Bell Laboratories
By Sara Elizabeth McNeilly Ammon
You were invited to come help the men who were developing
C language and microchip technology, among other items,
you list them plainly as I put in another load of laundry.
Seven were chosen country-wide, you were one of them and you
casually mentioned tonight
you have a VHS tape of some of your stay there, some of the
talks, you in a lab coat and Bell Labs and you wondered
if you should just get rid of it, whether it would be worth
trying to convert, whether we should watch it.
I was a
little girl and you were in New Jersey. You
came home with a present for me, a new purple swimsuit, and I was sure the
color was so bright and classy because it was from exotic New Jersey with its
beaches and its scientific mysteries.
You
turned down robotics but chose working with gallium arsenide wafers, disks that
were layered and etched with acid, spun and thinned, and you helped with this
as well as fixed the engineer’s overhead light so it would not shine in his
face. You gave him a racy nickname, and
the guy who didn’t want to like you ended up inviting you to the beach with
himself and his wife, you made friends and hung out with Nobel Laureates.
My son asked if a laureate was a runner up.
Tears in my eyes,
no, they were the real thing, talking to Dad,
he said he stopped counting how many were there for the
workshops, how many he spoke to, said he regretted not taping the entire summer
and
I made a note quickly on a shopping list next to me to find
the tape, find my Dad, the guy in the lab coat who turned down the job and came
back to Nebraska and took my sister and I to every single swim meet every single
summer, never missed one, and spoke to us in the same language he would have
used in New Jersey.
Acid corrodes, thins the plate, new language, C language, Find the
robotics, technology, language, fix it, find it and fix it, fix the light and
make the microchip,
Now, NOW. Now, find the
chemical, find the compound and engineer a solution for the current
situation. The 2013 situation, bracing
for impact,
The acid corroded, find it, Find IT, cure
it, fix it all.
