- December 20, 2024
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My 20-year-old son, Jackson, discovered something odd on the kitchen counter the other night: a purple plastic bowl, half full of water, with a single raisin resting sadly at the bottom. At first, he thought it was an accident, perhaps a sibling’s snack time gone awry, but then, it occurred to him that it might have been done on purpose.
“Are we trying to rehydrate a grape?” he asked, amazed that even this small amount of effort had been expended by someone — anyone — in the pursuit of something so obviously destined to fail.
Then my wife, Hailey, said, with a supreme amount of compassion and a tiny bit of scolding, “Luke, I told you it wouldn’t work.”
Luke, 6, remained silent, with a sheepish grin on his face, slinking into the shadows to avoid further attention.
His reaction made me wonder about his motivation. Was this raisin-in-the-water an act of scientific discovery, to be celebrated, or was it an act of puerile curiosity, akin to my elementary school cafeteria schtick of mixing up everyone’s leftovers into Gross-Out Stew?
As Jackson and Hailey examined the raisin in the kitchen, Grant, 18, was scrolling on his phone on a couch nearby. Without looking up, he mumbled, “The law of commutative property.” (Later explained: Grape - water = raisin; therefore, Raisin + water = grape.)
About a day later, Luke was vindicated.
Since the raisin-in-a-bowl remained in the sink, Grant encountered it yet again. With amused respect, he announced to the family: “Turns out, Luke’s raisin looks more like a grape than a raisin.”
That got Hailey’s attention.
“What?!?” she said, rushing into the kitchen to see for herself. “Weird!” she said. “It feels — like a gross grape. Who knew?”
“Apparently Luke did,” Grant said, beaming with sibling pride.
Luke was no longer the food waster, the mess maker, the little kid who didn’t know any better. Instead, he was the celebrity scientist, Luke the wise, the little man who wouldn’t listen to the naysayers for nothing.
Luke later agreed to discard the grape-turned-raisin-turned-”grape" — a great sacrifice considering it was our family's only known evidence of the commutative property of grapes.
