Technical Fallacies

I wrote this last Christmas, but Ken said I should post it for all of you. Merry Christmas to all, and Happy New Year!

Peanut Brittle
Philip Snider, ©2007

The trouble with Mr. Van Camp, my high school chemistry teacher, was you couldn’t read him. He wasn’t Mr. Monotone, but he wasn’t what you’d call sparkling either. He was like his lab assignments—controlled. When his student teacher was telling us how to get out of the draft by inhaling a little bit of hydrogen sulfide gas to induce asthma right before a pre-induction physical, I don’t remember if Mr. Van Camp even blinked. I don’t have a clue how he felt about the war. And when that hippie kid with the beard and long hair that all merged into one huge helmet used to come in late every morning and sit on the front row in the middle of the classroom, stretch out his dirty feet and go right to sleep by 8:10 every day, Mr. Van Camp didn’t say anything about that either. But then later that year, when he was teaching us about colloidal suspensions, he mixed up a rust-colored paste, spun it out in the centrifuge and shook it onto a 3x5 card. He explained that it was a compound of mercury and, by the way, a contact explosive. Then he laid the card on the floor next to the hippie kid and dropped a pencil eraser on it and blew the kid out of his chair. You just couldn’t read Mr. Van Camp.
That’s probably why he could get away with the surprise lab on the Friday right before Christmas break. We walked in and saw all the lab stations set up with ring stands and Bunsen burners, and beakers of white crystals and small packet of other compounds, and a sheet of tinfoil, and lab instructions all laid out. The large beakers were marked with so-many cc’s of C12H22O11, and the instructions said we were going to reconfigure this carbohydrate chain. We added another so-many cc’s of NaCl and so many ml of H2O and dissolved the crystals over the burner. The sweet smell, of course, was a dead giveaway, and those of us who had watched our mothers make candy started to figure it out. When the dissolved crystals started to boil and then turn golden, we were to dump in the packet labeled “organic matter,” which turned out to be raw peanuts, and Mr. Van Camp walked around the chem lab and poured vanilla from a glass-stoppered bottle into our beakers. Then we poured the stuff out onto the tinfoil and it hardened into peanut brittle. It was my favorite lab of the whole year.
So I decided I was going to make peanut brittle for my family for a Christmas surprise. Mom made all kinds of candy every year. She would put the cookie sheet on the same cutting board where she sliced onions for our everyday meals, and then pour out the molten sugar that would become almond roca onto that cookie sheet, which would heat up the wood and bring out the scent of the onions every time. I can’t taste almond roca , even now, without smelling onions. Candy making at Christmas was Mom’s family tradition, and she was good at it.
Which was fitting because Dad had a sweet tooth. I was well into adulthood when I figured out the connection, but the fact that Dad was alcoholic probably played into that. He wasn’t what most people picture when they think of alcoholics. He didn’t drink in the mornings, and it wasn’t until after I had moved out that he ever actually passed out without getting undressed and going to bed first. I don’t think he ever even drank during the work day, and it’s only now in retrospect that I’ve begun to realize what it must have cost him to manage his addiction that tightly every day of his life. But part of that must have been that he substituted one hydrocarbon chain for the other—sugar for alcohol—every morning. I know when he finally did stop drinking, there were dishes of candy all around the house for the rest of his life. And I knew he loved peanut brittle.
Everybody else went to bed about eleven, and I told them I was going to stay up and watch the Carson show, which I usually did on Friday nights, and then I got things together to make the peanut brittle. Johnny was on it that night, and that was back when he did an hour-and-a-half show, so I didn’t even get started until about 1:30. The problem was that Mr. Van Camp’s lab instructions were for such a small batch, and they were all in metric measurements, so I had to convert them and then multiply them. Math was always my worst subject, but at that time I still believed Mrs. Shoebridge’s propaganda, that anybody could do math if they just took it slowly and followed the order of operations. I was probably the one who finally changed her mind on that. I suppose I should have known there was something wrong when it worked out to a cup of salt for one batch of candy, but the sugar was boiling on the stove, and the peanuts were getting burned, and I was committed.
It was awful. The sweet flavor came first, but then the salt bit like a mouth full of ants. The roof of my mouth went raw immediately, and it made my teeth tingle. I never could put salt on a slug after that peanut brittle. The cruelty of it was too clear and too familiar. All I can think of is that my tongue must have looked like a salted slug that night. I was so frustrated and disappointed, I just left everything on the counter and went to bed.
When I got up I heard my folks in the kitchen, and I went in to explain to them what had happened. Dad was drinking a glass of water, or as Mom said, “another glass of water,” and just stared at me. He never said anything. He just stared. It wasn’t a glare, really, because there was no anger or malice in it, but there wasn’t any holiday mirth there either. It was like he was looking into my head, with a face like Geraldo when he opened up Al Capone’s empty vault.
Mom saw the humor in it, but I’m not sure Dad ever did, which is odd because Dad was a great storyteller with a sharp sense of humor. Years later I tried telling the story once in his hearing, but he didn’t join in.