Leo had been a precocious child.
Walking and talking at 10 months. He graduated with his first Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry at 16. By 24 he was a tenure track Ph.D. at Stanford with his own administrative assistant.
He was miserable.
It was the poetry of the basic cell that charmed him. How it quivered in the agar agar and devoured the sucrose. How it cringed when the refrigerator malfunctioned and almost died. He could see the small thing shiver,
The cell had likes and desires. It had dislikes and burdens. So did Leo.
He read Byron. He called all of his cells she for they possessed all of them the ability to divide and become two. To reproduce.
He’d recite She Walks in Beauty when pipetting some new solution into the dish.
He said “Give me your good side, Sweetheart,” when he slipped them between a slide and admired their nakedness.
His mother had wanted all this for him, but Leo had always and only wanted to drive trains through the Rockies.
He tried to make the best of it. He did love his cells. But he wanted to hang his head out the window of the caboose and howl as the train descended 200 feet into a valley.
He was 30 when he called the Chessie system.
31 when they quit laughing and took him serious
He was 33 and 2 days old when he landed a job on the railroad.
He hadn’t told his mother. Her dad had been a railroad man with a different family in every depot.
She would keen and cover her still glossy Greek curls with a shawl and call the priest. But perhaps some vocations are genetic. His cells cried out for railroad tracks through the pristine mountains. For the howl.
Stanford was her dream, not his.
He tucked Lord Byron into his lunchbox that morning. He would tell his mom at the end of his shift.
