Life without Science • by Sima Rabinowitz • 1

Hamilton Arts & Letters     “This was the last prose writing I completed prior to the pandemic. It seems trivial to me now in the context of the events and circumstances of these last nearly two years—cultural, medical, ecological, political. Nonetheless, it remains true that science is a place where the way I think, imagine, and write have converged.” – Sima Rabinowitz, Guest Editor   Models. Patterns. A complex language with its unique rules and nuances. You have to memorize and improvise. Balance facts with the unknowable. Strive for precision and embrace ambiguity. Integrate the metaphorical and the literal. And thrive on repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Magnificently convoluted syntax. Compound nouns. Hyphen-upon-hyphen. Codes to decipher and reconfigure. Imagination. Interpretation. Theory. Everything I love is here. I just didn’t know it was science. Because science was boring, hard, and scary. And I never intended to have anything to do with it. LAB PARTNERS I have no idea what we were actually studying. It was just called “Science.” In the first year of what was at the time a relatively new phenomenon—“middle school”—we shuffled between English, Math, Social Studies, Foreign Languages (French or Spanish), Gym (soccer, field hockey, volleyball), Unified Arts (metal shop, sewing—I made a soft sculpture, a pillow in the form of a slice of pickle after Claes Oldenburg— silk screening, woodworking, and cooking), Music (Band or Chorus), and Science. While there was a separate team of teachers for each grade (sixth, seventh, eighth), for all three years in middle school we had the same teacher for “Science.” Perhaps this is the reason why one of the only three things I remember from what must have been something on the order of 500 class hours in Science is the teacher’s name. The second is Mr. Farinola’s repeated warning that we had better pay attention if we wanted to get into the “advanced class” for high school. And the third and last thing I remember is the dreaded choosing of lab partners.  [  >>>>>   FORWARD ]   + [Distillate © HA&L + Sima Rabinowitz {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]