34 SUMMERS OF URCHINS AND LOVE | ANNE VISSER NEY
live in patches close to shore and are easily found.
I waded into the summer-warm shallows and
swept seawater into a bucket. The aerator purred
on its rim. I located the sand dollars by squishing
my toes into the soft bottom. Within ten minutes
I had a dozen large specimens.
Dead sand dollars are brilliant white and are
commonly painted and sold at beach shops as
Christmas ornaments. One is easily recognized
by its flat, round shape, which evolution has
perforated five times and etched with a five-petal
flower and a star at the flower’s center. Each of the
star’s five points is a pinhole through which eggs
and sperm once oozed.
A live sand dollar bears the same marks, muted
by velvety brown skin, tiny cilia, and soft spines
that react to a finger-graze or sea breeze by
sweeping rhythmically in concert with tiny tube
feet fringing its lunules.
Sand dollars are beautiful, delicate, worthy
creatures.xiii. the last lab
I reached campus early the next morning with
my sand dollars, bucket, and bubbling aerator in
tow. I drew potassium chloride into a syringe and
synched the teaching microscope to the computer
to project the scope’s magnified slides onto the
screen behind the instructor’s lab bench.
My students wandered in and took their seats.
I gave a basic urchin anatomy lesson and let
them touch the velvety spines and tube feet, to
feel life quiver. They marveled that this was
the same organism they knew as a Christmas
ornament. I injected each animal after giving
the intro. Red or white fluids oozed from the
gonopores.
“How do you tell females from males?” a young
man asked.
“One’s stuff is white?” I thought it was obvious.
The class giggled. I handed him an eyedropper to
collect sperm and one to a woman to collect eggs.
I hit the overhead lights and pipetted egg and
sperm samples onto separate slides. First, I staged
the eggs under the microscope. Instantly, the
projector screen was a pinkish cosmos littered
with galaxies of eggs, each planet-like egg the
size of a fist. My students’ eyes widened and shone
in the darkened room.I switched to the sperm slide. The screen
became a pulsing mass, then so many blue dots
under medium power and a swarm of black bees
at 1000X magnification. The students murmured,
Whoa. Damn. Check that shit out.
I talked about oocytes, spermatozoa, and
fertilization, then restaged the egg slide and used
a paper towel to wick sperm across the cosmos.
The class held its breath. I reviewed the process,
including the rapid vitelline expansion when
the first lucky sperm broke through. I isolated
a single ovum on the screen. Its fuzzy edge
throbbed as thousands of sperm beat against its
membranes. When its vitelline ballooned then
condensed into a thin corona, the class drew a
sharp breath.
Then a young man’s voice came like a prayer
from the dark. “Yo—that’s what happens?”
I hoped the lesson was twofold. Sex is a means
to survival’s end. It allows us to collectively
overcome changing environments and adjust to
shifting ecologies. It plays the luck of the draw. It
illustrates how the most well adapted individuals
are infinitesimal and insignificant in the scheme
of things, and those who are ill fated are also
exquisite and necessary. I wanted the students to
sense that sex is one small part of an incompre-
hensible force that drives the universe and shapes
everything, everywhere, all the time.
Biologists don’t study love, although I suspect
we should. It, too, is adaptive. Love gives us
hope in spite of sorrow, pain, and missteps. Love
assures us that the ephemeral is immortal even if
we don’t understand how or why. Love is eternity
glimpsed through wonder’s lens.
That lens has many forms: a certain kind of
orgasm, a poet’s transformative words, an Ohio
summer night for a girl on the brink of woman-
hood. It is a tiny pink ocean filled with saturnine
zygotes and shimmering larvae. We look through
a glass, our breath is taken away, and we are
transformed by the knowledge of eternity.
I think about this when I think about David.
He never grew up, had sex, or passed along his
genes. Still, some part of him is immortal—I
think he knew that, too. I saw it in his eyes when
he kissed Lenore, that girl he met at school. It
happened on his birthday the year he turned nine:
the summer of urchins and love.