Static

Not long ago, I gave my car door a slap before I opened it. My wife, who doesn’t miss a trick, asked if I had finally lost it.

I told her I was simply asserting my dominion over static electricity. I’m so fed up with getting shocked that I’ve become the aggressor in my war against static electricity. When I commit a pre-emptive strike by slapping the sheet metal, I still get shocked, but I don’t notice it. Instead, I feel the mild pain from the actual slap. It’s discomforting, but it’s discomforting on my terms.

She said, “And until this explanation, I’d thought you had finally lost it.”

I asked her why I get shocked so much more than everyone else.

“Because you’re constantly fidgeting,” she proposed. “You’re constantly establishing friction with the furniture and carpet. You can collect a lot of amperes that way.”

It’s true that I shake my legs and wiggle my feet a lot. In fact, if I’m awake, my legs are shaking and my feet are wiggling. Just ask anybody who has ever tried to concentrate around me.

But leg shaking seemed a weak explanation for the chronic condition of fly-away-hair that I grew up with, back when we all wore our hair in the style of the Bay City Rollers. It seemed a weak explanation for why I once received a static shock from touching a banana. It seemed a weak explanation for why I’ve twice shut down television sets merely by touching them.

She said, “Please tell the story again about the stocking. It’s one of the few stories you tell over and over that I enjoy.”

So I once again recounted how I had grown up in a house that was much too small for the many people who shared it. One corner of the dining room somehow became the depository for all the clean laundry. On any given day you’d see a mound of clothes that reached halfway to the ceiling. The only thing I can compare it to is the pile of coats that accrues in the master bedroom during a well-attended party. But that analogy doesn’t quite capture it. If it were a nudist party where more than just coats were deposited, the comparison might work better.

Anyway, in the mornings before school we kids pawed through the pile, looking for anything that came close to fitting us. If two or three of us tugged for the polyesters at the same time, the pile might crackle and hiss like the beginnings of a Boy Scout’s campfire.

One day in a crowded high-school hallway, a classmate behind me said, “Hey guy, what’s with the stocking?”

I halted and turned. “What stocking?”

“This stocking,” he said, stripping it from the back of my shirt and dangling it for all to see.

“Oh, that stocking,” I said, sounding a lot like Beaver Cleaver when he realizes the jig is up.

When she stopped laughing at me, my wife asked what I did with that stocking.

I said I took it to my physics class that day and got some extra credit out of the deal.