THE REINCARNATIONS OF A CARBON ATOM

I was born in a star that expelled me some five billion years ago and I was swept up in debris that orbited a new star that you call the sun.  That debris coalesced and I ended up as a carbon dioxide molecule in the atmosphere of a planet you call the earth.  I liked being in the “habitable zone” where I had more options than being frozen in an outer planet or dispersed into space from a hot as hell inner planet. I also felt like being one of the elite among the other atoms in the periodic table.  I could do lots of partner switching because of my outer valence shell. I could dance with hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen.  And did I ever form combinations in my youth on planet earth some four billion years ago.  I formed carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, cyanide, methane, alcohol, acetate, and even inserted and twisted myself into a ringed molecule, like I was dancing a hora in a benzene ring. I loved being a pentose or hexose sugar.  I became a nitrogenous base.  I also did some time as an amino acid.  Sometimes it was an acid that splashed me.  Sometime it was a base like lye that made me shape shift into another molecule.  Sometimes it was heat, like being sucked into a hot lava flow.  I crackled with many a lightning bolt.  I baked in the sun’s ultraviolet light. But I loved being part of a chain of nucleotides and helping that molecule replicate. I learned early that there was nothing permanent about these associations.  I was pretty indestructible although any one of my molecules was up for grabs in an uncertain environment.  As life evolved I sometimes was in someone else’s food and sometimes I was blown out as a gas or seeped out as  the watery urine of a worm, mollusk, crustacean, fish, or frog.  I preferred land to the sea but did a good share of my life in the oceans.  But even the sea was better than floating in a cloud and wistfully hoping I’d someday enter a plant’s stoma and getting fixed by photosynthesis and ending up in some leaves and getting munched by a grazing animal, like a brontosaurus.  Those molars were something else.

              I got around when I entered a primate. I liked swinging in a tree or scampering down to forage for nuts and fallen ripe fruit.  When the genus Homo came along, I spent a good part of my time associating with them.  It wasn’t as much fun being in the bowels or inner organs of the abdomen.  I loved it when I was located in a neuron, my favorite location, as I eavesdropped on forming thoughts. Among the tens of millions of people I inhabited over the past million years of Homo sapiens on earth, were some pretty famous people.  I was in a Sertoli cell of Amenhoteps’ right testicle.  I was in Socrates’ tonsil.  I was in Nero’s anal sphincter (not the most pleasant place for a carbon atom to reside). I was in a nasal mucosal cell in Cleopatra’s nostril.   I lodged in one of Dante’s tongue papulae. I was in a hair follicle in Leonardo da Vinci’s eyelid.  I was in a muscle cell in Shakespeare’s thumb.  I did time in Darwin’s ear, residing in a bit of cartilage of his outer pinna. I felt happy in a kupfer cell in Lincoln’s liver.  It was disgusting to be in Napoleon’s hemorrhoid especially when he was riding on horseback.  Fortunately I escaped when he breathed me out at St. Helena and I was transported back to Europe in a sardine’s vein and caught off Norway, packed in olive oil, and eaten as a snack on a cracker by Louis Pasteur. This time I was in an amino acid and ended up in Pasteur’s gum surrounded by obnoxious bacteria busy dumping out tartar on one of his lower right molars. My next human sojourn was in Margaret Sanger’s vaginal mucosa as she stirred up a storm setting up her birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn.  I am presently residing in a nucleotide in Elof Carlson’s right ear, making ear wax while he churns out another of his dithering articles.