Not Mad as a Hatter, Yet

“I’ll be there God willing and the creeks don’t rise,” said Mother for the hundredth time during my eight years. And she added, “If nobody’s sick.”

She was on the phone talking to only God knew who, but it was definitely someone from the George Hart Post 167 VFW Auxiliary. It could have been one of her sisters. All seven of the Short girls belonged to the women’s auxiliary and I’m sure each of them had held multiple offices at some time or another. My mother was a natural born secretary/treasurer for every organization to which she ever belonged: VFW Auxiliary, PTA, our village township. At one point, she was also president of two of them.

And I was born into an extremely patriotic family. I knew the connotative meaning of the word patriotism long before I ever looked for the denotative meaning in a dictionary. Our mother taught her daughters to love God, country, family, and veterans. Two of her four brothers went to war and those at home did everything they could do to support the cause. The sisters were quite active, thus the auxiliary. And then several nephews went to Vietnam, so they continued.

Being patriotic was the last thing on my mind when I overheard Mother say she’d be at the auxiliary meeting that night “if nobody was sick”. I decided then and there I was going to be sick. I sneaked into the bathroom medicine cabinet and found the thermometer. I brought it into the living room where Mother was still on the phone. Her back was turned toward me and she was still deep into conversation. I opened the container and held the thermometer over our gas space heater. I watched the silver line rise a little and popped the glass tube into my mouth when I thought she was about to end her discussion.

Nope, she continued talking and I held the thermometer over the heater again. Three, four times, I repeated the routine. My “fever” went up slightly but went back down when I put it into my mouth. I had to make this work or she would never stay home. I don’t know why I wanted her to stay, it was probably the excitement of a psychological challenge. I touched the silver bulb to the top of the heater and watched my fever skyrocket. This was gonna be great! But it popped and I screamed. Mother hung up and ran over to find me with the broken end of our thermometer in my hand and metallic balls bouncing all over the floor.

We set about trying to corral the liquid silver. Herding cats would have been much easier. We swiped and swept and scooped with a broom, dustpan, a cloth, and our hands. It acted like water but didn’t feel wet. When we moved it around, it separated into those little balls again, before settling into a shiny puddle. I knew she was mad at me, but we couldn’t help laughing at ourselves and the mercury, as the seemingly solid balls melted into a liquid when we thought we caught some. Mother held her hand out and I watched the liquid metal roll around like water in it. If it slipped through her fingers, the spheres bounced higher than the best superballs I had ever seen, even without throwing them hard at the floor. It was also the craziest thing I had ever seen; it defied the logic of an eight-year-old brain. She told me her science teacher had done the same thing in class. It was quite a magical adventure for me. I did get verbally reprimanded, but my greatest punishment was that she went to her auxiliary meeting after cleaning up the mess.

I’m not sure when I learned how dangerous mercury was. I don’t think Mother understood just how toxic it was, because she never would have let me help. Once I found out hatmakers often went “crazy” using the metal to felt hats, I worried she and I would end up in the looney bin, too. Whatever that meant.

She didn’t, and I haven’t yet, but you never know.

Note: Mercury is extremely dangerous. I am not condoning playing with it. I also do not intend to make light of a medical or mental illness or the facilities designed to treat such. The mid-sixties was a different time and world. There is an interesting article on History.com on a brief, unscientific history of the use of mercury at:
https://www.history.com/news/where-did-the-phrase-mad-as-a-hatter-come-from.

Photo credit:
http://abhinavmercury.weebly.com/uses-cost-and-facts-of-mercury.html.