Meet King Shabazz & His Best Friend Tony Polito.

What King really did NOT believe in was Science as an active, inquisitive, investigative adventure. Reduced to a series of Show & Tell Adults proclaiming a seasonal event for which he had no evidence or experience.

“Everybody talking about bout Spring. But WHERE is it at?”

Finally fed up and frustrated with the empty words, he declared, “I’m goin to get me some of this Spring. If Spring really is Just Around The Corner. I’m goin to go round there and see what do I see.”

King and Tony set off on a manhunt across their city neighborhood in search of Spring.

Spring is absolutely nowhere to be found at the school, the playground, Weissman’s Delicious Smelling Fine Bakery, the Church of the Solid Rock, a restaurant, a Texas Bar-B-Q take-out shop or the nearby vacant lot.

But they do spy a big, beautiful, dark red abandoned car. Wheels gone and perched on a high up mound of dirt. Halfway to the car was a patch of little yellow pointy flowers growing in the middle of short spiky green leaves.

Spring!

“Man, I think you tripped on these crops. They’re comin up. Man, the crops are comin up.”

And resting on the front seat of the old car, down in a whole lot of cottony stuff was a nest containing four light blue eggs.

“Spring is here.” King Shabazz whispers to Tony.

“Right,” Tony whispers back to King.

Hofstra’s Lazer Goldberg agrees with King Shabazz & Tony. He writes that Science Is Where You Find It. Every large city is good hunting ground. NYC is full of a huge variety of rocks, minerals, bird species, flowers, lichen, fungi and fern. Also micro & macroscopic freshwater life, trees, shrubs, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and insects.

And consider the people excavating for new buildings, building bridges, flying aircraft and manufacturing goods of all kinds. This too is observable Science.

King Shabazz & Tony somehow sensed that they would recognize Spring when they saw it. They had no equipment, guide books, curriculum or a prior knowledge base. Lazer Goldberg references Physicist Richard Feynman’s childhood nature walks with his salesman father. Senior Feynman may not have memorized the names of various birds, trees, rocks and flowers. But he did share with his son “The wonder he felt about natural events. Birds returning to precisely the same place each year. The life cycle in the woods that seemed to satisfy all its interdependent living things.

What was important was the SPIRIT the father transmitted to his young son. That feeling endured in Nobel Laureate Scientist Richard Feynman.“