I haven’t felt static electricity run through me in years. When I first learned about it as a kid, I was amazed and did everything in my power to bring on a shock. I discovered that department stores were the best places to make it happen. We would go to Hudson Belk and while my mother was looking at clothes, I would slide my feet on the carpeted floor, almost like cross-country skiing indoors, then touch a metal clothes rack or the metal trim on a display case. How the sparks would fly, with a flash of light and electric crackle, but more importantly, an electric current that would run up my arm. I thought it was so very cool to create electricity that I skied across the carpet over and over again.<\/p>\n
I apparently was an easily entertained child.<\/p>\n
Like I said, though, I had not created a spark for years until a recent trip to Montana to visit my daughter and her family. While at a park with my son-in-law and grandchildren, I found myself behaving like the children, climbing jungle gyms and going down slides. (This old granny isn’t dead yet!)<\/p>\n
It must have been the slide that built up the charge, even though it had been five or ten minutes since I had been on it. I was waiting at the bottom for two-year-old Hannah and when she came to the end, I touched her arm.<\/p>\n
Zzzzzzttttt\u2026..came that electric sound and I saw the spark. Unfortunately, Hannah saw and felt it, as well. She jerked her arm away from me as if she had been stung, and a shadow of fear passed through her eyes.<\/p>\n
Oh, no!<\/p>\n
Hannah kept her distance from me for the next few minutes, then, thankfully, she seemed to forget about it.<\/p>\n
Will Hannah ever ski across carpet to create shocks of her own? I don’t know. I just hope she won’t remember it was Granny who gave her a first jolt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I haven’t felt static electricity run through me in years. When I first learned about it as a kid, I was amazed and did everything in my power to bring on a shock. I discovered that department stores were the best places to make it happen. We would go to Hudson Belk and while my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=261"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":262,"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261\/revisions\/262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}