The Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter

In honor of the annniversary of the First Lunar Landing and my father's birthday this past Saturday, as promised, I give to you, the beginning of, which is really just the introduction:

The Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter - A Memoir

I am the Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter.

Doesn't matter if I'm actually Beautiful, but the tradition and cliche is that when Mad Scientists have daughters, they are, by definition, Beautiful.  Go back and watch all the Mad Science movies from the 50s.  I'll wait.

 

 

See?  Beautiful.

All of them.

So we'll ignore for the time being that I could stand to lose 40 odd pounds, my hair needs help, my nails are a nightmare, and I don't think I've worn make up in over six months.  

In the shadow of a Mad Scientist, sometimes it's okay for the cliche to stand.  And sometimes it's not.  It's rather the definition of conflicted.

 

 

In the so-called Real World, my father, Hugh Marvin Hyatt, was a high energy physicist, specializing in Electrostatic and Electro-overstress Events, up to and including Electromagnetic Pulse Events, better known as EMPs, the kind generated by high altitude detonations of nuclear warheads.

I told you he was a Mad Scientist.  

He played with lightning.  For fun.  He blew things up and got paid to do so.

And on top of all of that, he was just my Dad.

It rather warps your sense of perspective as a child.  

 

 

December 7th, 2002, around 10 in the evening, my father died. 

It's actually harder to write those words, even now, all these years later, then I can adequately describe.

Here's the thing about those Mad/Big Science films.  They never focus on the children of those great men.  After all, it is about all the Mad Science, usually with a healthy heaping helping of Apocalypse.  They don't talk about them much, unless that child's a boy, and usually he grows up to be a Great Man of his own.

But those daughters?

Well, she usually marries the Dashing Journalist/Hero who shows up at some point and is never seen nor heard from again.

I'm about to change all that.

Yes, this is about my father.  But it's also about finding your way when the pole star that always drew you home is no more.

This is my story.

 

 

Imagine, if you will, an electronics fabrication bench.  A tall stool.  On it, a ten-year-old girl in cut off jean shorts, a blue and white striped tank top, flip flops hanging off her very dirty and very tan feet, medium length mousy brown hair falling in her face.  In front of her, piles and piles of resistors. 

There I am.  Everyone wave!

Ostensibly, the resistors are being sorted according to their correct electrical engineering color codes on their barrels.  And they are.  But that's not the only thing that's happening to them. 

Right now, they're an army.

I tell you this story first for a reason.  Given the opportunity, any opportunity, any object was merely a vehicle for Story or for Art.  It still is, as far as my brain is concerned.  In the incubator of my father's many shops over the years, while I absorbed the many lessons he tried to teach me, I also absorbed observations and experiences that he never intended.  Whether he intended it or not, I was my father's greatest experiment, a fact that I continue to come to grips with even today.

And deep down, under everything?

That resistor army is still waging the battles I set for it.  Chess before I even knew how to play chess.  Because back then, I often felt like a pawn.  Luckily, pawns become queens when played to win.

The impetus for this memoir was not mine.  It came from outside, a prompting from various friends when I would tell stories about my father.  I resisted it for years.  When I first capitulated to the idea, it was originally meant to be a film and fictional.  A story about a father and daughter set alternately in a black and white world and a color one, learning to see the other one's World.

But the concept never gained traction.

I know why.

Fiction, a story version, wasn't what I wanted to say.  The resistor army wasn't enough for this one.

And then my father died.

I resisted still, the promptings, the questions.  The insistence of some that this story, more than any in my queue, needed telling.

And then my eldest daughter turned five.  One day, she asked me about rainbows.  And I began telling her about the property of light, and refraction, and the spectrum of visible light, reciting almost word for word, the lecture my father had given me when I had asked a similar question.  Over the years, due to the number of times I had heard it (and it had not varied in word or delivery), I had named it, Lecture Number Two - The Property of Light.

I am my father's daughter.

My daughters will never know their grandfather.

In the face of that, I could no longer resist, no longer hide from my past, or make my shadow battles in story form with the current incarnations of resistors, whatever they might be.  I had to tell the truth, shame the Devil, and put it all in one place.

For my girls.  Both of them granddaughters of a Mad Scientist.

So here we go.  Carrying the cliche forward, everyone says it's not easy to start.  But here's where the cliche breaks down.  The minute I gave in, the minute I started to put fingers to keyboard, the words have flowed.  Years of stories pent up inside me, pouring on to the page.  Things and stories I'd never told anyone and more importantly, truths I'd never told even myself.

I've judged.  I've second guessed.  I've somehow managed to not delete the manuscript as I've worked. 

Because every time I start to think about stopping, I hear myself telling Jane about rainbows and prisms and refraction, and in my mind, I hear the echo of my father's voice over my own.

 

 

* * *

I miss you, Daddy.