electricity and Orothene

Twenty three years ago, when I was a teeny little girl who often sported a pair of pink Osh Kosh overalls, my Dad used to refer to me as Cletus. There was no reason for this other than the fact that it was fun to get me riled up. I had the good fortune of growing up in the environment of a small town family-owned hardware store. It was called Clyde Howard Paint and Hardware. My Grandfather was Clyde Howard. It was a magical place where I could devise and follow through with endless amounts of what I considered, at the ripe old age of 6, to be experiments. This was the sort of place that demanded to be explored and experienced. Once I was old enough to be in school, I spent every afternoon there after school let out. My Grandparents were there, and my Father, who was their son-in-law, worked for them for 19 years. Every day I formulated new projects to work on. I had notebooks of ideas about how to spend these afternoons. When I was 8, we were learning about electricity in school. We were attempting to discuss it scientifically. I was wide-eyed about the whole thing. I didn't really have any grasp of what electricity was or what it could do. I surely didn't respect its power. But I wanted to see it. I'm a very visual person. I needed to be able to see it to understand it. So I devised a plan, and waited until no one was nearby to enact it. My Mema always kept a kettle in the office. She used the hot water to make oatmeal throughout the day. Apple cinnamon was by far the best flavor. The plug and kettle rested atop what I considered to be my desk. I'm not sure how exactly I came by this idea, but looking back, I still cannot believe I did it. I took a piece of copper wire which we sold at the hardware store, and stuffed onto each sharp end a short 1/2 inch length of bungee cord. I plugged the kettle into the socket and then pulled it out half way. Here comes the good part; I then proceeded to drop the arced piece of copper with the bungee cord ends onto the exposed lengths of the male coffee pot plug. Wow! The electricity bounced around visibly like miniature blue lightning bolts everywhere! I let out something similar to the death cry of a rabbit, the only sound it ever makes in a lifetime. I watched helplessly as the power scorched the coffee pot and the lead-based paint. Adrenaline coursed through my veins, but I was paralyzed. Mema heard the wail I let out and came to rescue me. She knocked my contraption off of the bare electrical connection just before a fire would have been impending. I was in big trouble for a while.
The hardware store had a back room too. An industrial place designated for the storing and cutting of polyvinylchhoride and galvanized pipes. And the only bathroom in the store was located through the floor to ceiling double-jointed saloon style doors to this room. They were painted pure green. The color of grass. And had been pained over so many times that they showed it. The corners lacked definition now, and were softened away from their original 90 degree angular edges by the many coats of color. The backroom had an unpainted smooth concrete floor dimpled by the various damages of 40 years. There were metal shavings all over the floor which were the by-product of cutting the galvanized pipes into specified lengths. There was always a bar of Lava soap in the bathroom on the sink. We needed it. This was the sort of place where you'd really get dirty. We sold pesticides and insecticides, among other things. We sold a particular product called Orothene. It was an insecticide, the predecessor to the Ortho which is on the market these days. In 1988, Orothene was still sold in a glass bottle. This is an important fact, because Orothene smells exactly like shit in a bottle. It smells so unfathomably foul, that you will check your shoes for piles of shit if you walk past a drop of it. I know this because when my parents were in high school, they used to put it on the bottoms of their shoes and walk through the movie theater mid-film as entertainment instead of actually seeing a movie. The glass bottling of this product was a poorly thought out idea. Just imagine how awful it would be if you dropped a bottle...Those are pretty much exactly the words that had come out of my mouth about 30 seconds before I did just that. I caught the toe of my teeny shoe in one of the many dimples in the floor, and stumbled just enough to drop the glass bottle of liquid poo smell which I was carrying around, as if to tempt fate. It shattered on the floor and created something that I can only describe as a vomit-inducing shit storm. There was no escaping it. I had to be scrubbed. I ran from the smell and just dragged it all over the place. I had it all over me. The Lava soap could not save me, but I was scrubbed with it anyway. Eventually the smell of crap no longer permeated my pores, but the backroom was not so fortunate. The dimples in the floor had probably been the reason that the concrete was porous enough to absorb the Orothene so quickly. The back room, where the only bathroom was located, smelled like an impenetrable turd fortress literally for years. Within a year, Orothene was sold in plastic bottles.