In 1752 there was a book written about Sir Isaac Newton that holds the personal account of how he came up with the concept of gravity.  Newton, you remember him?  Ol’ apple on the head boy?  Story goes, that one warm evening Newton was hanging out in the garden, drinking tea when he watched an apple fall to the ground (you should know there was no mention of it landing on his noggin) when he thought about why the apple would “always descend perpendicularly to the ground.” 

 

Don’t know much about history, don’t know much about geometry… but what I do know is a thing or two about congruent adjacent angles (I am a “T” after all) and how Newton might have said things fall perpendicularly, but I have anecdotal proof that some things don’t follow the laws of gravity.  Like cat yak and porcelain teapots.

 

Fret not.  I’ll elaborate.

 

There are multiple flooring surfaces in my house (tile, wood, linoleum, etc.) and despite this wide array, when the cat loses her lunch it falls only on carpet, no matter which way her fuzzy little head is turned.  Her head can be two inches above the much easier to clean area, but somehow cat barf always hits the carpet.  The porous, multi-fiber, tightly stiched, well-now-that-is- never- coming-out-of-there carpet.  No matter where she perches herself, feline regurgitation always seems to miss any surface, but carpet.  It’s a gravitational oddity, it is.

 

The evening after I’d installed said carpet my son complained of a sore throat.  Doing the Mommy Thermometer thing (touching my cheek to his forehead – foolproof.  Only two digits off from digital, I must say), I discovered he had a fever.  I follow this up with the normal line of maternal investigative questioning, “Does your stomach hurt? Is your nose snuffly?  How do your ears feel?  Have you gone to the bathroom today?”  After extensive Q&A and confident that he has a cold coming on, I give him the required two ounces of Day-Glo medicine called for in this situation (I have a whole other line of thought on putting children’s medicine in a plastic Mardi Gras worthy shot glass, but that’s another blog for another time).  The newly medicated boy takes two steps, turns his head in the direction of the bathroom, yet hurls the contents of his stomach all over the newly installed oatmeal colored Berber carpeting in the hallway.  Three inches from the easy to clean bathroom tile.  Three feet from the simple to wipe down white porcelain toilet.  I know all about movement and volume in regards to spatter (not for nothing did I waste countless hours watching Nick Stokes on CSI, I learned something from that educational eye candy) – but even where gravitational calculations should have placed the nuclear contents of my son’s stomach well within the confines of the all white tile, porcelain and glass guest bath, some freaky laws outside of nature messed with the flow.  The Day-Glo flow that landed all over my creamy colored carpet.

 

Scientific fact: All of the carpet cleaning experts in all the world are powerless against the dye contained in children’s cold medicines.  Be warned, new parents.

 

For further proof of gravity’s rules (because really, I see them more as Could or Could Not Rules, than straight up law) come into my kitchen.  In my kitchen, I have lovely soft mats on the floor in front of my sink and stove.  They are cushion-y, quite pretty shock absorbers and you’d think that when I’d drop fragile things directly over them, they’d be protected.  Well pardon me, but you’d be wrong now, wouldn’t you?  In the 16 years that I have hustled and bustled around my kitchen things that fall from my hands never land where they are supposed to, despite their original trajectory.  At least not the glass, ceramic or porcelain items.  These bad boys have a destiny all their own that has nothing to do with Sir Newton’s perpendicular descent monkey business.  One of my most beloved porcelain teapots made the decision to leap from my hands one morning (could be the lavender hand cream’s fault, but I place no blame) and I swear that just before it could make the squishy-squashy landing on the spongy mat below – it swerved to the left and smashed to bits all over the innocuous looking pale peach tile.  Por que?  A senseless and preventable loss.  If only gravity had done its job.

 

Steven Hawking can honk all the live long day about Big Bang theories, but what I really want to see revealed are some answers to the Big Crash theories.  Give me a scientist who will explain to me why things spill/hurl/fall the way they do and I can put away the expletives (I won’t write ‘em or type ‘em, but I apologize for what manages to fall out of my mouth during any shattered crystal glass episodes).  Oh, and if you can arrange for that Nicky Stokes to do the explaining?  I’d be mighty grateful.  And should I faint in the process, he might want to be prepared – I may not fall vertically.  I am fragile, after all.