So back in the early ’90s, I was working in the biology laboratory at Fordham University(strange but actually true). There I met Miranda J. McCleod, a slip of a girl, almost just a specter. She was fun and intense, but I remember that she was always tired from working on her own science experiments in her off-hours. Also notable was that she owned a dilapidated brown station wagon that she fiddled with frequently.
One day, maybe in the late spring or it could have been the early fall, she waved to me as she drove west on Fordham Road out into the sunset. I didn’t know it then, but that was the last time I would see her.
But about three years ago, a friend was helping me clean out a filing cabinet that I had gotten from Fordham when it remodeled its lab’s offices. And lo and behold, in the very back of the filing cabinet behind one of those springed walls, I found a manuscript, and my friend Mary Scanlan Smith found some drawings. Both were by Miranda J. McCleod. The name of the manuscript was An Explanation of the Fundamentals of the Derivation of Dilapidated Brown Station Wagon Theory (aka How I Became a Scientist and Discovered the Truth about Getting Stuck in the Wrong Universe) by Miranda J. McCleod.
On the top of the manuscript, Miranda had written, “Please share.” It’s taken me a while, but I’m trying to honor her request. So I have a Facebook page for her, and now she has a web site, all in hopes that someone will publish the manuscript. What she wrote is not exactly science. It’s more like mad science, and maybe most relevant to young adults, but I believe, as I’m sure she did, that we could all use some mad science in our lives.