Tag creativity

The working theory of the universe

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Although I don’t believe in the unified theory of creation, I do embrace the notion that patterns characterize our lives, giving them coherence. In fact, our brains are always making sense of our surroundings — not in ways that always render the truth — but having a working theory is better than the disorienting feeling that all is random and chaotic. 

Seeing this image reminds me of the Milky Way or a Ferris wheel at night or a vortex of particles swirling in a magical mixture. When in fact, what I captured is a tiny body of water near Asa Pond and off the bike path after a heavy rain, bringing soap suds into the stream and down a half-foot waterfall. The more you look, the more you see the connections and the deep surprise of everyday encouters. 

Underwater

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Often enough, we can find ourselves in a place, both completely recognizable and profoundly strange. Sometimes, we don’t even know we’ve been there until we’ve see sand from the desert on our pants and fragments from the Rain Forest in our boots. Or we see what image emerges in our camera and wonder how something could have played out in front of our eyes while we were paying attention to something. It’s like playing that ‘“nobody saw the gorilla on the basketball court because we were watching the game” kind of phenomena. This doesn’t only happen in our material world. It happens in our social and political world, as well. We wake up in the middle of the night in anguish because we suffered an unaccounted for moral injury earlier in the day. 
We often take ourselves to task for living these privileged lives and those points are all well taken. The ways of the world are crazy. There is no arc of justice that bends fast enough toward justice as we’d like it to be. There is no denying that there are forces bending the arc the other way, perhaps towards a world they see as just. It should be noted that our complex interconnected world yields great fortunes for some of us but it comes at a great cost not only to others but ourselves, as well, in the alienation, the existential threats, the complex nature of matters around us. Perhaps, those are all diseases of modernity but it seems more than that recently. Like the photo above, I seem to be underwater, somewhat adrift, in a world less of my making and certain less to my liking. The world swirling and our struggle to gain footing. Perhaps, in our complex rapidly-changing world, the longer we are alive, the more alienated we feel. Unless, we take the long view — that we are members of a long lineage of creatures on the world, stumbling along and making the best of our limited and limiting view of what’s around us.

Poet in a box

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About a decade before he passed away, my father, the celebrated poet, called me home to his summer place in the Hamptons for a visit. This was an unusual event as he preferred, we meet in the city, once a year, near the holidays. Asking for the reason, he told me, in that ponderous voice of his that we were gathering to talk about his will.  As his only child, I found this an intriguing proposition. By this time in his career, he had ascended to those rare heights in the American pantheon of cultural elite. He was esteemed enough to secure a wife, 40 years his junior, and with looks and appeal three standard deviations from his on scale of attractiveness. He had surrounded himself with willing accomplices, men and women of some renown, many teaching at fine universities, editing small but prestigious books of poetry for first class presses. This cadre blurbed his books and wrote complementary reviews. Some, I am certain read his poetry, but others simply joined the team. They couldn’t discern whether the poet has clothes or not; they were satisfied that someone more learned, someone in higher position on this bespoke hierarchy thought that he did. 

At this meeting which lasted less than an hour, we stood facing each other in a pretty room that overlooked a marsh. I don’t know that he sailed; he never spoke it and it never appeared in any of his poems. The room has been decorated elegantly by Tiffany, that recently acquired wife in that sparse modern décor, uncomfortable for humans but exceptional for long shots featured in Design magazines. I don’t recall his asking me to sit down or to stay for lunch. Tiffany seemed rattled by my visit when she answered the door that morning. In that short conversation, I tried to convey that none of my father’s wives held places of treasure or contempt for me. She had nothing to fear from me. I smiled and asked a few appropriate questions; I have a talent for that. She left shortly to sit on the dock, just at the edge, wearing a sun dress, her ankles in the water.  

During our meeting, my father, in his oblique way, told that he was writing his will and wanted me to know that I would be taken care of, as is due the son of an important poet. I quickly thanked him and told him that I was fine, I was making my way through the world and appreciated his thinking of me. Unlike the rest of my relationships, I must say that I have always been most obsequious with my father. My friends and partner would hardly recognize me in these exchanges. I still call him, Sir, as if he were members of the landed gentry in generations ago Great Britain. 

Still, he persisted and said that he was designating something very special for me. Once again, I thanked him. “That’s very kind”. 

He quoted one of his favorite non-poets Warren Buffett who had said that he was leaving his children money in his will to do some things, but not enough to do nothing. I smiled and replied, that seemed wise counsel. We talked no further of the will. He asked about my career and quickly changed the conversation to an upcoming collection of his poems soon to be published. Perhaps, I could attend the party to be held later in the year. I could have told him I was out of the country or made some other excuse but I said something like “wouldn’t miss it for the world” when in fact, I’d give anything in the world not to go.

 I left in early afternoon in my rented car, advising myself against obsessing about the conversation and parsing it. I vowed to file it away as another encounter with my father that I would never completely understand. I call upon my sketchy knowledge of Buddhism to leave it, to let it be.

The truth was that I spent the next ten years reviewing that conversation and imagining myself re-writing scene after scene and re-casting our characters as if I was working a script for an off-Broadway run. I never did reach an agreeable version, I couldn’t write him into the role where he emerged fully formed and multi-dimensional. And to tell the truth, I couldn’t do much better for my own character. At my age, it seems a lack of will and denial to be still wanting more from a father. I have wondered what kind of son would be happily matched with such a father. My imagination failed me. 

After his death in August 2018, we met with his lawyer to review the will. Tiffany got the money, the house, the other house, and a whole series of complicated but beautifully drawn rights to his intellectual property. I write beautifully here to refer to the genius of highly paid attorneys whose moral compass has wealth and the preservation of it as its North Star.

In his will, my father misquoted John Paul Getty[1] who he claimed wrote that nothing of value could be found in money. (Actually, Getty wrote, My formula for success is rise early, work late, strike oil.) So, inspired by Getty, he was giving his only son the treasure of his words, in the hopes that I would follow his path and his direction. There were bookshelves full of journals and notebooks and file cabinets with drafts of poems just waiting to be born.  I would become the next great Poet, the Celebrated Poet Junior. However, it should be clear that in all aspects of my life I have tried to be my father’s antithesis. Our taste in art, in women, our clothing, our social status, our values, our sense of our selves – all of it. Were it not for therapy, I could have foolishly made his work my work. 

Not long after the will was read, I received three crates in the mail along with a beat-up wooden filing cabinet from his lawyer. Enclosed was a carefully organizing archival box with notes in his hand, written on fine paper, along with well-worn dictionaries, a complete collection of the positive reviews of his work, titles of books of poetry I might use, a list of themes to explore. In this box, he also left a letter, a sort of map to the contents. “There is much work to do here”, he urged.

There was no suggestion here that I might want to consider being my own poet. Instead, this was more like a business plan, something that a son might seek from his father – throwing down the challenge to continue his legacy, fulfilling my birthright as his son. When the family business is poetry, what’s a father to do?  Along with the box, he outlined everything he thought I needed to know about writing poetry.  On a set of ten index cards, he outlined his guiding principles. What a gift.       

Don’t use all the words at once; be measured.

Be manly about poetry.

Order matters; coherence doesn’t

Clever trumps authentic or vice versa sometimes.

Plant tricks in your poetry. The critics love these. (Make certain they can’t all be found.)

Be not too careful with grooming, especially when you are young.

Write for people dumber than you.

Powerful people like to have poets to drink with.

Launch early, then glide.

Develop your poetry reading voice; this will be the most important key to your success.

Those acolytes of my father are delighted by his gift to me, smug and superior, that I will waste it. And I am most certain that I will in every way. Sons seldom are that acorn that doesn’t fall far from the tree, especially when that tree casts such a shadow that there is no room for light. Still, Poet in a Box. Maybe, I can talk to my marketing manager about the possibilities. 

[1]Getty actually wrote, “My formula for success is rise early, work late and strike oil.”

Sunday Drives

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I remember only the vaguest of details about the episode. My older sister, Janet, who keeps threatening to write a memoir revealing our family secrets tells it at nearly every family occasion. My brother, Carl, the baby of our family, swears the whole thing never happened. None of it; not a minute. 

It is generally agreed that parents and their children recount their family time together as differently as those blind men pawing over that elephant in the child’s tale. The stories that siblings bring back from their childhoods may reflect more about who they are as adults than what happened in their childhoods. Sometimes, it feels like we didn’t share much of our childhood together at all. Instead, we were more like boarders in a house with little interest in the other occupants. 

This episode supposedly happened two years before our father died in a fatal car crash. Janet uses this undisputable fact to shore up her accounting of this day.  We were on our Sunday drive in a rundown twenty-year-old Studebaker which my father maintained with his minimal mechanical skills. Bald tires. Engine burning motor oil. Failed emergency brake. Body rot. Unsafe for him to drive, but dangerous especially for my mother, a new driver, usually with a carful of kids.

We children were in the back seat on our way home after a long summer day at a public beach. My father was driving, with one hand on the steering wheel and his other arm stretched across the back of the front seat. My father’s family organized these gatherings and with plenty of cousins and lots of food we were dazed from the sun and sand, eager to get home and out of our swimsuits. The adults were full of booze, especially my Dad and his brothers. Janet says they were feeling “no pain.”  

As she tells the story, Carl and I slouched over each other ready to fall asleep. It was getting dark and the traffic was crawling along the state highway.  She was sitting at the edge of the back seat, pretending to read her book but was really hoping to hear what my parents were talking about.  To her it sounded like they were having an argument. Mom was asking him if he was OK to drive. 

Daddy said, ‘Of course, I am.’” He smiled and reminded her that he was a great driver.  Janet says that that my father was in a very good mood on that drive home. And she added “because he’d been drinking.” 

This kind of thing drives my brother and me crazy.  His drinking infects all her stories about him, even the ones about a very happy Christmas morning when he was awake earlier than usual, making us special Santa-shaped pancakes.  He was even more excited than we were about opening presents. That lovely childhood enthusiasm about him made him a great playmate and sometimes an unreliable parent but not on this magical morning. He was completely ours to enjoy. She insists he was up early drinking. That is why he was so much fun; Carl and I tell she’s crazy. This story always makes my brother storm out of the room, no matter how often she tells it and how often he pleaded, Please, not again. 

According to her, on that Sunday afternoon, there was an accident just ahead and the rescue crews were arriving. My father grew impatient and as quickly as he could, he swerved the car over to a back road. She reminds us of how much he hated traffic. I remembered that he knew every major highway, side street, and gravel road in the state. His job as an appliance repair man required him to know how to navigate anywhere; he also seemed to have magical sense of direction, the way some people do. So, on these Sunday drives, we could find ourselves in places he’d discovered during the week — abandoned mines, old houses he could fix up, farms he wanted to buy – all adventures and dreams.  This backroad would likely be a shortcut that took us a longer time to get home but it didn’t matter, he just hated traffic. 

Janet says that once we turned down backroad, things got serious. My father started driving faster; my mother sat up straight in her seat. Janet says my mother tried to catch my father’s attention by staring at him, by throwing one of her “stop it now” looks but it didn’t work. My father was smiling, enjoying the drive, one hand on the steering wheel and the other now on the shift.  She put her hand on his to get his attention and he smiled. 

Our mother asked him to slow down because he was driving too fast.

Janet says, he just smiled and sped up a little. The back road was not well paved so the car was bumping along. I do seem to remember that part of the story, being jostled out of sleep for a minute.

Janet says, “She asked him to slow down again, ‘Please, John. You’re scaring me’.” 

Daddy said, “Nothing to worry about, honey. We need to get these kids home.” Smiling again. 

Janet says, “I must have gasped or something because Mommy and Daddy heard me and noticed I was listening in to their conversation. I felt like I was in the middle of one of their arguments but I didn’t want to be. So, I leaned back in my seat. I just wanted Daddy to stop driving so crazy.”

She says that she settled in between my brother and me. Soon, the car started weaving.  Janet says, “Daddy was jerking the wheel back and forth and the car is rocking, speeding down the road. He’s driving like he’s a stupid teenager.”

 “Mommy screamed and she said to Daddy, ‘John, you’re going to kill us all’.  And she looks back at me, and says, ‘You’re scaring Janet.’  Mom took her hand away from his and put them on the front of the glove compartment, bracing herself in the case the car crashed.

“Daddy looked in the rearview mirror and motioned me to come forward. I leaned into his side of the car and put my hands on the back seat. I was almost crying but I tried not to. I could smell the alcohol on his breath.” 

“Daddy asked me, ‘You’re not scared are you, Janet? We’re just having a little bit of fun. Mommy just don’t understand’. I looked at him and I could feel myself biting my lip, scared but maybe thinking he knew what he was doing. Maybe, we were all really OK. But then I looked at Mommy and knew that she was right. He was driving crazy. I was scared.”

Janet always slows down her story at this point to look hard at my brother.

“And I told Daddy, ‘I am scared. At least at little bit. I think you might be scaring Baby Carl, too. I think he’s crying.’  She adds, as if she is sharing inside information “That was a lie. I said you were crying because you were always his favorite, Carl. Maybe, that would make him stop but really were both fast asleep. I had to do something.”

“Daddy just nodded his head and slowed down and straightened out the car.  Mommy put her hand back on his and I sat back and tried to relax. Some Sunday drive! We could have died that day. I was so happy to finally get home. Daddy carried you both in the house and put you to bed. I grabbed a Coke and went to my room.” 

Soon after this event, Janet stopped coming on Sunday outings. She played the teenager card — too busy with friends, had homework, got a boyfriend, blah blah blah. So, our little family continued our Sunday drives, exploring the backroads and looking at houses we couldn’t afford, schools we couldn’t attend and visiting dangerous neighborhoods we had no business being in. Until he died. 

I have listen to Janet repeat this short story over and over again. I suppose I should thank her for saving our lives and maybe I would if I remembered more about that afternoon. But maybe not. I only remember being in that car on a hot summer afternoon asleep with Carl’s feel stretched over my lap. That is it.  In my mind, I don’t want these stories messing with the memory of my father. 

I wish Janet could gain some wisdom and grace in her retelling of her stories about him. There could be a space for our father not as a severely damaged man but instead as a someone with a serious problem caught up in a post-war culture that celebrated men’s drinking. He was a wonderful father I can’t excuse his drinking but I’ll never forgive her these stories. 

Homecoming

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In late December 1973, I returned to Chicago after a visit home to Rhode Island for the holidays — a twenty-seven-hour trip on an over-packed Greyhound bus without enough seats for the all the passengers. The Arab oil embargo put air travel out of reach of my budget so like many of my co-travelers, we packed into an overheated bus, dressed in winter coats, snowy boots, suitcases stowed in the luggage rack above the seats and under the bus.  I stood in the aisle, like a vulture, ready to pounce on an open seat. But I was young and there were older people, women with children, and others more worthy of a seat. I stood until we reached Sandusky, Ohio when a department passenger freed up the aisle seat. The very young woman next to me asked if I could hold her baby while she got something to eat at the next rest stop. The baby fell asleep in my arms for a few hours. Her steady breathing on my chest gave me a few hours of the best sleep I had had in a while. I felt unanchored when I gave the child back to her appreciative Mom who was also happy for a rest.

When I arrived at the Providence bus station, I saw the holiday lights in downtown and the Christmas tree in front of City Hall.  Last-minute shoppers, their arms full of bags and boxes, filled the street. From there, I took a local bus home. Familiar sites appeared as we drove through the streets and little towns on our way. The A&P, the Outlet Company, Frank’s Fruits and Bakery, the old police station, the elementary school I attended, my parish church. The bus stopped at the intersection of Main Street and Branch Lane where I got off, saying Happy Holidays to the driver and the few passengers that remained.  I walked the long steep hill to our house. There were white candles in the windows, and a Christmas tree in the middle window.  No other lights on in our house. I knocked softly and went to sleep on the couch. My mother was already asleep.

I spent less than three days at home. Not all of them happy. I felt empty and hollowed out, my mother less than receptive to my simmering depression. Nothing seemed to matter to me. I went upstairs to my closet to pack some warmer clothes for the Chicago winter. None of them fit. All two sizes too large. I had a lost a lot of weight during my short stay in the city. In truth, I was scared to back to Chicago. But I said not a word. When you know exactly how a conversation will go, it’s better to dispense with the actual exchange. In response to my expression of anxiety and fear, I could imagine my mother saying something like, “Well, you’ve made your bed. Now you must lie in it.” 

On my return to Chicago, the bus discharged its passengers at the center city terminal. The city was dark and quiet with a heavy wet snow. I walked north out of the busy downtown area toward a more residential area with less traffic and fewer streetlights.  The snow fell steadily as I walked ten long city blocks to my studio apartment on the north side. Sidewalks were full of slush and ice. It had snowed most of that winter –- the snowiest winter in a long time. I was carrying my mother’s old suitcase and a portable TV that she bought me for Christmas. I had tied some twine and looped it through a wire handle to make carrying the fifteen-pound television easier but in the snowstorm, I struggled to carry both packages. I stopped often to take a break, putting down the load to regain my strength, then switching the packages to the other hand for a bit until I had to stop again. 

I took a short cut through some back streets. This area was full of abandoned cars and vacant houses.  Dark alleyways punctuated this long block where men sold drugs and girls sold sex. The few streetlamps cast dim light, the snow dropping thickly like a waterfall. Garbage and mattresses sat on the edge of the sidewalks.  A golden glow shone through the second-floor window of a boarded-up apartment – the only light in the building. It smelled like wood smoke.  

At the end of the street, I rested my packages on a staircase that led to an office building.  I took a deep breath, shaking the snow off my hat and brushing it off my shoulders. I tried to dry my wet face and my glasses on my scarf. At the corner, a car was parked, with the engine running, the driver at the wheel, cabin light on, and windshield wipers running. The driver lit a cigarette and turned his head to get a better look at me. He nodded to acknowledge that we saw each other. I nodded back, quickly picking up my bags and slipping backwards on the icy pavement. As the TV fell, my gloves followed into a slushy puddle. I stood up, wringing out the gloves, feeling a cold trickle down my back. I was shivering, my coat heavy, soaked with snow and smelling of cedar chests and wet wool. My boots full of snow.  I thought of abandoning the suitcase and TV. But I picked up the bags. One block to go.

In the middle of the block was a bodega, just about to close. I had shopped there often for fruits and vegetables. It was a small market managed by a family from Pakistan, always happy to see me. I peeked in the window to see if anyone was in the front of the store.  I would have gone in just to say I was back in town and wish them a good night. But no one was around.  

I climbed the icy stairs to my apartment building. I opened the heavy door and stepped into a lobby full of old newspapers and discarded food containers. I walked down the hallway to an alcove that held a large metal panel of one hundred mailboxes built into wall. There were no names on the mail slots just room numbers. Across from this panel was a small windowless parlor where four men sat in upholstered chairs. Most were smoking, some reading, some at tables playing solitaire or making a puzzle – all in complete silence. Even though the table lamps were all lit, the room had a sinister feeling, casting deep shadows onto the faces, hands, and clothing of the men. 

I had lived in this building for just a few months, in a studio apartment on the eighth floor. A Murphy bed faced a pull-out table on the opposite wall. A small refrigerator froze bottles of Tab, exploding them, usually in the middle of the night. Cockroaches scattered when the light came on but lingered. I seemed no threat to them at all. The radiators overheated the apartment, with a steady flow of hot steam, soaking the carpet. I never closed the windows, even in a two-day blizzard. Looking northward was a frozen Lake Michigan, blue and gray, stretching out forever like a tundra without relief.

Down a long dark corridor covered with faded floral wallpaper was a closet where we deposited our trash. Halfway down on the left, the door was always open. I could see a man him sitting on the couch, dressed in shorts and a sleeveless t-shirt, surrounded by stacks of newspapers and magazines. As I passed, he got up quickly as I passed, hiding behind the door to his apartment. I made my way to the closet, sensing him in the hallway, watching me. As I walked back to my apartment, he passed by me in the corridor walking toward that closet. 

I entered my apartment nearly closing the door but not before seeing him return to his apartment with the bag of garbage I had just left. I sat on my bed, letting my imagination run away. I was thinking about what was in that bag. My name and address. A letter from home. An envelope from my employer. Empty prescription bottles. Regular trash. Feminine hygiene products. Who knows what else? I felt violated. I wanted to call my sister but there was no phone in the apartment. It was late at night and the only phone was in the lobby.  It had one of the folding doors and a little seat with an overhead light that went on when you closed the door. I needed a lot of change to make the long-distance call to Florida and what could she do so far away. 

 Instead, I wrote her a letter describing him, just in case something happened to me. Tall. Bald on the top of his head. Prominent cheekbones. No facial hair.  Wore shorts and undershirts in the winter. Black rimmed glasses with thick lenses. Maybe with a limp. Furtive. Unit 817. Brown hair. Fidgety. Hoarder. I called him, The Creep, but that really didn’t do him or me justice. He was much more than just a Creep to me. 

I grew frightened. I never saw him leave our building or talk with anyone.  When I saw him in the lobby, his eyes darted around and his gait was unsteady. He avoided human contact, sliding away when approached, giving others wide berth around him. There were a lot of men like this in building, remote and strange.  They never made eye contact, as if we were all threats to each other.  I tried to avoid being followed. I never took the elevator up the eighth floor. I would get off at a random floor and walk the rest of the way up or down. Or start at the stairs and then take the elevator. I walked up and down the dark corridors, leaving my garbage where my neighbor couldn’t find it.  I thought of getting a boyfriend or a dog, something to show this man that I wasn’t like him, somebody cared about me. But the longer I stayed in that apartment, the more like him I became, alone and abandoned.

Not my kind of Saint

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When I was a child growing up in the fifties, it seemed that everyone in my life – my parents, my teachers, my aunts and uncles, and grandparents – and everything in my life – from the movies I watched to the books I read to the things I dreamed about – were all aligned in a project to make me a very good person. I resisted these influences in my childish ways but overall, I bought in. I embraced their hopes and dreams for goodness for me, but that wasn’t enough; I wanted to be a Saint.

My little sister and I shared a tiny bedroom and, on those nights, when my mother had a late shift at work, I would read to her at bedtime. I had the upper bunk and with the streetlight falling brightly onto my pillow, I could read as late in the evening as I wanted without detection. Our favorite book was given to me by my aunt Gaby. Without her own children, she had plenty of time and energy to devote to my development and guidance. She gifted me The Children’s Book of the Saints for my First Communion.  Every day of the year, there was another story of a Catholic saint, a simple guide for us to inspire goodness and courage. It was perfect for my dreams of sainthood. We loved best the stories of the saints who were martyrs. Stories of Saint Ignatius who was a rich boy and a soldier who then repented and found the Society of Jesuits did nothing to excite us. Saints like him seemed to us good enough but not bold or inspiring. We need saints who had visions and who suffered. We loved stories of saints like St. Bartholomew who was skinned alive, St. Ignatius of Antioch who was fed to the lions, or St. Lawrence who was burned at the stake. Never denying their faith. We relished stories of saints, like St. Juthwara who’d been beheaded and walked away with her head in her arms, on her way to church to pray. Our favorite was St. Thecia. When they tried to burn her at the stake, it rained. When they fed her to the lions, they laid down and licked her toes. She kept trying to kill her with snakes and swords but protected by her faith, not torture not the work of man could kill her. She lived to her eighties. As a child, I hadn’t yet worked out just how I would get myself into situations where I be given a chance at martyrdom but my mind was firmly made up to do whatever I needed to do to become St. Sandra of Rhode Island. 


Recognizing the power of movies over our generation, the nuns gathered us together in the cafeteria every month to watch an inspirational film like Boy’s Town, Captain January, or The Miracle of Fatima. When I was in the second grade, we watched a film about the Maryknoll Brothers doing missionary work among the pagans in China. At the end of the movie, the Chinese marched a Maryknoll Brother up a hill and crucified him – “He refused to deny his faith”, the narrator intoned.  We were stunned; I was inspired. Our nun talked with us about the movie and about our faith and passed around the little metal box where we were supposed to drop our change to support the missions. Some of the kids had spent theirs on candy; not me. Then, she asked, “Children, how many of you are willing to die for your faith?” Almost all our hands went up. “Me, sister! Me, sister!” I was so proud of myself for offering my life for Jesus Christ.  I never told my Mom, although maybe she would have been proud of me, as well. She knew about my sainthood thing.

From that moment on, I have never doubted for a minute that children could be recruited into Brown Shirts or an army of child soldiers or into the Children’s Crusade. Children may be innocent but they are engineered to be socialized into groups well-intended or evil seeking. I gave up on sainthood when it seemed the pagans were disappearing from the planet and emerging as Buddhists, Muslims, Hindis, and people of other faiths. There were other diversions from sainthood, as well, but that is a much more common story.

V and me….Sandra Enos

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In space capsule years, 47 is a long time; Voyager I and I have spent the best of those years together.  When Voyager was launched in 1977, it was the heyday of space exploration. The public was dazzled with flights to the moon, astronauts were heroes. Nowadays, any clown with a billion dollars can send up a rocket or satellite. In fact, there is so much traffic in space that we need rocket tow trucks to remove all the junk in orbit. 

V, my nickname for Voyager I, is an antique in terms of spacecraft and technology. It is the size of a Volkswagen Bettle, the car I drove when I worked at NASA in the seventies. It has a tiny computer. My iPhone is 235,000 times more powerful and 175,000 times faster than the computer on board V. The power it needs to transmit messages is equal to that of a refrigerator light bulb. It sends radio signals with a 3-watt transmitter, much weaker than a typical radio station. It takes ten hours for a message to get from V to the earth where it is picked by special antenna designed by NASA and by me. Right now, V is 15 billion miles from earth, traveling through the solar system, through the heliosphere and is now traveling in interstellar space. 

There are just a few people like me who can speak to V with our outdated programming languages – just a few lines of code – but the younger engineers have no interest in their grandfather’s spacecraft. We used to be able to do miraculous things under great limits but no more.  am thinking that our great riches have spoiled us; we seem these days to require enormous resources from our planet and from other humans to do stupid things. If our iPhones are hundreds of thousands of times more powerful than the computer on board on Voyager, then we should I be doing some important things than watching cat videos and ordering avocado toast delivered to our door. This is the measure of our age, it seems. 

I hacked myself into a special arrangement with V. I receive all those images that NASA gets — moons around planets alive with volcanos, craters full of sulfur, oceans buried underground, gaseous rings around Saturn – and much more. V sends me images of black holes, of extraterrestrial spaceships, of dwarf planets, of solar storms and hurricanes. The scientists predicted that sailing through the stars would be quiet and majestic. V reports to me that the noise and tumult and wind are deafening. 

V has stopped communicating with NASA early in 2024; this may be the end of its “official” life. But last week, I received a message from V that the Golden Record had been removed from its front plate. The Golden Record was our generation’s tossing a message in a bottle out into the universe. It was compilation of messages from the earth to other civilizations that may encounter Voyager. There were greetings from earthlings in 55 modern and ancient languages. Music from across the planet. Images of the earth and its people. Stamped on the record were instructions for its use in simple graphics. Evidentially, according to V, it easy enough for another civilization to take back home for closer inspection, like we did with moon rocks.  Also, according to V, they weren’t impressed.

The last message that Voyager sent to NASA was a simple one. Because its computing power is so limited, V has kept his comments brief. At this stage of its life, it sent a simple “Hello. By the time you get this message, I won’t be here any longer.”  It’s been silent ever since hurtling through space at 375,000 miles per hour. My V.  Where else will we go?

Are you lonesome tonight: Assignment #5

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The Beatles burst onto the Ed Sullivan Show just three weeks after my father died. This set off secret operations in our so-called music room. This was the back half of our living room with the piano that nobody played and with our record player, a significant piece of furniture with the console on one side and storage racks for albums and 45s on the other. Until I was a teenager, the only music we had in our house were my parents’ records, music from the War that they used to dance to, and our mother’s records, which we were not to touch. Records and the record players were in the “No Children Allowed” zone in our house. 

We loved watching my parents dance to music from the forties. They would glide across the floor with great grace, I thought. My father was a smooth dancer and after practicing the foxtrot and waltz with him, he accompanied me to the Father Daughter dance at our high school, clearly the most handsome and charming man in the crowd. That evening, one of the happiest nights of my life, happened just two months before he passed away.

We processed grief privately in our house. My mother simply couldn’t bear to discuss the loss of our father with her children. Much later in her life, she said to me that she had no words of comfort or consolation for us. My father would have known what to say to us, she said. So, my mother dealt with the anguish of loss she couldn’t voice through her records, stacked up for play one after the other.  How Great Thou Art by Mahalia Jackson, Don’t You Know by Della Reese, Full Month and Empty Arms, Moonlight Sonata, and Elvis Presley’s Are You Lonesome Tonight?

We would watch her expression, see her tears, and sometimes sit with her on the couch when she probably would have appreciated some time alone. Elvis really tore her up. I hated Elvis. I hated how sad he made her, how he kept pointing to her loss, and how much she missed my father. He kept making her cry asking, “Are you lonesome tonight?” With the full force of my teenage sarcasm, I would reply under my breath, “Well what do you think, Elvis. Her husband just died!” “Do you gaze at your doorstep and picture me there?” And from me, “Would you please just stop it!” I really did hate him. 

The underground operation – the secrets — began when my favorite aunt bought me the first album, Meet the Beatles. It is hard to explain six decades later the sort of effect the Beatles had on me. Their music was full of hope and fun and hand-holding, of the sweet innocence of love and flirting and dancing. It was perfect early teenager music. It seemed like the world changed when they arrived. My friends and I couldn’t get enough. I wanted to play their music all the time. My mother worked a long shift during the day but there were a few hours between our coming home from school and her returning home from work that we could use the off-limits record player, playing our music, and being careful to keep everything in its place and just so, remembering every tiny detail that could set off an inquiry.  During those magic hours, we would sing and harmonize and dance around the house, feeling free and crazy. Always in the back of my mind was whether all of that youthful exuberance was somehow a betrayal of the grief I felt in the loss of my father.  We hid the Beatles from my mother as long as possible. We covered our tracks as best we could. 

When the Beatles made that first appearance in early February 1964 on the Ed Sullivan Show my little sister, my tiny brother, my Mom and I were seated in our usual spots in our living room watching TV. I was apprehensive. Could the Beatles cheer up my Mom? Would she tune them out? Would we have to dampen our enthusiasm to honor her grief? I wanted her to love them, as I did, to see them as love and joy.

My mother loved the Beatles, these British young men with long hair.  She loved other English bands, too. We surprised her with the Beatles album which she added to her playlist and every once in a while, she would join us in a crazy dance. We had broken through the no-permission zone and into sharing music with my mother. It was all quite surprising to us. That was a new Mom. Maybe, we gave her a respite from her loss.

When my first true love moved away to college, my mother put up with my playing the same broken-hearted Dionne Warwick ballad over and over and over again. She never once told me to get over it, or to stop playing that miserable music, or that there would be other boys. She let the music pull out my tears, to feel the loss as best and as deeply as I could, even though I couldn’t talk about why this boy meant so much to me. 

We played out our grief and our happy times in common prayer of music.

Announcement New of Policies from British Airways: The Regulation of Seat Behavior

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It has come to our attention that as the size of passenger seats has declined that the number of complaints about passenger behavior in those seats has increased. While not rising to the level of a terrorist threat, these complaints have been the subject of an inquiry by Her Majesty’s Commission on Good Order in Seats under the Dominion of the Empire.  Accordingly, today, we are issuing draft regulations that we hope do make our expectations clear about the right order and decorum in the passenger seats. Such regulations only apply to the leisure traveler and neither to those in business nor first class where order appears to be maintained by a more genteel breeding. The timing of these regulations is a matter of urgency as increasing numbers of people all over the globe are turning to the British for guidance in these troubled times on matters of decorum and manners. How else to explain the popularity of Downton Abbey?  We British simply have the market concerned on civility and good manners, despite some recent high jinks in the royal family. These simple rules can surely return to the plane cabin some of the glamour of jet travel that existed before too many people could afford to fly.

Rule #1

The arm rest

In a typical seating arrangement on a flight, there are fewer armrests that there are arms. For example, for a three-seat wing accommodating three passengers with two arms each, we would expect six armrests. However, to save money, the airlines install only four armrests, leaving an undercount of two. This is not our fault; register a complaint with Boeing and Airbus. This shortage requires that EVERYONE share. The occupant of the middle seat bears this especial burden since that individual has no armrest of his own. Despite a common belief, the first person to arrive in the seats has no right, under national law or Geneva Convention, to claim the armrest as his. Neither does membership within a racial group or religious organization constitute such a claim. Similarly, the larger arms found on most men does not bestow upon them any endowed right to the armrest. It is our policy that all the arms of our travelers have equal call and claim to armrests.  Accordingly, a timing device has been installed. A small really negligible electric shock will be administered every ten minutes to assure proper sharing of the armrest. In the event that this fails to move the recalcitrant resistant arm, the cabin attendant can adjust the current. Technology has evolved to allow this system to work efficiently and effectively.

Rule #2

The rightful allotment of seat space and its environs

Contrary to U.S. law on this issue, British law and custom argue for a circumscribed space that is purchased with a standard airline ticket. In other words, under the British system, one buys his seat but that does not allow one to claim the penumbra around the seat. This stands in opposition to American jurisprudence and practice which suggests that it is not only one’s seat that one is purchasing but the area around and into the other’s seat if one is big and pushy enough. Clearly, we see the American doctrine of Manifest Destiny still rules the American traveler. Our seats are NOT selected to accommodate your specific height and weight. For that, you buy a wet suit. Our seats perfectly fit the average male in Great Britain (determined by the British census of 1920) and so should fit women as well. 

Overwhelmed by complaints from passengers that other passengers were taking up more than their fair share of breathable air and seat real estate, we are hereby providing enhanced procedures. A passenger may request from the cabin attendant a PROOD, a passenger-restrain-of-other-device. This instrument fits in between seats in accordance with British law on property and boundary rights on an aircraft.  A full-body version can also be requested to guard against passengers whose body frame leaks into another’s as well as those passengers who fall asleep with their heads on the shoulders of strangers.  Such activity is seriously disapproved by this airline. 

Rule #3

General communication protocols

It should be noted early in this paragraph that we were one of the earliest airlines to accommodate digital devices in our cabins. This is despite our deepest reservations that this move would lead to a further diminution of civility and correct behavior. We had expected nothing better than the worst that has emerged.  We have waited as long as we could before issuing guidelines.       

  • To game players. Despite the fact that you have your earphones on, the rest of us can hear the guns, the shouts, the senseless music, the crashing cars. Please lower the volume or risk having your gaming device tased on our armed staff. 
  • To the viewers of pornography, this should be done in your home, in your bedroom, if at all. Our cabins are full of children and people of good taste who really have no need to see what turns you on.  
  • To traveling salesmen. Do not coyly bring up your latest website so you can cleverly poke your neighbor in the ribs, saying “Oh, man. Look what the IT guys have done. Our next Turbo Filter looks awesome. It replaces the older mode.” Blah. Blah. No one cares.
  • To grandparents. Only one person on the plane wants to see hundreds of pictures of your grandchild and that person has just locked himself in the restroom after seeing hundreds of pictures of someone else’s grandkids.

Our overall advice: keep to yourself. Pretend you are carrying state secrets and imagine that this is the case for your seatmate, as well. Imagine that he will have to kill you if he reveals anything at all to you. Who knows? It may be true.  

Enjoy the flight. The cabin attendants will be serving refreshments if they think you deserve them. Thanks for flying British Air.

What’s Tina Got to do with me? One of six assignments

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Growing up in the fifties, I am given more freedom than I deserve. My distracted mother, a recent widow with three young children to raise, ignores my adolescence. I explore far and wide. I pal around with boys and the girls. I am athletic years before Title IX. I am crazy about music. I teach myself guitar. We write plays and perform musicals at my little high school. We sing and play music on our bus rides home, me playing bongos on my math and English textbooks. We know all the moves of those girl groups and can mimic and even embellish their dances. I can harmonize. It is magic for me. 

I don’t give this up at eighteen. In my twenties and thirties, I find another group of women friends who also love to do this. It was a heady time for the women’s movement. We want to be in and celebrate each other’s company. We sing and dance for our friends and perform at women’s conferences. We perform Aretha, the Shirelles, the Supremes, the Dixie Cups, Gladys Knight and the Pips. We never tried to do a Tina Turner song She was too far a reach for us. Which of us white working-class girls imagined dancing like Tina did? None of us. I had seen her on TV with Ike and the Ikettes. She was too sexy. Too crazy. Too beautiful. Unreachable as an icon with those long legs and warrior woman body. She was just too hot.

That all changed. She survives her abusive relationship with Ike Turner and returns to the music scene with ground-breaking album Private Dancer, with the hit What’s Love Got to do with it?  She rises strong, confident, strutting. A music critic writes that this album “reeks of attitude.” I can’t read that as adoration. George Bush awards her the Kennedy Center Honors and notes that she has the “most famous legs in show business”. They still don’t understand what Tina is all about. At 44, she becomes the oldest woman to receive a Grammy for Best Solo performer. That doesn’t sound that old to me. 

I see her anew. She is just ten years older than me. In my youthful eyes, I saw her a giant. I learn that she is a tiny 5’ 4” tall and weighs 120 pounds. That is exactly me. In her emergence, Tina gives me strength. I am finally ready to bust out of my good girl, Catholic obedient, uniform wearing, background singing self.  Tina creates the space for me to come out to my friends. To feel flirtation for the first time in my bones. I let myself be attracted and attractive. And maybe for the first time, I think, “That can’t be love. What’s going on? We just met!” But there is something powerful and worth paying attention. 

And not just me. Liberation is recognizing that is always time for re-birth and reinvention. My troupe is done with happy songs about “Going to the Chapel” and waiting for that boy to call. We’ve been burned and are ready to claim power and respect. Turner steps out and we follow. We sing Tina Turner in our comfortable shoes, with our short legs and choreographed moves until my group falls apart, with heart aches, broken marriages, wayward children, cracking voices, slower paces. One of us has cancer. Another, a husband certain to die with a brain tumor.  We are well prepared for the next transition.