How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto

Author:Julius Taranto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2023-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

27.

The aquarium, more than any other setting, felt like my mom. Dad must have had this association too and it must have had something to do with him and Patricia.

Mom had taken me there a lot when I was little. In retrospect it was quite extravagant, how often we went, given what I now recognized to be its exorbitant price. This was back when Dad still worked at a larger firm, which meant both that he was often absent on weekends and that $136 per week in aquarium fare was fiscally plausible.

I was a glutton; I would have gone every day. I dreamed of getting trapped inside, of living in there. It turns out there are many precocious girls who decide at some point that they will be marine biologists, an aspiration so common it’s a cliché and—guilty. Though I think I committed to this career, and abandoned it, earlier than most.

I have never had one of those moments where my mom’s face comes to me in memory, speaking tender wisdom. A lot of what I remember is not quite memory; it is inference from stories, photos, and footage. Other than this I remember strange things, the wrong things. I remember dragging her up Pier 3 toward the aquarium, the way its sharply geometric structures loomed like a great prow in Baltimore harbor. I remember how she used to hand me a pencil and the black-and-white marbled comp notebooks in which I recorded my personal classification of marine species. Then Mom would put on headphones, connected to a Discman in her purse, on which she listened to audiobooks while I went from tank to tank, noting key observations that would eventually add up, I was sure, to a phylogenetic breakthrough.

Even if I learned something very interesting, I was not to interrupt Mom’s “reading” but was instead supposed to wait and report all my new findings in an efficient, organized form, on the drive home. In retrospect: a prelude to presenting scientific papers, and perhaps one reason I was such a natural. At the beginning my core interests were mainstream—the Atlantic bottlenose dolphin, the leatherback sea turtle, puffins. Later I trended toward the obscure, toward corals and deep-sea crustaceans.

Like I said, I remember the wrong things. Teachers tell you what you are supposed to retain; it is new knowledge, new skills, not daily experience, that you make an effort to file away. No one tells you to memorize, in case of pulmonary embolism, every passing phrase of the most obvious and consistent element of your life. So I remember hardly anything Mom ever said to me. But I do recall that the Valvatida order of starfish contains 16 families, 172 genera, and 695 species; that octopus tentacles have chemoreceptors allowing them to taste by touch; that the tasseled wobbegong, Eucrossorhinus dasypogon, is the only known member of its genus.

Anyway.

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