So I just started watching Catch Me at the Ballpark.  It’s a nice sol anime about an overworked salaryman who goes to baseball games to relax at the end of the day and interacts with a new beer girl.  It’s really chill and wholesome based on what I watched in the first episode, but what I’m here to talk about is the 2nd half of the episode.

In the 2nd half of the first episode, we see a nice story about a security guard who’s pretty negative and takes the job way too lightly and casually.  After the beer girl brings a lost child to them, he talks about how a baseball game is no place for a child anyway since they’re bound to get lost and how it’s such a nuisance dealing with lost kids.  But eventually he remembers back when he was a child, the older security guard that he’s working with actually helped him when he was lost.  Despite that, going to baseball games as a child made him love baseball for the rest of his life, to the point where he got a job as a security guard at a baseball stadium to hopefully see more baseball.

The beer girl makes a comment saying how you are when you’re 4 is how you’ll be at 100.  The meaning of that statement is that young children are very impressionable, so the things they’re exposed to at a young age shapes the type of person they’ll be for the rest of their life.  This is something that we saw with the younger security guard.

Now the reason I wanted to make this post is because this was something that kind of resonates with me.  I’ve been a volunteer at an aerospace for about 2 years, and I love it there.  I spend some of my weekends volunteering there and teaching visitors about all the history behind everything from the earlier balloons and fireworks up to modern space travel.  I’ve always loved this museum, I used to go there all the time throughout my childhood and have some core memories of things like my dad teaching me about hot air balloons and doing drone activities there.  All my memories and love for the museum is what drove me to volunteer there myself.

Something that I only ever realized after volunteering there for a while was the real impact you have on people.  Not just young children, but people of all ages and backgrounds.  I’m proud to say that I’ve been able to inspire a number of people over my time volunteering, and in turn, many of these people have actually inspired me as well.  I want to share the stories of a few really memorable visitors that I’ve had these types of experiences with.

1

The first one I want to talk about is 2 young boys and their mother.  Over the 2 years that I’ve been volunteering at this museum, I have seen these kids probably at least 20 times.  One of the things I do sometimes in the museum is running a paper plane folding activity.  These 2 boys, they absolutely love that activity.  Every time they come here, they always run over to the paper plane station and fold a couple planes.  Even though it’s the exact same 4 plane templates, they always love folding them over and over again and then flying their creations.  Having spoken to their mother, she told me that they’re always begging her to go to the museum so they can fold more paper air planes to fly.

This is a pretty simple story.  If kids love doing something, of course they’d want to do it again.  What really stands out to me though is in this age of ipad kids and low attention spans, the fact that these kids can reliably crave the same activity over 2 years without ever getting bored of it, and even more so when it’s not an activity on a screen, that’s just warming to see.  You never know what these kids will grow up to be.  Maybe someday they’ll grow up to be pilots or engineers.  Maybe they’ll grow up to do great things.  Maybe they’ll grow up and forget all about aviation and paper planes.  No one can say.  But regardless of that, seeing these kids overflowing with joy and helping them create the highlight of their day is something invaluable.

2

Next up I want to talk about a family I once met.  So this family came to the museum for the first time, and one of their objectives was to see the machines and vehicles that their grandfather/father help build when he was an engineer back in his day.  I’m not gonna say what the thing was or what the company he worked for was since I don’t want to dox myself, but what he worked on was something very very important to history.  So anyway, I met this family while I was on docenting that gallery, and they told me about their grandfather/father and where they could see the thing he worked on.  Since I knew the gallery like the back of my hand, I showed them around and taught them a bit about the beautiful machine that he helped build.  After that, I directed them towards something on the wall that many people don’t really pay attention to.  On the wall, we have in frames, giant posters featuring the signed names of every one of the engineers that worked on building that machine.  The family had no clue that thing even exists, but after pointing it out to them, they scanned through the signatures and eventually found the name of their grandfather/father.

Again, a very simple story, but this really stresses how much you can do for someone with a tiny act.  Me showing them the poster on the wall allowed them to have an extremely wholesome experience that was completely unplanned.  My knowledge of all the artifacts and items on display allowed me to provide an extremely memorable experience for a family that I only knew for about 20 minutes and will likely never see again.

3

This one is about an extremely smart kid I once met.  This kid was only 7 years old, only in 2nd grade.  During this time, I was running an activity that demonstrates and simulates how gravity and orbitals in space work using a circular frame with a cloth over it and marbles and weights to act as space objects.  So I was running through my lesson that I give to all kids, this kid started asking some pretty great questions, like why do the marbles move faster when it gets closer to the weight in the middle.  That’s not the type of question you expect from a 7 year old, his observation skills are really amazing.  So anyway I explain to him how when the marble rolls closer to the weight in the middle, it speeds up because it’s essentially going down hill and that the planets do the same thing around the sun.

This kid continued on asking question like that the whole time.  After I finished my little lesson, he ran off to explore the gallery with his father.  But like 2 minutes later, he came running back over to me to ask if the space shuttle heatshield tile on display was real.  I respond with of course, it was never used, but it’s the real deal.  So then he asks me what it’s made out of, and I respond saying something called porous silica fibers.  I didn’t elaborate on what that was since I didn’t expect a 7 year old to want an answer with anymore depth than just what he material was called, but I stood corrected as he then asked what that meant.  So I gave a simple explaination of what it was and he seemed to understand it.  Then he asked how does it withstand so much heat?  At this point he seemed to really be understanding what I was saying to him, so I went a bit more technical and gave an explaination of hour the structure of the silica fibers allowed the tiles to be porous, meaning that a large portion of the tile is just air.  The important thing about that is air is an amazing cooling device, and having all these pockets of air allows the heat to get trapped in those air pockets and eventually dissipate into the atmosphere.  Yet again, this kid understood every word coming out of my mouth.  Truly such an intellegent kid.

So off he runs, then 1 more time he comes back to me, this time with a question of out left field.  Do compasses work in space?  Now that’s a question I couldn’t answer right away since that had nothing to do with anything in the galleries, so, I gave it a quick google on my phone for the answer.  Now instead of just telling him the answer, I figured this is a smart kid, so I might as well let him exorcise his brain a bit.  I asked him how do compasses work, and he resonds by having a magnet point to the north pole, which is correct.  So then I tell him about the magnetic field and how the magnetic north pole is different from the geographic north pole since the magnetic north pole is based on the position of the magnetic field.  I also tell him that the magnetic field extends 10s of thousands of miles from earth, so if you’re on the ISS only 250 miles from earth, how is the compass going to behave?  He resonds correctly saying it’ll point towards the magnetic north pole, genuinely such a bright kid.  So I say now let’s go to the moon where we’re far away from earth’s magnetic field, now where does the compass point?  He responded to the moon’s north pole.  Now we have an incorrect answer since the moon doesn’t have much of a magnetic field.  So now I shoot him another try saying now that we’re away from any strong magnetic fields, what will the compass do?  This time he responds that it won’t work.  As far as google and I are aware, that answer is correct.  Ofc we can’t say for certain bc the Apollo missions never tested this out, but as far as we can deduce, he’s correct.  The magnet won’t move since there’s nothing to move it.

This story ran on for a bit since I got a bit excided talking about sciency stuff, but there was plenty more thing I talked to that kid about.  This was something that was extremely fun for both of us, and for a 7 year old kid, he understood many of these concepts better than some adults would.  The kid is truly gifted and he’ll make for a great aerospace engineer imo.  I have no clue where he’ll eventually end up, but I hope I helped inspire him to continue on learning.  A kid like that I capable of making major contibutions to humanity in the future if he gets raised right as a kid.  I hope he will go on to do great things, and hopefully me letting him work his brain was something that will contibute to that possible bright future.

Conclusion

There was honestly 2 more stories I wanted to share, but I yapped way too much on that 3rd one and am already almost at 2,000 words lmao.  Idk if this post is that interesting, but I just wanted to share some core memories of people I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with in my time at the museum.  Just as that security guard in the anime was inspired as a kid, I hope I contibuted to inspiring the next generation myself.  If you made it down here and are reading this right now, I really you make an effort to do so too.  It doesn’t always need to take much effort or time to do something good and become a core memory for someone, whether it’s a child or an adult.  Whether or not you ever see that person again in the future, who knows.  But if you can inspire people and become a memory they think about from time to time, you’ll be investing in a better society for the future, and it might help inspire yourself as well.

 

p.s. I also finished watching Witch Hat Atelier yesterday and while I’m not gonna make a post on it, it was incredible.  It definitely deserves its praise.  I really love the unique magic system, and the art is just beautiful and the animation is incredibly smooth.  Highly recommend watching it.