The incandescent barometric pressure of Lima, Peru
I have been nervous about going into the 7th grade at Tarville Junior High. It seems so, well,...I don’t know,...ummm, big and threatening. Here are all of these kids whose hormones are already raging or on the verge of raging and who are taken from a nurturing, safe environment of their elementary years and thrown into a self sufficient atmosphere in a totally different school with totally different students from consolidating elementary schools across the district,....well, I don’t have to tell you that the anxiety barometric pressure was high and the climate was right for and adolescent electrical storm. All of those elements of junior high make for quite a volatile concoction, not to mention all the new faces and the searching for your place in the junior high pecking order. And they really shouldn’t allow smoking in the boys room because just one strike of a match at the wrong time and,...KABOOM! Pent up emotions and sex and drugs and rock n roll and lots of testosterone everywhere! Really, seventh grade doesn’t seem all that different from elementary school, just a few more classes, a few more classroom changes in a day and more kids and more peer pressure and more homework and more responsibility,....I know,...other than that Mrs. Lincoln,...how was the play?

Well, that’s not all,...on top of all of that it seems that we have a project due at the end of the first six weeks. Mercy Knox has been the 7th grade World Geography teacher for as long as the school has been here. Some say she was the primary teacher in the 40's when there was just a one room brick school and I believe it. I knew this assignment was coming. Miss Knox is known for having no warm up or introductory period to 7th grade. She says a few welcoming remarks and then it starts. Work, work, work. We call her "Merciless" Knox. And everyone knows that topic of the first paper of the year will always be Lima, Peru. People say she was a missionary in Peru after she completed her college education from a big Baptist college in Arkansas. They said that she was a missionary for the Baptist church in Candessant, Peru, a small town about 90 miles south of Lima. It was named Candessant because this was the first village in those parts to have an incandessant light bulb(prior to the name change it was a foot long word that even Peruvians had difficulty saying,.....it’s plain to see that they were just itching for a reason to change the name of their village). Another missionary had been called to preach in that remote village,...but was NOT called to give up electricity,...so having an engineering education from Georgia Tech,....he put his education to use and built a generator,...mostly with things he could find around the village and when he would venture into other villages and towns. Mercy was one of the first female Baptist missionaries, and especially in that part of the world. The story is that the work of God was not going so well for Mercy in the male dominant society within the small Peruvian village. When this happened, well, she kind of got depressed and felt powerless, which is not a common feeling for the Knox family. Her Dad was a big, wealthy overseer at one of the biggest sock mills in Tarville, Sock Capital of the World. She kind of "let her guard down" and fell in love with an electrician from Lima who was putting in power poles with a crew that was running the first electrical lines to the small village of Candessant. His dark Peruvian hair and complexion kind of over-powered her. She was weakened and she succumbed to his exotic Peruvian charms and the next thing you know Miss Knox was back in town with a dark haired and dark complected daughter she had named Grace.

That was another first for Miss Knox. Usually the girls who get pregnant outside of marriage run away from Tarville to get married to their premarital sex partners(as I have overheard them being described by my mother to one of her friends as they gossiped in the vestibule of the church house)and to have their "out of wedlock" babies(they won’t say bastard outside the church, so I know they won’t say it in the church). Miss Mercy Knox ran to Tarville,....and without the Peruvian power pole guy, the father of Grace. All of this I know from that one short gossip session in the church foyer between my Mom and Miss Beulah Burke. Little children have big ears, but only when good stuff like this is being discussed in church.

So Lima, Peru is the subject and we must choose one aspect of the country to explore and write a report on,....2000 words or less. I think less is definitely going to be my focus. I haven’t quite decided but I think I will write a report about the obvious,...I hope no one else thinks about reporting on the major export, but they probably will and when you don’t have a uniqueness about you, you kind of get lost in the crowd and lose your identity. Oh, I’m sure someone else will write about Lima’s number one export, lima beans. I guess I better prepare an alternative topic so as to keep my individuality about me. Hey, I know,...this might not be too exciting, but maybe I should write about the guy who came up with the word "peruse" or "to look into". Not many know but he was from a suburb of Lima, Peru. That would be unique! See Peru is up high on a mountain and "looks into"(peruses) a large valley, which is very fertile because it is part of the Peruvian River Basin. When the monsoon season comes, the Peruvian River moves beyond its banks and brings life giving water to the rest of the valley, making the conditions of the soil just right for growing lima beans.

You know, I have no idea about the accuracy of the facts that I have been spouting about Lima, Peru. They are probably about as true as most of that stuff about Miss Knox I heard from Mom and Miss Burkee. I’m a fiction writer, for Pete’s sake! And my Mom is into fiction too, so, I guess I get it honest. Maybe I’ll spice up the class and turn in a story about, "Early Female Missionaries in Candessant, Peru". Or I could just go with something like, "The Barometric Pressure in Candessant, just outside Lima, Peru". I don’t know. Which one would you rather read? Gf 9/27/03