Coercive Forces

It started innocently enough but then, as some situations do, it escalated out of control.

My son Jessy's teacher, Mrs Gresham, was no dummy. She knew how to keep her classes occupied. In May 2003, her project of the month was making . . . decorations. She told Jessy's class: "Kitchen magnets make a great gift for mom and they're very easy to make! We have a wide variety of frog patterns for refrigerator magnets, so let's get started ."

And that's how it all began.

Refrigerator magnets are addictive. A frog leads to notes, photos and art work held in place with flower magnets, cute dogs, cats, rabbits, Easter, Christmas and Thanksgiving doodads, plaster, plastic and clay immitations of cookies, candies, fruits, cat food, mementos from trips, windmills, red barns, cows, clocks, angels, chocolate and magnets that make sound: phones, boomboxes and coke cans.

Mrs. Gresham wasn't the only one who thought kitchen magnets make great gifts. Every cousin in a forty mile radius thought so too. So the magnets multiplied.

But not all magnets are created equal. Some stick to the fridge and stay in place; others fall off and roll under any levered surface until just after dark when they stealthily move to the middle of the kitchen floor. This is hard on bare feet and inevitabley produces a scream. "WhaaaaAooucheee."

Which is why my husband, Pat, made the super magnet. Screams interrupt his sleep and then, even Ambien won't get him back into a good snooze.

Pat, an electrical engineer, armed himself with information from the internet about ceramic permanent magnets, rare earth magnets, electromagnetic magnets and more. For weeks, he talked about magnetic dipoles aligning parallel to external magnetic fields, and that magnets are measured in terms of Gauss, Tesla and Megagauss Oersted which I thought was quite a mouthful but it rolled off his tongue slick as nylon sliding off satin sheets.

"The magnetic field of earth at the surface is One Gauss." He wiggled his eyebrows Groucho Marx style.

"Oh don't be so pedantic," I'm sure my voice sounded sarcastic. "I could look that stuff up online, too, you know."

"Yes. And you would find that a refrigerator magnet is a hundred to a hundred-and-fifty Gauss while neodymium magnets produce magnetic fields tens of thousands of times stronger than those of earth. Baby, them's suckers can lift 350 pounds! And there's magnets which will lift more. Now sweetheart, hold onto your seat cover, cause I plan to build you some mighty strong magnets. You'll love em."

Pat shoved his hands in his pockets and started whistling an obscure Irish tune as he strolled out to the garage where his workshop was located in the summertime. In winter, he tinkered in the basement.

It wasn't long after Pat started attaching his inventions to the Frigidaire that we had a visitor. One of our political friends, named George, who hailed from Texas.

After visitng formally in the parlor, we invited him into the kitchen for coffee. George stands five feet ten-and-a-half inches tall; weighs approximately one hundred and eighty-five pounds, has been known to lift the front end of an old Chevy pickup clear off the ground cause his adrenalin got to pumping so fast and furiously that it made him angry, see, cause that ole Chevy had run plumb over his favorite Stetson, and George, well he always wears an oversized Texas belt buckle made out of rawhide and plenty of metal.

Whew! If that wasn't a mouthful but you get the idea. This fellow is no fishpond weakling.

We were all walking into the kitchen when it happened.

One of Pat's gizmos grabbed George by the buckle. He might of thought it was by his short-hairs but I assure you it was not. The magnet grabbed his belt buckle and propelled George across that space with such velosity that it slammed his nose flat against the fridge's side before anyone could sneeze twice, if they'd a had a mind to. Broke George's nose in two places, the force was so great. Push, twist and grapple, George never did free himself. It took Pat and me plus two rugged neighbors using a pry-bar to finally set him free.

Pat's magnets kept getting stronger. And so did the consequences.

Like the day we noticed the housecat toting a kitchen spatula, a bread pan, an outdated Idaho license plate plus an unusual assortment of metal objects. These items protruded from the cat's fur at various angles and as the cat languidly strolled by the metal fireplace poker, it too, chinked itself firmly to the cat's hide.

We called the vet.

"You got refrigerator magnets?" he asked.

"Ah . . . yes."

"Got any that look like food?"

Isn't it silly how people nod their heads while talking on the phone? As if the other person could see them. I nodded affirmatively. "Um hum."

"More than likely the animal mistook the magnets for cat chow. Happens more often than you'd think. Bring him in and we'll see if we can demagnitize him. If not, it'll be an operation for old Tabby."

But, at the exact moment we opened the front door to rush Housecat to the clinic, a plane which we thought might belong to a Hawaiian airline flew overhead. We tried to stop the event from happening, but our cat was ripped from our arms, flew through the air with Superman speed, and whomped onto a metal section of the plane with a loud tinny click. Housecat had the ride of his life but landed safely in Honolulu. Last we heard of him, a native sent us a postcard saying Housecat was having a fine vacation lazing on the beaches.

Sure now and wouldn't it be fine if that were the whole of it but no, there's more. Pat went and built his biggest magnet yet. It's Gauss rating was 181,000 or more. Heck, signs, chains and metallic markings on the floor whizzed through the air towards it. Folks driving through the neighborhood who had pacemakers headed straight for the hospital. Watches, metal-stripped credit cards and tools joined the arial melee.

Airborn ferromagnetic objects sped along at speeds of twelve thousand, one hundred-and-forty-five miles per hour as they honed in on the magnet. Suddenly, the Sun's restless interior reacted to Pat's new high-powered magnet.

A chaotic turbulence pulsed round and round the Sun's orb and magnetic field lines dragged round as well. Stretching. Twisting. Tangling. Conditions became highly unstable. It was as if millions of atomic bombs exploded at once.

Pat's teeth worried his lower lip in troubled anticipation of what would happen next. He tried to stop the chaos by reversing the polarity of his magnet but all that did was create a larger-scale magnetic effect: the reversal of the Sun's magnetic poles. The Sun's north became its south and visa versa.

The sun's storm spewed forth stuff and huge amounts of the charged matter swarmed our planet. Most of us weren't affected by it much but fifty thousand people in Sweden were without power for about an hour.

It's a fearsome worry when something you've created causes such a commotion. In a flurry of activity, we tossed all our refrigerator magnets in the trash can. And, you know, that trash can didn't sit around and wait for the garbage truck to pick it up either. It sped down the street on its own magnetic power like a sailor seeking the source of a siren's song. T'weren't but a heartbeat before it vanished. Pat promptly dismantled all his workshop projects involving magnets, his interest thoroughly quenched.

And the next time Mrs. Gresham suggested kitchen magnets as a great gift for mom? Jessy's red hair spiked, his blue eyes rolled, and his freckles jumped clear off the bridge of his nose. He muttered something about solar lunacy, stuck his hands in his pockets, began whistling an obscure Irish tune, and sauntered out of the classroom. Mrs. Gresham complained that she didn't see him for the rest of the day.
Coercive Forces © 2006 Chaeli Lee Sullivan