we had already moved three recliners in and out of our houses, like four times. It was a shell game with large pieces of furniture, trying to figure out where they go. Lifting heavy things causes me to worry about injured backs and what about my new shoulder? I was about to give up and advised the cowboy, “The dump, let’s take them to the dump,” which I saw as a sound solution, but he shook his cowboy-hatted head and said, “It’ll be easy to move them, fulcrums and levers.” Here comes Mr. Jasper again.

Although my dad had taught me about levers when he showed me how to use a crowbar one summer as we remodeled a house. He gave me the task of prying the shingles off its roof and I kinda enjoyed it because when I was twelve, sitting on the roof seemed like a good idea. Not so much now. I figured out the lever thing, but I had no idea what a fulcrum was. And, at twelve, I hadn’t met Mr. J yet.

So, once again, Cowboy Bob and I shuffled the three recliners, switching one with another, moving them from the garage to the house. He has a Gator tractor, aha, another simple machine: wheel and axle. It has a bucket lift on it (another lever with a fulcrum) and these two aging persons slid the recliners into the bucket and high-fived each other as we slid them into the living room, moving the third back to the garage for a future yard sale.

The moral of my blog is that we never know where the future takes us and what we discover, fulcrums and levers, wheels and axles and pulleys as well as the others I have forgotten. Whoever would have thought that my eighth-grade science lessons would still ring true now? Now I just ogle my cowboy, listen to his ramblings, and wonder why these key men in my life were mechanically inclined and why that intrigued me. Interestingly enough, Cowboy Bob said his gorgeous writing teacher in high school broke his heart when she decided to marry someone else. So, here we are, sixty years later, I fell for a science-minded guy, and the cowboy found his journalist. He explains how the pyramids were built and I write about our adventures. Full circle.

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