Class President, turned Mad Scientist

I'm not sure exactly when I realized that my father wasn't like everyone else's. After all, when you're 5 years old you hardly realize that it isn't normal for your dad to have a basement computer lab (in the early 1980's when computers cost about $200k apiece) and hand-assemble CPUs with a soldering iron and chunks of lead wire.

My dad is somewhat of an anomaly in that unlike most mad geniuses, he was high school class president, a bit of a "ladies' man" and can generally interact with people as well as anyone. It's just that instead of the normal high school mischief, his idea of fun was to set off a thermite reaction that melted through a concrete sink and several inches into the concrete floor.

Add into that the fact that he managed to accomplish all of this while missing the first and last 6 weeks of school every year and living for 5-6 months per year on Isle Royale on Lake Superior as part of a commercial fishing family, and you can get a pretty good idea of exactly how smart my father is. He went on to finish double-majors in physics and industrial engineering from MIT while continuing his habitual mischief as a frat boy.

Sometime during my parents' temporary separation period, I called him while on vacation in Hilton Head, SC to visit my sister. According to her, my side of the conversation went something like this: "Hi Dad, what are you up to?..... Really. You're building a cold fusion cell..... Huh. Where?....The kitchen counter? Mom's going to love that. Well... Does it work?" to which he replied in a thoughtful tone, "Rather inconsistently, I'm afraid."

He went on to explain in painful detail what he had assembled and how, and what his latest results had been. I didn't listen too closely, as this is par for the course with my dad- he has a different world-altering project every week, most of which (shockingly) actually work but get shelved when he gets bored of fiddling with them.... a reason for a slight amount of bitterness on my part every time I have to make my student loan payment.

I later found out that the reason he shelved the cold fusion cell is that he left it unattended one afternoon and returned to find that it had started reacting in his absence, boiled off most of the water and wouldn't stop reacting. After several water refills he dumped it on the lawn in a fit of desperation and hosed it until it was completely destroyed. He kept that little incident a secret for several years until some time ago my sister asked him, "Say, whatever DID happen with that cold fusion cell?" and he apparently felt enough time had passed that he was no longer embarrassed he almost burned down his house with a glass of water, an easily-obtained innocuous chemical and a few pieces of wire. Speaking of which, I need to throw away that bag of chemicals in the basement.... Note to self.

Skip forward 10 years, and my father has settled down to more tame pursuits. He's been working on-and-off for the last 20 years on a stock-picking program that has made millions of dollars on paper. However, true to his Norwegian commercial fishing roots, he has a strong aversion to making money and avoids it at all costs, while insisting that he "just needs to tweak it a little bit more." He's also designed computer models to predict fish populations on the Great Lakes (which he presented last year in Boston at the International Systems' Dynamics Conference), models to predict the profitability of storage units in a large residential market, and has recently started teaching grad-level seminar courses on systems' dynamics at UMD (after which he goes to Sir Ben's with the students and drinks with them).

Oddly, however, he is completely unable to hook up anything related to a tv set that isn't actually part of the tv. He can disassemble a television and fix it, but he can't hook up a DVD player to save his life. Nor can he switch the tv source from "cable" to "av1." Additionally, he can text message but is completely unable to access or navigate his own voice mail. These are just some of life's little mysteries that shall forever go unanswered.

My dad's other favorite past-time has now become getting his youngest daughter re-hitched in time to produce some diabolically intelligent grandkids. It becomes frightening when your dad starts telling you "tongue in cheek" that he wouldn't entirely protest if you weren't even married yet when the grandkids started appearing. Needless to say, I no longer bring my dates home to meet mom and dad for fear of what he might blurt out in a fit of fatherly enthusiasm. When I was engaged the first time around my then-fiance finally had to shut my father up by saying, "Stuart, are you aware of exactly what we'd need to be doing in order to produce grandchildren?" Even in his scotch-induced state my father was horrified enough to drop the subject, but not so horrified that he didn't bring it up about 5 minutes after my divorce was final and he had a friend's son he wanted me to meet.

Of course, there is one other reason I usually don't bring my dates home to meet mom and dad. Believe it or not, the mad scientist seems to heartily intimidate most men. I have to admit from my end that after growing up with my dad it seems hard to find "just the right guy." After all, there aren't too many guys floating around who have qualities on par with "class president/mad scientist." There also seems to be some kind of information gap on the guy side of things- apparently they haven't gotten my father's memo- he thinks every guy should want to date me.

All in all, I have to love my dad. It kind of rocks having someone in your family who is constantly surprising you with his weird ideas and simultaneously putting your dates to sleep with in-depth explanations of the predator-prey relationships of fish in Lake Superior. And you just never know what you're going to get when he says, "Hey, I just did the NEATEST thing down in the basement. Come take a look!"

Erica.