Under the Surface

“I like this one.”

Mom and Dad stared down on the display, “Are you sure this is what you want” says mom?” We are at Sears and Roebuck in Center Line, Michigan, it is summertime 1961. School is out but my grade eight biology class introduced me to a new world full of discovery – I was determined to continue the adventure. I had my sights on a Tasco 1200X microscope, $49, a lot of money then. “Yes,” I said. I was excited.

My Tasco came in a crafted wooden box for storage – it was not a toy. At its base was a battery operated light, flip the holder of the light and a mirror was on the other side. It came with glass slides and cover slips. A few prepared slides included a fly wing, mosquito, and bee stinger. The adventure was to visit a new world of living creatures some almost invisible to the naked eye – swirling around in a drop of pond water.

I lived on Smiley Street in a hamlet area called Disco, it was country – the street I lived on had more open fields than houses. At one end of Smiley was “the woods” and the other end of the street crossing a busy two lane road called Van Dyke was ….”the pond.”

The pond was my favourite place to visit to gather water samples. It was a lush open marsh area with trees about 200 feet on the far side. On warm summer days I stooped at the water’s edge filling my jars. The pond was its own world of welcome – Lily pads, cat tails, water spiders scampering across the water surface, dragon flies hovering and darting in the air, and the sound of frogs – peepers, Leopard and bull frogs croaking and splashing into the water – alert to my intrusion at the water’s edge.

Back at home “lab” I would hold a jar up to the light, you could see movement of something. A drop of pond water is placed on a slide, gently a cover slip is lowered over the sample drop and the slide is placed on the microscope stage – looking through the eyepiece the moment arrives – the discovery of a new living world.

What is this? What’s that moving? Over the weeks I put accurate names to what I was seeing; hydra, amoeba, daphnia, volvox, paramecium, cyclops, stentor. And there was the myriad forms of algae, a marvel of shapes and structures that was intricate and beautiful.

My Tasco over time gave way to a compound microscope with camera hookup to a laptop, I can take video and pictures! The ponds nearby still beckon for visits and the occasional visit is made, the more the better.

Biology is the study of life, it is a science. If pond life taught me anything it is that there is more to life than what meets the eye, maybe this is seeing beyond just biology. Take any person, what meets the eye – first impressions and public persona is one thing, what is under the surface can be another thing, it usually is. You never know another person fully.

There is always more to the story especially if you know only one side of it. There is more to a person than what you see – under the surface is a lot of beauty and flaws – there is vulnerability, dark crevices, the unexpected, surprises, chaos, and creativity. And the one thing most needed to embrace the mystery of the self and another is humility.