My boss is the ice cream man

Something about Cub Scout camp yesterday made me think of my seventh grade science teacher, Mr. Garton. I think it may have been the “outdoors” station where a mustached old man taught us about the ecosystem and the food chain. (I am an omnivore) Or perhaps, it was the way that out of my fourteen webelos, eleven of them could easily have stepped out of the same mold. Apparently short, round, sandy hared little boys are all the rage right now. (I, by the way, have access to a white panel van already stocked with ice cream. Small fee required.)

Part of our curriculum that year was an extensive inquiry into heredity and genetics. We spent weeks talking about beans, bees and purple verses yellow flowers. We wrote mini biographies on Charles Darwin and papered the walls with full color Mendel squares. By the end we could follow from start to finish the recessive gene’s losing war against dominance and plot its probability every step of the way.

We didn’t talk about human conditions until the last week. We naturally stuck to simple, safe subjects like the color of our hair and whether a baby will have blue or brown eyes. A few minutes before class ended one day a boy, Geoff, asked a question.
“Both of my parents have blue eyes, but my eyes are dark brown. How is that possible?”

I distinctly remember turning my full attention to Mr. Garton in the front of the room absolutely ready to take whatever came out of his mouth as fact. I know I didn’t notice it then, but there must have been at least a moment of hesitation as he debated inside what to tell him. I do remember, however, the carefully chosen phrasing of his answer.

“It must be caused by some kind of slight mutation in the gene that controls your eye color.”

A dangerous sentence to direct at the new boy who had been walking the outcast/in-crowd fine line since the beginning of the year. Naturally, it didn’t take long for my classmates to take to ending all his arguments with:

“What do you know, Mutant?”

At time I was a little mad at him for being so clearly the cause of the nickname. I couldn’t figure out why he didn’t just lie and tell him he didn’t know what his mysterious brown eyes meant.

Now, when I think back to his question and all the possible reasons for his impossibly brown eyes, I try to imagine what I would have done. It amazes me how quickly the nickname was picked up and its actual cause was dropped. Thinking about this (and the fact that its been this long since I have thought about Geoff and his eyes) I find myself revising my slightly damaged opinion of Mr. Garton. Now, surprisingly, calling the boy a mutant doesn’t seem all that cruel.