AN EXTREMELY SMALL STORY

By Deb Lease

So, I've been mulling over what story to share about Kris Dressler for weeks. Cake fight? Something about skinny dipping? One of two stories about a duck inside of a house? But what I keep coming back to is a very small story that I'm sure even Kris wouldn't have remembered.

When Francesca was very small, they wanted to be a marine biologist. Like small kids everywhere, they loved everything about the movie Finding Nemo. Francesca particularly loved Mr. Ray's song early in the movie, when Nemo is heading off to school for the first time. Despite having seen Nemo approximately three million times, I never bothered to learn the song; but Dressler knew it. Why did he know this song? I honestly have no idea. Wally and Cece were not yet even a thought in his head, I can't imagine how he would have come across it; but when Francesca asked for it, he would sing it, with gusto.

After maybe a year of this, Dress and I were hanging out without any small children around. I mentioned how much Francesca loved it when he sang that song, and how great it was for me, since I'd never taken the time to learn it. Immediately, he launches in: "Well, you know, it's really pretty simple, right. You start off, Let's name the zones, the zones, the zones, let's name the zones of the open sea! Right? That's the easy part. But then, there's epipelagic, you know, 'Epi", like 'outer', like, 'epidermis', right? And then, mesopelagic, 'Meso' like 'middle', you know? And then it's bathypelagic, like a bathysphere, and then abyssopelagic, you know, like The Abyss. And that's it! The rest of the zones are too deep for you and me to see!"

I mean, there you have it. I'd listened to the dang song dozens of times, and Dressler taught me in two minutes how to remember it for the rest of my life. He was a phenomenal teacher, and he wasn't just interested in some tiny, esoteric corner of fluid dynamics--he wanted to talk about everything, enthusiastically, including cartoon stingrays with four-year-olds.