I’m starting out this article in the past, giving it some background for the present.
Since moving to Danville some years ago, I’ve paid my light bill at The Charles H. Harris Financial Center. I guess I’m behind the times by not saying, “electric bill,” (and on a related note, I also refer to a movie theater as a “picture show”).
In joining the people leading up to the tellers handling the payments, I always counted myself lucky if my chance position in line put me at the window of a lady there with beautiful white hair and a sweet smile.
But just before reaching her counter, I beheld “moving things” (but not those Indiana Jones “Effendi, why does the floor move?” kinds of things).
It wasn’t her counter which was “moving” but instead, the items she had lovingly placed there — cute little solar cell toys!
It was an extensive collection. My late Aunt Lotus Abshire had an extensive collection of salt and pepper shakers (but they didn’t move unless you shook them).
Upon her counter were plastic dancing flowers with plastic dancing petals. There were also plastic dancing penguins, plastic dancing ducks, plastic dancing birds, and plastic dancing “etcetera!” Plastic gets a bad rap (no pun); but these little things looked too sweet for such treatment.
I almost forgot, there were also “bobbing blooms” (which, if said too fast and “Spoonerized,” might get all mixed up into something embarrassing).
These, of course, were the “cute” animals, not the dangerous ones. Pictures of their living versions are often posted and shared on Facebook, eliciting exclamations of, “AWW!” (not “EWW!” or “UGH!”).
And I don’t think she was pushing solar power. I really think she was pushing “cute power.”
As a child, my “solar toy” was a Crookes Radiometer; its vanes were powered by sunlight in a different sort of way. Instead of looking “cute,” it looked “science”(what else? It was invented by Sir William Crookes, of cathode ray and Crookes Tube fame). My son, Jeremy, still has his (Crookes radiometer, not a Crookes Tube).
This particular “light-bill lady” retired several years ago, and I wondered what had become of her.
Now, back to the present:
As I was pausing at the intersection of Danville’s Parkway Drive and Piedmont Drive, waiting for the light to change, a SUV or truck (moving so fast I couldn’t tell “just which”) came flying through the intersection.
My perception of the vehicle’s make and model was thrown off by something inside it, which grabbed my attention more. The complete top dash (driver and passenger sides)was filled to the brim with little solar cell toys of the same sort as those I used to see on that white-haired lady’s counter at the Charles Harris building.
I’ve seen the “dash-riding duckies” before, but this wasn’t them. They don’t flap.
I barely caught a glimpse of the driver, but she did have a passing (a very “speedily passing”) resemblance to the lady who had formerly taken my light bill payments.
I wondered if the police would consider such a moving multitude of things in the driver’s line of sight to be “visual hazards.” But some people also use the tops of their dashboards as a “roll-top-desk,” in order to “file” letters, bills, etc. (although those things don’t wave back-and-forth and bob up-and-down at you).
I had wondered how the “light-bill lady’s” retirement was going; and perhaps I now know.
I thought back to her solar cell toys, moving gracefully and leisurely in the artificial light of the Harris building. And I reflected upon a video I had seen, where someone had taken these same kinds of little solar cell toys out into the bright sun, their motion and measured energy being increased several-fold.
Still, if a great multitude of these little “solar cell flowers and critters” could be hooked up to pool their energy, I don’t think there would be enough to power or “supercharge” an automobile.
Yet in my mind’s eye, I see pistons churning, “leaves waving,” “wings flapping,” and “blooms bobbing,” all in synchronization!
But surely, such a contraption is beyond the bounds of possibility.
Surely?
