Road Apples by Tim Sanders
Nov. 14, 2011
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Miller time ... in a bottle “Whoever told you that didn’t know diddly,” he said. The gentleman sitting across the booth from me at the Waffle House was referring to an article I’d written twenty years ago. I’d forgotten about it until he brought it up. “You ought to rewrite that mess and tell people what really happened. It is very timely now that we’re just getting used to the latest Daylight Savings Time shift, and also with all the talk about solar energy. He was way ahead of his time. And by the way, his name was Miller, irregardless of what you may have heard to the contrary.” “I don’t remember exactly what I wrote, but I’m sure my sources were–” “SOURCES? I was Archimedes Miller’s next door neighbor back in the day. I seen his true genius up close and personal. There weren’t nothing that man couldn’t do when he put his mind to it. He lived in Sand Rock, just down the road from the school. Fact is, him and me we was classmates until I skipped that grade.” “You skipped a grade?” “Twelfth. I couldn’t see no sense in wasting my time on no more education when I already knowed how to spell and do my numbers. But Archimedes he went all the way through. I remember when it come to Science he was a worldbeater. He pulled straight “C”s without no effort at all because he was very scientific. His momma she kept on having babies, so when he was nineteen he invented an electric diaper alarm which had a little red light that blinked on and off when the baby got wet. His momma she didn’t like it because it made the babies twitch a lot, but if it hadn’t been for Pampers, he’d of been a millionaire. His daddy he said Archimedes needed his own drawers electrified and maybe he would quit loafering around and find a job. Most folks couldn’t see his potential. He also invented the 12 Gauge Toilet Gun, which he guaranteed would clean out your clogged commode in no time, but when his daddy tried it out he got himself all covered in–” “But what about the solar energy and the Daylight Saving–” “I’m getting to that part. When he was older and lived next door to me, Archie was busy writing a Western novel called “The Magnificent 7-11,” about the very first convenience store in a small Mexican village. He did a lot of his writing at night, and since it was back in the ‘60s, when everybody was all talking about Daylight Savings Time, he come up with his bottle idea. Thing was, he couldn’t just use any old bottles, they had to be very dark. He studied on it, and decided to use old beer bottles and paint them black, just to make sure the sunlight wouldn’t leak out. So he got 800 empties and put some, no more than twenty at a time, outside in the sunlight from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. He was very careful about the time. He said he could get two hours of daylight into a 12 ounce bottle, and as much as three hours into a 16 ouncer. He got him a couple of tool boxes from some old Ford F-series pickups in the junkyard, and lined them with tinfoil so they wouldn’t leak no light, and then he put them in a special made storage shed where he also did his writing and research. Them boxes was where he kept the bottles of daylight he saved up. Many’s the time, around midnight, I’d see light flickering from out the cracks in that shed and I knowed he’d uncorked a bottle of daylight and was writing, because I could hear him pounding away on that old Underworld typewriter of his. And when he wasn’t writing out in that shed, but light was still flickering, I knowed he was inventing something. That’s where he come up with the Variable Speed Hairless Nostrillo. Like everything he done, the Nostrillo was way ahead of its time. Archimedes he took an old hand crank drill and fitted it with a nostril spreader and–” “But what happened to the Daylight Saving bottles?” “One night while Archie was down in Loachapoka, tending to his sister Orpha who had wrenched her leg in a gopher hole while she was chasing a rat across the yard, them three Crookshank boys from over at Yellow Creek got into his shed. They was always troublesome, and I didn’t know nobody was in there ‘til I seen the sky light up above that shed and heard them boys screaming. ‘I CAN’T SEE! I’M BLIND AS A MOLE! SOMEBODY GET US OUTA HERE!’ and so on and so forth. Come to find out they’d prized open them tool boxes and decided to bust up all them bottles, just out of meanness! When that concentrated sunlight hit ‘em all at once, they come down with a serious case of temporary blindness. One of them, Little Earl, he never could get no driver’s licenses, and oncet when–” “What about the bottles?” “Well sir, when Archimedes he come home and seen what had happened he sat down and cried like a baby. It was pitiful. He said they’d destroyed every one of his Special Formula Slightly Overcast With a Chance of Showers bottles, and there weren’t but seven of his Original Formula Miller’s Bright left. He had aimed to work up a deal to sell most of his stock to the state of Alaska, which had way more darkness during the winter months than they needed. But right then and there he went and got us some sunglasses and told me to turn my head, and he uncorked each and every one and let all his saved up daylight loose. He said the world wasn’t ready for it yet, and he didn’t want to be responsible for what might happen if his solar technology was to fall into the wrong hands.” The gentleman told me the late Archimedes Miller had left him all his research notes. Those notes, he said, explained how the secret to efficient daylight saving and storage was the proper placement of the contents of a cigar box which he kept under his bed. The box, as it turned out, contained twenty tiny plastic magnifying glasses, collected from old Crackerjack boxes. He said Archie’s mistake back then had been concentrating on saving daylight for TIME rather than ENERGY. After he finished reading the Miller notes he planned to contact the Department of Energy to see about a large federal subsidy. He asked if I’d be interested in a partnership, or at least in purchasing some shares in the Archimedes Miller Solar Corporation. I told him no, but I’ll probably live to regret it. |