BY ROB KAISER
The Cincinnati Enquirer

LUDLOW - There's this chemistry between Michael and Patricia Geise.

The 22-year-old twins don't look or act much alike - Michael's a foot taller than his sister and more likely to crack a joke - but the emotional bond they share is the stuff of family lore.

It's the kind of thing that defies scientific explanation, but which is best explained with a story about science.

The twins will graduate Saturday - Patricia from Morehead State University; Michael from Thomas More College.

Then their lives will converge at Ohio State University, where both will continue studying chemistry as graduate students.

That both would end up in the sciences is no surprise; Michael and Patricia are smart. She was valedictorian at Ludlow High School; he was salutatorian.

That both would end up at Ohio State is not so remarkable, either. It's a big school.

What's amazing is how they got to this point: Miles apart at college, they decided simultaneously and independently to change their majors to chemistry, unwittingly setting their lives on convergent paths.

Not until they came home for Christmas their freshman year did they discover they had moved in lock step without ever talking. Here we go again, their mother thought, smiling.

'It's spooky'

"They've always done this kind of thing," Gay Geise says of her twin children. "It's spooky."

Like the time they were sitting in their highchairs and they each chucked a bowl of tomato soup into the laundry basket at the same time. The baby sitter's still getting over that one.

Or the times Patricia has called her mother from college saying, "Is Michael all right?" And he'll turn up with a cold.

Or the time Patricia cried as Michael got stitches.

They don't have to talk to relate to each other. "When they were babies, they communicated quite well," Mrs. Geise says.

The magic of all this is lost on Michael, whose scientific mind is far too logical to dwell on such phenomena. Ask him whether he was surprised the day he discovered that he and Patricia had decided independently and at virtually the same time to change their majors to chemistry, and he says no. "We've always had an affinity toward the sciences," he says dryly.

Their mother appreciates the mystery of it more than her son does. "They both do the same thing every time," she says. "It isn't amazing anymore. It's more comical."

Headed in same direction

Mrs. Geise has no doubt there will be other times when her twins do the same thing at the same time or cry at each other's pain or enter into unspoken conspiracies together.

After all, their lives generally are headed in the same direction. Patricia is in inorganic chemistry. Michael is in organic synthesis. He wants to do industrial research and will serve an internship this summer at S.C. Johnson Wax in Racine, Wis. - his second at that plant.

Usually Mrs. Geise takes it in stride when the twins do the same thing at the same time, but this weekend the tangle of their lives poses a special problem - one Mrs. Geise has wrestled with for years. They will graduate on the same day in ceremonies more than two hours apart.

"Isn't it sad?" she says. "I've agonized over that for three years."

Finally, she told Michael, who stayed home for college: "We've been here in this house every day for you for four years. Now we're going to be there for your sister."

Michael's brother, Newport firefighter Charlie Geise, 37, will attend his graduation. Gay and Dan Geise will drive to Morehead to watch their daughter graduate.

"Unless somebody finds me a helicopter," she says.

Rob Kaiser is The Enquirer's Kentucky columnist. His column appears regularly on Sundays and Thursdays in The Kentucky Enquirer. He can be reached at 578-5584.
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