Giving Up the Ship

My 40 Year High School Reunion apparently produced much in the way of fellowship and reminiscence, to the extent that one incorrigible troublemaker volunteered to compile a set of "High School Memories," noting that the class after ours has done so, but it was lame. This, of course, sends me back to the memory bin, trying to locate some non-lame memories, but I find the pickings pretty slender.

Partly this is due to my multiple lives during high school. I have lifeguard memories that occurred at that time, but those were from the Downtown Nashville YMCA. There were girls I dated, primarily from distant high schools, possibly owing to a fear of gossip, or the instinct of self-preservation that realizes that breaking up with someone who is in your English class is Very Rough on the System. There are a number of Forensic Club memories, but I can categorically attest to the basic lameness thereof.

Besides, the best memories are about mischief made, and I was such a sweet kid, really I was.

Still, I believe that I held some sort of record for being tossed out of Mr. R's 8th Grade class, which was either technically in High School because it was in the same building, or technically not, since it was still Jr. High School. Whatever. Mr. R was an ignorant twit, and 40+ years has not dimmed that assessment.

I will leave aside the times when he said foolish things like "Rock and Roll is a Communist Plot." I seldom bothered to call him on things that everyone knew were stupid. But when he told the class that Earth satellites stay in orbit by balancing between the gravitational attraction of the Earth and Moon, my calm demeanor vanished and I said something like, "That's idiotic." That got me a quick trip to the library (Oh, throw me in the briar patch, Mr. Detention).

Then there was the pop quiz on the Revolutionary War, where one of the questions was, "This man said, 'Don't give up the ship!'" Sadly, I knew that it was a dying quote from Captain James Lawrence during the War of 1812, and that said ship, in fact, was given up shortly thereafter (though the words became a slogan used in the Battle of Lake Eerie). R had, as so many before him, confused that saying with "I have not yet begun to fight," which was from John Paul Jones, the correct answer to the wrong question. I said, "I don't think you have the correct quote," and R said, "How do you know who I'm talking about?" So I levelly answered, "All I know is that John Paul Jones never said, 'Don't give up the ship.'" My fellow students' pencils scratched the answer that R had been looking for, and I, once again, was ejected from a class that was trying very hard to make me know less than I already knew.

Barry

I’m not much for “tell all” memoirs. I don’t think that I have the right to invade others’ privacy to any great extent, and the diligent reader will observe that most of the times when I’ve mentioned other people in these essays, I’ve either obscured the names or tried to paint the others in a good light.

But there is the matter of how to treat those who are dead, those who can neither grant or deny permission. I can see both sides to the argument there, so it’s inevitably a case by case basis. In this case, I think that Barry would not mind, and besides, I think he deserves some sort of eulogy from me, the sort that I could not deliver at his actual memorial service, because there were friends and family there who might have been wounded by some of the details.

Barry was a drug dealer. He began peddling marijuana in the early 1970s, and had graduated to cocaine by the time I met him in the early 80s. He was, when I met him, at something of a low ebb. A while before he’d planned on giving up the trade, getting married, the whole bit, then his fiancé ran off with someone he’d thought was his best friend, and then a series of ill-advised deals went sour, rendering him, if not impoverished, at least less able to finance the sybaritic life style that it turned out most of his other “friends” were interested in. So he was struggling to keep from foundering financially, a struggle made much more difficult by the lure of the product that he was back to peddling.

We met through a mutual friend, and Barry and I became friends. I won’t say that there weren’t drugs involved, because at that time, if you were around Barry, drugs were usually involved. However, we also joined a bowling team together, went to concerts, parties, etc. Barry was an amateur theater person, so I went to some of his performances, and he was interested in standup comedy. I never saw him perform, but we did go to see various comics he was interested in, and the SF comedy scene has had a lot of talent pass through.

When I started to feel the effects of “the Lurgy,” the maybe-it-was-chronic-fatigue-syndrome that I got in the mid-80s, drugs were one of the first things I gave up (with the occasional lapses, of course; I’m not some sort of iron-willed paragon). But Barry remained a friend, one of those who was willing to help with those minor things that sick people need, like the occasional trip out to a restaurant when I just couldn’t get it together to feed myself.

Barry got busted in the late 80s, but he was only holding grass at the time, the dealers’ paranoia serving him well enough that he didn’t take any coke to that particular meeting. The prosecutors tried to get him to set up his own suppliers (just as he’d been set up), but Barry was having none of that. While awaiting trial he dumped the rest of the business, cleaned up his act, and took a job as a night security guard. He sufficiently impressed the arresting officer that the man recommended straight parole, no jail time, and that was that for Barry as dope dealer.

Still, Barry was ever the entrepreneur, making frequent trips to Bali, to buy artwork that he then sold when he returned home. And he’d always been a comics collector, so he ramped that up as a small business as well.

Barry had an occasional girlfriend, whom I’ll call Di. It turned out that Di had lived near RPI during my time there, as a place called “The Farm” (did every college in the early 1970s have a “Farm” associated with it?). She’d been involved at that time with a guy I put in the acknowledgements to SunSmoke, Jim Nagy, who’d played McMurphy in the RPI Players production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and had been given tepid reviews because he obviously hadn’t been acting, just playing himself. Which is to say that Nagy had major charisma, and I had the unfortunate task of telling Di that Jim had died in the mid-80s. He’d lived an amphetamine fueled life for years and had cleaned up too late, apparently, the damage having been done, and something critical finally gave out.

It can be a small world in the fast lane, even if you’re usually just a passenger.

After I married Amy, she and I had dinner a few times with Barry and Di. Amy told me after one of them that, during a time when I’d left the table to go to the restroom, Di had confided to her, “If ever any man looks at me the way he looks at you, I’m his forever.”

Barry quit the drugs, but he kept his Corvette, and that was what did it for him. He was on Highway 101 in Northern California, a twisty turny stretch that shrinks to two lanes for periods, and he was behind a camper and he was always impatient. He tried to pass when he couldn’t see far enough ahead, and someone was coming.

I developed a theory about the illegal drug business back when I had a better vantage point for observation. It seemed to me that the nature of it was primal, stark, a world of black and white. There is no legal system to enforce contracts and the regular criminal justice system is often deliberately manipulated by criminals to their own advantage, creating situations where the police and the law was the instrument of injustice, rather than of justice. And it looked to me like the tradesmen were either snakes or honorable men, with a great gulf between the two.

A friend of Barry’s told me he saw the highway patrol report of the accident, and it suggested that Barry deliberately went through a railing and down a steep embankment, rather than hitting the oncoming car. I believe it, because that was Barry, always taking risks, but trying his damnedest to confine the damage to himself.

Trust

When I was four, some buddies and I decided to become “blood brothers.” This was to be accomplished by means of a razor blade applied to the finger tip, which we were all pretty sure was a good way of producing blood. And it worked like a charm, at least for me, as I cut myself pretty good and bled profusely. At that point the others chickened out, leaving me to run home to get bandaged and lectured.

Many years later, I forget the exact circumstances, but I think it involved parking my car in a very small space. Dave volunteered to get out and talk me in, but I brushed him off and parked the car by eye and feel. Afterwards, he said something like, “You didn’t trust me to do it, did you?” I thought for a moment and confessed, “Probably not, but don’t take it personally; I don’t really trust anybody.”

I don’t know whether it’s a “guy thing” or an American thing, or a Southern thing that I project, but I’ve known a lot of people who aren’t real big in the trust department. When you view life as a struggle, red in tooth and claw, trust is pretty scarce. I can relate, given my own experience and reactions. For one thing, just ordinary acting in good faith doesn’t seem that thick on the ground these days. I have a natural tendency to take people at face value that has eroded pretty badly over the years.

I remember one project manager who, I’m pretty sure in retrospect, was trying to sabotage my career, by telling a client lies about me, and telling me lies about the client, and making sure that I never got a chance to talk with any of the client representatives directly. He later quit to become an EST trainer and got personally screwed over by Werner Erhard, after which he had a psychotic break and more or less complete mental collapse. I am not so highly evolved that I didn’t enjoy watching that Karmic Komedy play out.

But simple treachery hardly accounts for the matter. When does “passive aggressive” turn into “doesn’t give a damn?” I don’t know, but I’ve learned not to rely on unsecured promises. Beyond that comes the frequent simple inability of many people to accomplish what they set out to do. They start with the best intentions, but something comes up, something invariably comes up, and there you are, stuck holding that bag.

So I make allowances, and I’ll bet you do to, so often that you don’t even realize you’re doing it most of the time. You tell the chronically late fellow that you’re going to leave two hours before you really need to leave. It started out as fifteen minutes, but the chronically late guy caught onto that, so it’s been clock creep ever since.

Back in the 70s and 80s, there were all the “human potential movement” tropes, one of them being the “trust exercise” where you stood up, closed your eyes and fell backwards, trusting the person behind to catch you. How pathological is it of me that I cheated on trust exercises? I never trusted the folks behind me to catch me; I just decided that I didn’t mind falling on my back. Besides, I knew how to fall.

But then there’s this. A while back, Ben made a comment about my “owing Amy my life.” He was referring to her quite heroic endeavors on my behalf immediately following my melanoma diagnosis. She cut through the county health bureaucracy in probably record time; by the end of the day that I’d been given the diagnosis, I had an gatekeeper physician appointment for the very next day. The next day I got scheduled for surgery, and an appointment with an oncologist for the following Monday. Time counts when you have cancer, and delay can make the difference between a good and bad outcome.

“Owing your life” sounds like a debt, though, and this doesn’t feel like a debt. It’s impossible to be sure of the “what ifs?” Without Amy’s efforts it would probably have taken longer, but I expect I’d have managed it. I usually manage. That isn’t really the point. The point is that I didn’t have to, and the point is that I can (and do) trust Amy with my life. That isn’t a debt; it is a much more blessed state of mind.

Passwords II

A completely inaccurate merging of several conversations between Ben and me:

“Amy and I had dinner last weekend with Brad and a couple of other guys. One of them was a Buddhist who was also Elvis Costello fan and we spent some time swapping concert stories. He’d been to Madam Wong’s and had seen the Naughty Sweeties during their heyday. On the other hand, he hates Jackson Pollack.”

“It’s always a little surprising when someone who likes the same things doesn’t like all the same things.”

“Yeah, it makes the idea of ‘shared experience’ a little dicey as a way of separating ‘us’ from ‘them.’”

“Then there’s the flip side, when people seem to like the same things, but for such completely different reasons that they might as well be from Mars.”

“Ah, sure. Welcome to my world. Except I’m the Martian.”

“Where’s the Kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth Shattering Kaboom!”

“The Illudium Pu-36 Explosive Space Modulator! That creature has stolen the space modulator!”

“Speaking of Martians, what do you think of Tom Delay’s asking The Colbert Report for the clip of Colbert asking Robert Greenwald, ‘Who hates America more, you or Michael Moore.”

“I think Delay and some of his people may be brain-damaged. There are certain sorts of deficits that make people unable to comprehend irony. It’s like aphasia; they just don’t hear it.”

“Well, that’s charitable.”

“Yeah, I’m a philanthropist. But maybe that’s another way to run the password thing. Remember when we were doing IQ guessing?”

“Yeah, you were pretty good at it.”

“It’s not that hard. Most IQ tests load primarily onto verbal acuity. You can get that by just talking to someone for a few minutes. I do remember that a friend of mine in college asked me what I thought the IQ of his fiancé was. I thought about it a moment and realized that she was smarter than I’d have first thought, IQ around 135, which turned out to be an exact hit. But she’d laughed at the right places in our jokes, not a beat behind, like someone does who is following someone else’s laughter.”

“You think it would work for the sentry?”

“I don’t see why not. Guy comes up to the checkpoint and the guard says, ‘Halt, friend or foe?’ and the other guy says, ‘Friend.’ So the sentry says, 'A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a bar…'”

An Other James

[On the occasion of my 40th year High School Reunion, which I will be attending by phone].

I was at a party once, attended mostly by SF fan types, and the subject of name changes came up. I asked the group how many of us had changed our “go by” names in some significant way since we were young. It turned out that something like ¾ of us had.

My own change was fairly major; I was “Pete” in high school, then “James” or “Jim” in college. The former had made sense to distinguish me from my Dad (I’m actually a “Junior”), but I’d never cared for Pete as a name, and college is all about reinvention. I eventually had to settle for "Jim" because so many people just automatically shorten the name unless you're a bore about it. I did, however, draw the line at "Jimmy." There is one person in the world who is allowed to call me Jimmy, and he goes by Jimmy, and he's older than I am, so I can't/won't object.

So the guy I knew as James in high school, and who still goes by that name, knew me as Pete. He didn’t like me, and vice versa. I was what was known then as a “brain,” while he was a “hood,” short for “hoodlum” back then. (Now it's short for "neighborhood" and comes from African American slang). Truth to tell, in our white bread suburb, before drugs, the counter-culture, and the flood of semi-automatic weapons, “hoods” were usually pretty tame.

Which isn’t to say that they didn’t make trouble, nor that I had no trouble with them. Indeed, three times a week, just as school was letting out, I’d be down on the corner waiting for the bus that took me to the downtown YMCA, where I was a lifeguard and sometimes gym class leader for younger kids. But there on the bus bench, I was a target. Sometimes the rowdies would just yell at me; sometimes they would throw things like wadded up paper, empty cartons, or occasionally, half empty soda cups, or empty soda cans.

One day, after a week where it seemed like the barrage had been escalating, I reached down, grabbed a rock, and threw it back. It was a pretty heavy rock. I still remember the rather sickening thud it made against the car door.

The car pulled over and James got out and began stomping in my direction. He outweighed me by probably 40 or 50 pounds and I’m sure he expected me to run. I did not. Instead, I said something phony tough, like “Come on!”

I’m not sure what I’d have done if he’d followed through. I wrestled at the Y, (but within my weight class!), so I’d have probably gone in low, hoping for a leg grab to upend him. Most probably, he’d have beaten the crap out of me. But it never came to that. I was a brain and he was a hood, and it was a busy street, and plenty of people had seen the first object thrown at me. Even if he won the fight, he would have lost, because hoods get into trouble pounding on guys smaller than they are, especially if the smaller guy actually puts up a fight.

So he turned, said something that I didn’t catch, got back into the car, and he and his buddies drive off.

They left me alone after that.

Several years later, on my last trip back to Donelson before my folks moved away, my Dad bought me a $350 used car as a present to take back to graduate school. As I was leaving town, I stopped off for gas, and there was James, working at the gas station. I was enough of a snobbish snot to take pleasure in the thought of him being stuck in a dead end job for the rest of his life.

My high school class hasn’t had many reunions, partly because what had been our high school is now a middle school, so there’s no administrative push for reunions. But we did have a 20 year reunion, and I won the prizes for “came farthest” (you’d almost need to leave the continental U.S. to beat me), and “most changed,” which was basically my classmates voting on whose appearance had changed the most. The still long hair and beard carried the day. The guy voted “least changed” did indeed still look a lot like he did in high school; I just didn’t remember him as looking as gay as he obviously now is.

At the first party on Friday night, held in the “Don’s Den” building that was the after-the-game party place that I’d actually never been to before, I saw James. He looked very good, with no major weight gains, smile on his face, and a pretty wife nearby. “Hi,” I said (or something equally clever). “What are you doing these days?”

“Actually, Pete,” he said, “I’m a cop.”

Later, I learned that he was not only a cop, but he was a major honcho for the Nashville Police Kids Summer Camp (or something like that) the sort of place where you send kids who are starting to maybe be a problem, in hopes that some summer sunshine, clean air, and good role models will straighten them out. So that’s part of his job now: being a good role model.

Okay, okay, it’s almost as stereotypical as the gas station gig. Wild kid turns his life around and becomes a policeman. But narratives work like that. At some point, James had to decide who he wanted to become, and he chose to be like the authority figures he’d had experience with, the ones who had probably more than once cut him slack when he needed it, the ones who’d been there themselves in a previous turn of the narrative wheel.

James had been a major driving force behind organizing the reunion; he’d wanted to show the rest of us he’d turned out well, good family, good job, pillar of the community. And I liked him, and I liked that he was proud of what he’d become, and I liked that he wanted to show it off,

We get plenty of narratives about the curses that are passed down from the older generations to the younger: poverty, pedophilia, drunkenness, drug addiction, child and spousal abuse. I take from James the counter-narrative, that the right mix of kindness and authority is also contagious, at least if supplied to the right person.

I once took it as a major sign of my own personal evolution when I realized that I really didn’t believe that the world’s problems would disappear if everyone was like me. There are plenty of people in the world who aren’t much like me at all, who add to the world and my appreciation if it. James is one of them, and I hope he prospers.

Wind and Smoke

Well, I'm running down the road
Trying to loosen my load
I've got seven women on my mind,
Four that want to own me,
Two that want to stone me,
One says she's a friend of mine
Take it easy, take it easy
Don't let the sound of your own wheels
Drive you crazy
Lighten up while you still can
Don't even try to understand
Just find a place to make your stand
And take it easy

-"Take It Easy" by Glen Frey and Jackson Browne

Several times in my life I have done things that were courageous to the point of foolhardiness, or possibly desperation. Usually, I realize this only years later, after much reflection.

Attending RPI was one such action, a decision of existential change, necessitated by an abiding need to get far away from the land of my birth and upbringing, which is to say the mid-South of the United States, Nashville, Tennessee in particular. The transition to RPI didn't seem like such a stretch at the time. After all, my father was born in Montana, raised in Illinois, stationed in Utah and Alaska during World War II, and then settled in Nashville to marry and raise a family. But all these things were in the context of major support systems, family, the Army, his job. What I had was RPI, an unknown quantity that wound up treating me pretty well. Besides, I had the confidence of the true knurd.

So, upon graduating with my bright shiny Master's degree in Engineering Science, I decided first, that I would move somewhere that I wanted to live, then look for a job, rather than having the job search make my decisions for me. Then, because I was truly sick of snow and winter, I decided that California was the place I wanna be, to paraphrase the immortal words of the Beverly Hillbillies theme song. That I went to Northern California rather than Southern California was because I knew a guy.

And there we go. Rather than having a major support organization, I knew a guy. One. Guy. Douglas and I had been friends at RPI, and in 1974 he was a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley. He kindly agreed to let me sleep on his floor while I was looking for a job etc. So Berkeley it was. I had no idea how brave I was being.

Soon after I arrived, complications ensued. Specifically, another friend of both of ours, Henry, decided to move back to Berkeley and also look for work. I'd known Henry when he was a 'Tute student, but he'd later transferred to Berkeley and he and Douglas had been roommates for a while. Douglas could hardly turn him down, but it made Douglas' one bedroom apartment pretty small. Then there was the fact that Douglas had decided to leave the UCB Computer Science program, so he was also looking for a job.

Yep, three twenty-something guys living in a one bedroom apartment, all looking for work in the middle of the 1974 recession. What could go wrong?

Anyway, we tried to give each other space, but it was pretty tense. The gloom of looking for a job at that time was pretty thick and the apartment was kinda depressing. So I ate out pretty much every meal. Fortunately, there are a lot of cheap places to eat in Berkeley, it being a student town. Almost every day I'd have at least one meal at Salerno, an Italian restaurant, where I could get a bowl of minestrone soup and fill up on bread. Or sometimes the soup was from the aptly named Soup Kitchen, which was on the corner of Dwight and Telegraph. Henry and I would eat at Kip's pretty frequently. And so forth.

For entertainment, well, again, student town. Concerts in the park, Sproul Plaza and the like. Low cover charge clubs. And so forth. Plus libraries, used book stores, comic book shops, all geared to low disposable incomes.

On some bulletin board or another, I saw a card for a J. P. Sartre discussion group. That's how I met Steve L. (Another Steve, Steve E., was to become my roommate for the year beginning the summer of '75. Steve E. and I met through the California Mythopoeic Society, probably another contact gleaned from a card on a bulletin board). Steve L. organized the group to help him get ideas for his senior thesis in Philosophy. I admired his ingenuity on that matter. Besides, somewhere along the line I took a look around and thought to myself, "Hey, I'm discussing Sartre in a Berkeley coffee house. How cool is that?"

Steve also got me my first job on the west coast, a part-time low paying gig for a company called Contractor's License Information Service, which, as the name implies taught would be Contractors to pass the State exams. CLIS had a "no fail" policy, which meant that, once having paid the fee, the contractor wannabe could attend as long as it took to pass the Licensing exam. CLIS was very much a "teach to the test" operation, to the point of sending its employees to take the tests and having them copy as many of the questions as they could get away with. The CLIS courses then taught the answers by rote. This is, at best, marginally legal, so it was not that much of a surprise the day that the tax guys shut the place down. Cut corners in one area and you're likely to cut a few elsewhere.

In any case, I was hired to gin up a new course, for the 1st Class Radiotelephone License. The fact is that rote learning is not so much a help for the FCC exams, as they routinely change the answers just enough to mean that you need to know what you're answering. But it was fun to write questions about push-pull circuits and the like. The CLIS gig paid enough that I didn't need cash infusions from home very often, and it lasted until I got a job at Mare Island on the nuclear submarine refueling crew, and then, six weeks later and before my security clearance had come through (hence, before I'd done any real work) my air pollution gig at SAI. I'd moved out of Douglas' with my first paycheck from Mare Island, so I was now living alone in my very own one bedroom apartment, two blocks from UCB. It turns out that the dropout factor makes it easy to find such a place in January.

So, living alone, which, as you might guess, can get lonely. But the Special Interest Group is a powerful networking tool, so I began to slowly expand my circle of acquaintances. Later, other friends followed me to California, taking advantage of the beachhead I'd established.

In the summer of '75, as I mentioned earlier, I moved in with Steve E. who had been accepted to a Cornell graduate program, but for the following year, so he had a year to burn. He spent his time working for CALPIRG, one of the Ralph Nader spin-off organizations. In some other essay, I'll describe the weekly Dungeons and Dragons game we were part of (yes, I really am that geeky). But to close out this essay, I'm going to tell the tale of a party.

I'd kept in touch with Steve L. and he had a band. It was something of a pick-up group, with a decidedly fluid personnel roster. Its name was Cargo Cult. That day, they were playing at a barbecue in somebody's back yard, probably an unpaid gig for a friend, just for the practice.

Steve played bass. They also had a drummer and the usual guitarist, but they also had a pedal steel player and for a few songs were joined by a girl who did an absolutely killer cover of Linda Ronstadt's "When Will I Be Loved?" As you can probably tell from the descriptions, there was a decidedly country rock flavor to the band that afternoon, and it took me a while to realize that the country licks were mostly coming from the guitarist, whereas the pedal steel man was playing jazz.

It was not that big an insight actually, because it came in the middle of an extended instrumental break where the jazz took over. A fair amount of the ceremonial herb had been passed around, the smoke joining with the barbecue scents and afternoon haze. Behind the band was the faintest glimmer of blue from SF Bay, with the fog gathering just beyond the Golden Gate, ready to overwhelm the sky as it usually does on summer evenings in the Bay Area. The wind had picked up and the day had turned cool despite the warm sun.

It was one of those Moments. The thought crossed my mind that Cargo Cult was Really Good, and that they knew it, but they probably also knew that they'd never make it as professionals. This was as good as it would get, and they were fine with that.

As for myself, well, you take your mystical insights were and when they happen. On that day, my thoughts were that we were creatures of wind and smoke, as ephemeral as the fog, as diffusely powerful as the sunlight. We coalesce and disperse; we merge with our surroundings. We sometimes accomplish great things. At other times we merely exist, as if there is anything "mere" about it. I was happy with all of it, a happiness that had taken just under a year in California to achieve. Right then, at that that particular point in time, I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

Bo

Bo Diddley (1928-2008)



I had two extremely minor encounters with Bo Diddley. One was when he played at a house party in Marin in the mid-80s, and that was pretty much the extent of it, watching the master work his magic from a balcony on the crowd below, and being a part of that crowd.

The other was a long distance business encounter. I wanted to use lyrics to "Who Do You Love?" in my story "The Ballad of Jake the Snake and the Rock and Roll Kid." But Bo wanted a hundred dollars for the rights to do that, and I was to be paid less than $200 for the story itself, and those weren't the only lyrics I wanted to use. So I fudged the musical quotes and made up my own lyrics to "Who Do You Love?", plus "Oh Well," and "All Along the Watchtower."

But I was tempted to just send Bo the check. I really do think he deserved it.

The Way I Talk

When I first moved to California, I went to a lot of concerts, and one of them was Gil Scott-Heron. That would have been at the Berkeley Greek Theater, an outdoor amphitheater. During one of the breaks I went over to the porta-potties for the usual reason, and there was a line, as is generally the case during the breaks. While waiting in line, I got to talking with a couple of young ladies from Oakland. The young ladies were black.

It was a very pleasant conversation, and afterwards, I tried to analyze why I had felt so comfortable. Their young lady-hood obviously was part of it, but it occurred to me that part of it was their accents and manners.

What has come to be called “Ebonics” is actually a large sub-variant of the southern accent and grammatical quirks. My relationship to the southern way of talking is complicated, of course, given that I grew up in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Kentucky, then left for what still seem to be very good reasons. Nevertheless, I have the same reflexive it’s-okay-for-me-to-criticize-but-not-for-you-to-do-so that everyone has about their family, town, state, and country. Added to that is something that I’ve mentioned previously: speaking with a southern accent means that people automatically make all sorts of assumptions about you, including that you are dumb and ignorant.

The black conservative economist Thomas Sowell has written that Ebonics (as well as a number of other features of “Black Culture”) is actually derived from “Cracker Culture,” which in turn was a English/Scots transplant that was pushed on African slaves by their white overseers. One of the features of my mild prejudice in favor of blacks is that I tend to cut black conservatives a little more slack than I do white conservatives, so I lean toward the belief that Sowell believes that American blacks are held back by their culture and would do better if they got rid of it—akin to my own ditching of my southern accent, for example. Nevertheless, Sowell tells only half the story.

The reason why people in the south, both black and white, talk the way they do is partly informed by slaves learning English from Scots overseers, but once that happened, some of the slaves then became the house servants of the southern plantation owners. In particular, they assisted the plantation owners’ wives in household duties, including child care and child rearing. In many cases, they served as wet nurses.

Guess who the children learned to speak from? There have been cases recently of largely absent parents being shocked when their children began to speak Spanish, or Tagalog, or whatever the native language of the main care-giver. In the case of the old south, they learned to speak from the negro slaves, who spoke a creole compounded from Scots grammar and African intonation. In other words, the slave owners began to speak like African-Americans. And when the wealthiest and socially prominent members of a community talk in a certain way, the rest of the community tends to begin talking that way.

The way you speak marks your social class. Every upwardly mobile young person learns this quickly, and the lucky ones are good at dialect. If you are reading a newspaper story, and the word “articulate” is used, chances are that it is being applied to a black person, even if race is not mentioned in the article. It’s one of the standard code phrases, and it means that—surprisingly—the black person doesn’t sound dumb.

Similarly, I would advise any black high school student to work on their accent. The best thing would be to somehow arrange to live in England for a little while and to develop a trace of a British accent. That adds about the same number of assumed I.Q. points that a southern accent subtracts. But any non-Ebonic, non-southern derived accent will do. It’s just part of the tool kit.

A couple of years ago, I was listening to some NOVA special (some PBS thing, at any rate), and one of the speakers sounded familiar. It took a little while for me to place it; he sounded a lot like me. In reaction to a former southern accent, the speaker slightly overemphasized the trailing consonants of words. So while the southern accent says walkin’, thereby dropping the trailing “g”, the reformed southern accent says walking, slightly overemphasizing the trailing “g.”

There are some other features, no doubt. One place to hear them is on Comedy Central, either Dave Chappelle or Stephen Colbert. Chappelle is black and Colbert is from South Carolina. In some ways, it’s the same thing.

Bad Wisdom

When I was twenty, under somewhat consciousness-altered circumstances, I became aware of what felt like pressure in my back teeth. A trip to the dentist confirmed that the sensation had been either real or a fortunate coincidence; I had impacted wisdom teeth, four of them.

I had them out over a Christmas break, while visiting my parents in Illinois. I think it was done in two operations, right side, then left side; I'm not positive of the memory of the whole thing because the first surgery is what sticks in my mind, for reasons that will soon become apparent.

I've never cared for the idea of general anesthesia, so all the dental work I've ever had has been under, at most, local novocain or nothing at all. This isn't as tough guy as it may sound, since I've been blessed with remarkably sturdy teeth. When I was twenty I had yet to have a single cavity, and the only traumatic dental work I'd ever had was the removal of my two bottom front baby teeth, when my adult ones came in behind them and failed to undercut the roots. Still, I have to admit that having two fully-rooted teeth yanked out when I was six feels a little painful, even at this distance.

As a complete aside from the main story, I'll recount that I also had an odd bit happen with the novocain when they were prepping me for the wisdom teeth extraction; they hit a vein with the needle. Novocain is a trade name for procaine, which is the anesthetic, but it's usually administered with adrenaline, which is the trade name for epinephrine. The epinephrine causes blood vessels to constrict and keeps the procaine in the local area longer, reducing the need for more injections. However, when, as it sometimes happens, the needle hits a vein, the epinephrine goes into the whole body. Epinephrine is the "fight or flight" hormone, and sometimes can cause panic reactions, especially if the patient is already anxious.

However, despite whatever trauma I had as a six-year-old, dentists are not a source of fear for me. Quite the opposite. No cavities. Great teeth. It's an ego thing. So, rather than having a panic reaction from the adrenaline, I had a different, although common reaction, which is a sense of "I feel like I ought to be afraid but I'm not." All the physical symptoms of fear are there, but none of the emotional involvement. It was an odd feeling of disconnect, which, it turns out, was about to get useful.

See, there's a downside to this "Look, Ma! No Cavities!" thing, and that is that it is a product of hard teeth, and hard teeth are brittle. Now let's see what I mean by "brittle."

"Impacted" in a tooth means that it is trying to grow towards another tooth. In my case the angle was fairly extreme; there simply wasn't enough room in my jaw for them to come up naturally. The standard procedure for impacted wisdom tooth extraction, at least when I had it done, was to file a couple of grooves in the teeth and hit the grooves with a hammered chisel, breaking the teeth into two or three easily extractable chunks. I've since been told that this is a pretty primitive procedure, and most such extractions are now done by sawing and such, but, 1970, central Illinois, who knew? I certainly didn't. Nor did anyone know what was about to happen when the hammer came down.

My oral surgeon hit the first blow onto the chisel and nothing happened. Then he hit it again, and said, "Oops."

Yes, dammit, I got my very own Bill Cosby "Oops." From my dentist. What had happened was that the tooth hadn't broken into two or three easily manageable chunks; it had shattered into more than a dozen pieces, shards, splinters.

So, the guy spent the next half hour trying to make small talk as he fished around in my open gums for little shards of tooth. He didn't get them all, either; bits of tooth were coming to the surface for months afterwards.

Then I got to go home and have my first experience with Demerol. Some people like the stuff; it makes me violently ill.

So, gums sewed up, still bleeding a bit (and one of the sutures had been sewn a little tight, so, what with the swelling, it cut into my gum and leaked blood for days), I got to vomit maybe two or three times before I figured out, don't take the Demerol!

And, of course, stomach acid is just the thing to sooth those raw and bleeding gums.

The second round of extraction went much easier, what with the no shattering teeth and no vomiting afterwards. I barely remember it, in fact.

Then, back at school, like I said before, months of having little tooth splinters come to the surface.

Ah, but it doesn't end there. It so happens that tooth extraction leaves a little halo of bone burrs around where the tooth used to be. Usually, these little spikes of bone get reabsorbed by the jawbone. Not mine. No, instead, sharp little bone spikes inside of gum plus chewing, moving the jaw, equals minor, ongoing gum lesions serving as infection sites.

After months of sore throats, persistent colds, coughs, etc., a dentist in Troy figured out the problem and took an X-ray, which confirmed it. The treatment was simple: open up the gum again and file down the spikes with a rasp.

Local anesthetic works well on pain, but it does nothing at all to keep you from hearing the sound of your jaw being filed down with a rasp, incidentally.

Finally, as a lasting little reminder of the whole thing, the months of infections caused a couple of drainage lymph nodes on the right side of my throat to permanently swell. My dentist told me to resist any attempts to biopsy or otherwise mess with them. This is now their "natural" state, and they'll probably be that way for the rest of my life.

Some Other Guy’s Anecdote

My high school friend Mark went off to Oberlin College in Ohio. One day his roommate came in and said, “Hey, want to go to a Simon and Garfunkel concert?”

“Sure,” said Mark.

The concert was in Denver.

So they got into the roommate’s car and drove, non-stop to Denver, saw the concert and headed back. College students do that sort of thing. It’s part of the educational experience.

In Kansas, one of them fell asleep at the wheel.

“So that,” explains Mark, “is how I wound up walking down Main Street in Russell, Kansas carrying a radiator. Did you know that Russell was home of the National Spelling Bee Champion? They had a big sign, just on the edge of town…”

Kid, don’t try this at home. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

Listening to the Radio Late at Night

I’m sure there are people whose memories are better than mine; I just haven’t met many. On the other hand, I’m sure that some of my self-perception of having a good memory is illusory. One does not remember what one forgets, after all. Still, I have many clear and verifiable memories of events, personal encounters, books read, TV shows watched etc. that has impressed enough people for me to grasp that most people don’t have this sort of access to their past.

Most people do remember where they were, what they were doing, etc. at times of great import, like 9/11, the Kennedy Assassination (assuming you were actually alive then), the Fall of Saigon, and so forth. One feature of my own situation may simply be that I have a lot of marker events in my childhood, so my memories got organized at the same time I was acquiring them. Maybe, self-centered dweeb that I am, I consider my own life events to be as important to me as the world shaking events that others remember.

One type of such event is moving, changing houses, which changes the entire “atmosphere” of a memory. That can sometime deceive, as when you go back for a visit to the old place, to see old friends, but usually the surroundings, the frame of the memory is a pretty good test.

In the spring of 1954, my family moved from a house we rented on McRory Creek Road to 2935 Ironwood Drive in Donelson, which was a move of only a few miles, but it felt huge. In at least one way it was huge; McRory Creek Rd. was semi-rural, while Donelson was definitely sub-urban. At least the Post Office thought as much; the McRory Creek residence was a rural route; the Donelson house had an actual address.

Mapquest tells me that McRory Creek Road has been swallowed by Nashville Intl. Airport. At that time it was Berry Field Air Base, where my dad worked as a radio operator. The house in Donelson, on the other hand, was still there the last time I was there only a few years ago.

So I have a set of memories that are bounded in time by the move. Any memory I have of McRory Creek Rd. happened before I turned 4. I remember my 3rd birthday party; that’s probably close to the limit of my memory. I’ve heard people who claim that they have memories from before they were 3, but, according to developmental psychology, such claims are dubious, though I’ll allow that great trauma might linger in memory longer than other forgotten images of childhood.

“I have a friend whose father every week took him to the toolshed to sandpaper his ass. He’s been trying for 30 years to repress those memories, without success.” – Merle Kessler.

On clear memory I have from the McRory Creek house was of our old radio, one of those huge, jukebox looking affairs, late at night bringing forth music. At least the memory feels late at night, dark, no one else around, calm, private. My best guess is that the radio got left on somehow and I got up in the middle of the night. I had an early bedtime when I was a child.

The song I remember is “Your Cheatin’ Heart” by Hank Williams, a song that seems like it should be angry, or scornful, certainly the lyrics have that in them, but the delivery conveys more about the hurt and loneliness that the anger is trying unsuccessfully to mask.

I remember both “Chicken Road” by Tennessee Ernie Ford, and “The Wayward Wind,” by Gogi Grant (and later by Patsy Cline, but the Grant original is the one I remember), from the Donelson House. The "Wayward Wind" is from 1956; I may not have even heard the Ford song on the radio, since my dad had the record. But it felt like a late night song.

So did “Heartbreak Hotel” which made me an instant Elvis fan at the ripe age of 6. That one is tagged as heard first in Illinois, so that would have been from a trip to my grandparents in early summer of 1956, a couple of months after the release of the record. I slept upstairs, where no one could hear the radio if you played it real low, late into the night.

There’s a feel about late night music radio that you don’t get any other place. McLuhan famously divided media into “hot” and “cool,” with “hot” meaning (more or less, and McLuhan was nothing if not slippery and ambiguous) “high definition” and “cool” meaning “low definition,” both indicating how much participation the medium required. He did, however, classify television as “cool” (as compared to movies, perhaps), but maybe that was a mistake.

In any case, radio gives you a sense of “not from around here.” Television puts everything in your living room, radio shifts your sense of presence to the Great Beyond. Late night radio music is as much a signpost to the World Out There as the train whistle or the truck horn as it moves past your small town headed to who-knows-where. Wherever it’s heading, there are adventures to be had, love, fame, success, whatever it is that you want, and you can’t get where you are.

A lot of songs lack that quality of longing, but there are so many that have it. Glen Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” pulled me from sleep one night, as did “For What It’s Worth” by Buffalo Springfield. The Beatles had a slew of them, from “Strawberry Fields” and “I am the Walrus” to “Eleanor Rigby.” The Rolling Stones came through first with “2000 Light Years from Home” and “Paint it Black” then topped themselves with “Gimme Shelter.” I’m not going to try to make a catalog of Motown late night songs, because Ray Charles alone would run to excess. Even uptempo song can be late night radio songs, like “Heat Wave” by Martha and the Vandellas.

The choice spots at WRPI, the ones that had the most prestige were late night, the signoff slots. You didn’t have to follow the format, and the show was open-ended, with a scheduled signoff time that you could go as far past as you liked. Sometimes the DJ would go until 3 or 4 in the morning on weekends, and many is the time I’d listen to radio in bed, thinking I’d turn it off as soon as something came on that I didn’t like, and I’d wind up listening until the signal went dead. Firesign Theater’s “Echo Poem,” “Legend Days are Over,” by Beaver and Krause, “To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb” by Lenny Bruce, you just don’t turn it off when you’re listening to those.

I’ve frequently put The Cowboy Junkies, The Trinity Sessions on the iPod rotation. “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” is another late night Hank Williams song of loss and despair. But there is an affirmation to it, as there is in so many of them, an acknowledgment that there are things worth having and living for. Something worth having is worth grieving over at its loss, late at night in the dark, with the music whispered in your ear by a sweet voice from the Great Beyond.

Phil

Phil worked at Systems Applications Inc. in the late 1970s, as did I, although he worked in the telecommunications policy analysis group, while I was a smog modeler. I'm not sure how long he'd worked there before we got to know each other, but I'm pretty sure that the first thing he said to me was "Were you at Westercon last weekend?"

So Phil was a science fiction fan, among other things, the other things including being an economist and a libertarian, back when there was still some intellectual meat in libertarianism, which is to say before it became a front operation for the Conservative Movement. Phil was a fan of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy, for example, and did a bit of work on "cap and trade" air quality management policy analysis for SAI before he left. In those days, cap and trade was a new idea, and new ideas fascinated Phil.

We were simpatico, he and I. We had one long conversation once on a drive down to Los Angeles, five or six hours of non-stop ideas, back-and-forth on philosophy, economics, space exploration, computers, science fiction and fantasy, all the seriously geeky stuff that we sort know each other by. There were the usual "agree to disagree" areas, and we were also fine with that.

At one SAI party, there was a game of charades where I drew "The Hound of the Baskervilles." Phil was on my team and the clues went, five words, first word short, second word sounds like [make circular movement with hands] round, ground, hound, on the nose, fifth word sounds like [makes dribbling motion] Basketball!—blank Hound blank blank Basketball, The Hound of the Baskervilles! On the nose, and we were done, total elapsed time less than fifteen seconds and the other players were just blinking. What had just happened? Some form of telepathy no doubt.

Phil left SAI to go to work on a "dream project," one of those companies trying to build a private space launch vehicle. He also got involved with Eric Drexler's Foresight Institute, and Drexler stayed with Phil and his wife Gail when he first moved to California. Gail was more serious than Phil; when one of my first stories, "Shaggy Purple" came out, one about the discovery of an astronomical object so implausible (a purple star, inspired by a piece of astronomical art I'd once seen at a convention) that one of the characters decided it must have been artificially constructed. Later in the story, some alien artifacts are discovered orbiting the star, cinching the theory, but the character does not tell anyone except the narrator that he's pretty sure that whoever made the star did so as a joke, to upset alien astronomers perhaps. But with only the star and a few enigmatic artifacts as evidence, the story soon fades from public attention.

Gail was of the opinion that the discovery of the existence of an alien race would have had a bigger impact. Phil understood why the story was named "Shaggy Purple."

I lost track of Phil when I got sick in the mid-80s. In the early 90s, when I was beginning to reconnect with various folks, I checked the phone book, found Phil's name, and called the number. I only got an answering machine the first time, and it was Gail's voice, and the message made no mention of Phil.

I was hoping that they'd gotten divorced. Not because I wanted them to split up, of course.

When I finally got through to Gail, she told me that Phil had died the year before, at 41, of stomach cancer, only a couple of years after his father had died of the same thing. She speculated that whatever had activated the cancer had done so for both of them at some time in the past and the induction time had just been a little different.

That's another one of those examples of intellectualization that I sometimes point out.

We spoke for over an hour, maybe more than two. It turned out that a college buddy of mine had worked for the Foresight Institute for a time, so there was some gossip about that. Periodically we circled around to Phil and his quick and untimely death. He'd only lived a couple of months after the diagnosis. One of his comments at the time was to envy the 18 months to two years that AIDS took to kill its victims. Two years looks awfully good to someone with only a month to live.

I want for Phil to not have died. I want for him to have made a lot of money, one way or another, and to have gotten into space, either in a sub-orbital flight in a craft from a company he was a part of, or as one of those space tourists who get to go to the Space Station by paying the Russians. I want for nanotechnology to have created a cure for Phil's cancer, even though I don't believe that Drexler has a clue and that his view of nanotechnology is snake oil squared. I want a time machine to be able to go back and stop whatever it was that triggered Phil's and his father's cancer so that both of them would still be alive.

I want world peace and I want to dance the Charleston with Louise Brooks. I want to hear a duet between Joni Mitchell and Tim Buckley. I want to teleport to Barsoom. I want all sorts of things that I can't have, that I could never have, even if I were fortune's most favored son.

Small Towns

I grew up in a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee, but I both entered and exited grade school in small towns in North Carolina and Kentucky, respectively.

I began the first grade (“pre-school” not being an operative concept in the 1950s South), in Summerfield, North Carolina. It’s now a bedroom community for Greensboro, and it’s not really that far, only 10-15 miles, but the roads back then weren’t that good, and Summerfield felt very rural. By “rural” I mean that there was a tobacco farm next door, a mule pen maybe 40 yards from our back porch, and the first money I ever actually earned (as opposed to little “tips” for being cute or helpful) was at a “tobacco stringing party” where the whole neighborhood tied harvested tobacco leaves to sticks, to be hung in the curing sheds.

There was also a General Store across the street, and across an open field and parking lot was a drugstore, complete with soda fountain. I must have charmed the manager of the drugstore, because he made me ice cream cones with chocolate syrup and peanuts and charged me far less than usual because I’d been buying Drumsticks at the General Store. Or maybe he was having some weird kind of competition with the General Store. In any case, I spent large amounts of time in the drugstore, reading comic books and magazines, and the sight of a pre-schooler bookworm was probably just cute as all get-out.

When we first moved to the area, we lived in Greensboro for a while. I’m not absolutely sure if Dad worked in Greensboro or Winston-Salem. If it was the latter, then we moved so he’d be closer to work, but I think he worked in Greensboro. I can only remember going back to Greensboro from Summerfield a couple of times, to see our friends the Appels; the son Steve, had been my “best friend” for maybe all of the three months we lived there. Steve’s sister was mentally handicapped, that may have been the euphemism for “retarded” then, although “retarded” may have been the euphemism. All I can remember about her was that she was sweet and shy, saying very little, and she had a lot of health problems. I know now that it’s very rare for health issues to be confined to the “mental;” there are usually profound developmental malfunctions accompanying most mental handicaps.

I don’t remember much about school in Summerfield; we weren’t there very long. There were two “alpha males” in my class, me and a guy named Terry, and we got along. It was actually a trio that included a girl named Carol (these are very treacherous memories, I acknowledge; I’m not positive that was her name). It being the Baby Boom and all, the school got some “Portables,” pre-fab classrooms, installed a month or two after we started school, and there was a split-grade 1st and 2nd grade class formed, with the brightest of the first graders put into it. I would have gone into it, but it was already known that we were about to move back to Nashville, Dad’s transfer not having worked to anyone’s satisfaction, so our trio got broken up and Carol and Terry left. I had only a few weeks to get used to that, then we moved back to Donelson, and I became “the new kid in school” despite having lived in Donelson for years.

As an aside, having reminded myself of Terry and Carol, I don’t ever recall passing through a “girls are icky” stage. I will acknowledge being terribly annoyed at times by my younger sister, but I’ll stipulate that I was probably even more annoying to her. But one of the pains of my adolescence was watching various girls that I’d substantially liked deliberately dumbing themselves down in accordance with “community standards.” At the time I thought it was because I was in the South; now I acknowledge the more general problem. Still, my experience suggests that it’s worst in the South.

Anyway, Donelson Elementary gave way to a new, much closer school, Hickman Elementary, which I left behind about six weeks into my Sixth Grade year. This move was to Russellville, Kentucky, where Dad had found a job managing a bowling alley (that dates me, I think; they call them “lanes” now). This was definitely one of those “small town gentry” places that John Barnes talks about; the business failed after a year basically because the man who’d purchased it hadn’t kissed the proper feet, and the local Men of Influence wouldn’t sponsor leagues, which are the lifeblood of a bowling establishment.

When my sister and I entered school, my folks were told (condescendingly), that the school was organized on a “three track” system, not really separate classes for “A,” “B,” and “C” students, but, well, that was how it actually was; they just didn’t call it that. And they’d found that transfers from Tennessee schools were “usually a bit behind” where the same grade Kentucky students were. So they placed Marilyn and me in the middle (B) group, and said that if we had any trouble keeping up, they’d move us back to the slower (C) group for a while. Then if we caught up, we could move back to the average group.

A week later, both of us were moved to the advanced classes; I spent the entire year more or less sitting in the back row, reading the World Book Encyclopedia and occasionally giving demonstrations to the class about such things as the destructive distillation of wood or writing short stories and little science fiction plays. My sixth grade teacher, very wisely, God bless her, realized quickly that she had a mutant on her hands and didn’t try to get in my way. As long as I turned in the assignments and didn’t disrupt class (well, the wood distillation was a little disruptive, in the sense that it stank up the place), she didn’t try to rein me in.

The school was also very musical, with the music teacher being a real power in the place, and musical numbers being a common entertainment at school assemblies. I had a good voice, but no musical training beyond church choir (no snide remarks, now), so it was one place that I had the unusual comfort of not being a standout (phys ed was another; I was pretty average except in things that they didn't pay attention to, like swimming). On the other hand, I’d have liked to learn to read music, and they didn’t teach that, for some reason.

I’d already turned into a science geek, making some of my first buddies by telling them about the difference between alpha, beta, and gamma radiation while we were discussing some of the first issues of The Hulk. And there was an older student, I think in high school, who was also a chemistry geek—gads, he actually had access to real nitric acid—and I expect we’d have done some interesting, if dangerous, stuff if the family had stayed in town.

After a year, though, it was back to Donelson, for an entire 7-12 sequence at Donelson High School. High school is itself a simulacrum of a small town, and, as many have noted, everything we do later in life reflects the tribal customs that we all learned in High School. But that another essay or twelve, and if I access this particular file structure much longer, I’m going to get maudlin, if I haven’t already.

Binding Energy

The most tightly bound of the nuclei is ⁶²Ni, a case made convincingly by M. P. Fewell in an article in the American Journal of Physics. Though the championship of nuclear binding energy is often attributed to ⁵⁶Fe, it actually comes in a close third…

The high binding energy of the group of elements around A=60, typically called "the iron group" by astrophysicists, is significant in the understanding of the synthesis of heavy elements in the stars. It is curious that the abundance of ⁵⁶Fe is an order of magnitude higher than that of ⁶²Ni. Fewell discusses this point, and indicates that the reason lies with the greater photodisintegration rate for ⁶²Ni in stellar interiors.
--The Most Tightly Bound Nuclei

When I was eight, and cute as a bug, I spent several months selling candy door to door, to finance my way to YMCA summer camp. The camp’s name was Widjiwagan, some sort of Indian name that is at least superior to Sissimanunu (from the Dick Van Dyke Show episode "The Brave and the Backache").

That first year I sold enough mints to pay for the whole thing, something I never did again, I suspect because they kept lowering the price (and quality) of the sweets, first to mint cookies, then to some other kind of cookie (peanut butter?) as I recall. Every year I sold about the same number of units, but the unit price declined, and so did my sales figures.

My camp councilor that first year was James “Cookie” Cook, whose nickname was sometimes pronounced “Kooky” after the TV character on “77 Sunset Strip.” One story that he told was about his appendectomy surgery, which was funny as all get-out to hear him tell it. He did also say that his physicians were surprised at the speed of his recovery, and his surgeon had mentioned something about how many people get all anxious and tense before surgery, and that can be seen in the internal organs themselves, which “try to hide” as it were, under stress. His, Cookie said, were pretty well displayed, so the surgeon said it was an easy surgery.

I have no idea of the veracity of all this, of course. But I like Cookie a lot, which is why I was anything but a happy camper the next year, when I learned that he’d died in a car crash the previous spring.

I read the Norman Cousins book Anatomy of an Illness when it first came out, after seeing Cousins on the Dick Cavett Show. By then I was well along the path to becoming the raging skeptic that stands before you today, but I don’t think I saw much harm in telling sick people to take what enjoyment they could from life; hey, it probably doesn’t hurt and it might do some good. And Cousins book was specifically about laughter, which I do revere. But over time I saw the simple and basic prescription transmogrify into, at least in some cases, yet another way of blaming the victim. You can get well if you just have the right attitude, so your being sick is obviously because you can’t control your attitude. Suck it up.

Anecdotally, well, I’ve known what seems to be more than my share of people who died, enough for the Jim Carroll song to resonate pretty strongly. Some of them had terminal illnesses and plenty of warning. I’ve also known a fair number of people who had what might have been fatal illnesses who nevertheless survived. In one period in the late 70s and early 80s, I specifically remember four people who developed pretty serious cancers. The two who had really positive and optimistic attitudes died; the two gloomy depressives lived.

Sure, sure, anecdotes aren’t statistics, but the statistics are just as suspect. Certainly being ill makes people anxious and depressed, so you start out with the obvious correlation that sick people are inevitably going to be less “positive and optimistic” than people who aren’t sick. The studies that attempt to assess “attitude” attempt to correct for this by objectively assessing people’s prognosis, then seeing if those with a “positive attitude” have better results. The real problem there is that people may subjectively have some information about their own health that doesn’t show up in the objective prognosis. If that is the case, then all the “positive attitude” does is to include that subjective judgment into the mix. In other words, optimism may well be an effect, not a cause.

Still, physicians are human, and nobody really likes dealing with gloomy people all the time. So if the “positive attitude” prescription is more for the benefit of the physician than the patient, it still might make the situation better for the patient if it improves the attitude of the physician. That explanation is less harsh than to say that it’s just more victim blaming, and I’ll take the incremental improvement. Blaming the physician is seldom any more productive than blaming the patient.

In 1989, my Dad was diagnosed with cancer, first liver cancer, then someone else thought it was lung. Both had abysmal prognoses. Some family connections got him into the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, where they re-diagnosed him as having a carcinoid tumor, an intestinal tumor that was producing substantial amounts of serotonin, which accounted for some of his mood swings in the years preceding.

The tumor had metastasized to his liver, and there was the rub. Surgery could remove the colon tumors, but the liver tumors were inoperable, as such. But the Mayo boys had developed a life extending surgery that involved cutting the arterial blood supply to the liver. The liver can still live (albeit, not happily) on venous blood, and removing the arterial blood supply would starve the liver tumors and give an estimated 2-5 years of added life. Not the best result, but a lot of things can happen in 5 years including better treatments.

While we were visiting him prior to surgery, one of his doctors made a visit and made some remark about how important “attitude” was. As I’ve said before, I don’t have much of a poker face, so after he’d left, Dad said, “You looked pretty skeptical there when he said that.”

I said, “I don’t really think that attitude is that important. I think you’ll be okay because you have a healthy heart and good constitution, and I’m fine with that.” Dad nodded. Maybe he was getting tired of acting chipper all the time. Maybe he was relieved that I’d told him that I wasn’t going to blame his attitude if the outcome wasn’t as good as we hoped.

He survived the longer-than-expected four hours of surgery, then died in the recovery room, before he regained consciousness. The subsequent autopsy revealed that he had over 90% blockage in one of his coronary arteries, an absolutely “silent” condition, possibly because the serotonin had masked any chest pains he might have had.

Being right in the abstract and wrong in the particulars is seldom any solace. Things do not always work out for the best, unless your idea of “best” is that everybody dies, but life still goes on. I’m also none too keen on this unintentional irony business, so I try not to think of it too often. Yet there it is, emblazoned above my words, for the world to see.

If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron. – Spider Robinson

Jabber

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

When I was in the seventh and eighth grade, I walked to school each morning with Mick, who was four years older than I. We both shared a love of science fiction and similar stuff, so the age difference was not as much a factor in our friendship as it first might appear, although it was a bit of a downer when he graduated, just as I entered my freshman year.

Donelson High School, where we both attended, was what would now be called a combined middle and high school, I guess, housing grades 7-12. The 7th and 8th graders were primarily situated in what was a newer addition to the school, judging from the construction. The upper grades were in the part of the building that had a pretty old feel too it.

Mick taught me Jabberwocky on the way to school one morning. Maybe it took a couple of mornings, but I doubt it was more than two. My memory was pretty awesome in those days.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

I'd already heard the opening verse of Jabberwocky, of course, because it was sung by the Cheshire Cat in the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland. But the whole poem has more weight to it, and besides, it's cool to recite.

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought

There's a science fiction story entitled, "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" written by "Lewis Padgett, a pseudonym for Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. In it, a scientist from the future sends some toys back in time, one batch landing in the 19th Century and the other in the 20th. The 20th Century children who find them play with them and begin to have their thinking transformed. The transformations frighten their parents, who take away the toys. But this action is too late, as the children find the missing information about how to travel into other dimensions by hearing a poem written by a friend of the girl who found a similar toy in the 19th Century. The friend and the girl were Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

Night of the Jabberwock was a mystery by Fredric Brown, a prolific author of both SF and mysteries. The protagonist is a small town newspaper editor who complains about there not being enough news. He is also a Lewis Carroll fan, and the story combines nearly surreal events (somewhat enhanced by alcohol) and complex plotting. It's a pretty wild ride.

One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

My senior year in college I moved into an apartment that had been previously occupied by a couple of friends of mine. They did not completely clean the place before they left (do any college students ever do that?) and one of the things they left behind was an issue of the Chicago Seed, an "underground newspaper." That particular issue had a double page spread of the Tennille illustration of Jabberwocky.

I knew that the newsprint would fade; in fact it was already yellowing. So I got some tracing paper and traced the entire print, then pinned that on the wall. I must have had some time on my hands.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

I was driving with Ben a couple of days ago, and I forget which one of us began spontaneously to recite Jabberwocky. No matter. Both of us remembered the whole thing.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Day Labor

The summer after my freshman year in college, I could not return to my former job of lifeguard, because those jobs are lined up well in advance of summer and I was a thousand miles away at school, making job hunting in Nashville somewhat impractical. When I got back to Nashville, I began a job search, and good luck at finding a good summer job when you begin the second week in June.

I first had a brief, abortive attempt at working the graveyard shift in a supermarket, restocking shelves, during which time I learned something about the music of Jimmy Rogers, because that was what was on the station the store PA system radio was tuned to. I also learned to not use the box cutter on the sugar bags. Then I was laid off to make room for some friend of the family of the night manager.

After that, I tried earning some money via day labor, through Manpower Incorporated one of the first temp job agencies. Again, minimum wage, and sometimes the jobs lasted no more than a single day.

The best job I had during that time was driving the office mail run for Genesco. In the days before email and such, all interoffice communication was through those weird little brown envelopes with the holes in them that were closed by the red strings wrapped around the other red thing that I've never learned the name of. Genesco had a downtown office and one out on Murfreesboro Road, and maybe another drop spot, my memory fails a bit here. The job consisted of driving around one big circuit, dropping off a packet of interoffice mail and picking one up, no interaction with other people, except the occasional smiling receptionist, and listening to the radio as I threaded through the traffic.

I'd have loved to have had that job for the whole summer, but I expect I was just a vacation fill-in for the regular guy, whose family knew the manager or something. Not that I'm still bitter about Tennessee hiring practices from 40 years ago or anything.

Far and away the worst job I had during the Manpower summer was the one that involved unloading the logs from the box car. That was a one-day special, thank god. The logs were destined to become railway ties, if memory serves, and they were cedar, or so I think we were told. You couldn't have proved it by me, since wherever they'd been harvested had been wet, muddy, and now the dirt was caked on them to considerable depth, black and powdery, perfect for rubbing into the skin, hair, or dispersing into the air inside the boxcars, like black smoke.

Outside it was a typical Tennessee summer day, maybe in the mid-80s. Inside the box car it was considerably hotter, approaching sauna temperature. Our sweat mixed with the black powder dirt and covered us with salty mud in the first few minutes of the job. There was water to be had, and we used it liberally, both to drink and then to just pour over ourselves, washing some of the mud off, to be replaced almost immediately, by more mud. Not to get too gross, but we were spitting mud by midmorning, and blowing your nose produced black discharge.

But what the hell, it was only one day.

The day had begun with a ride out to the site with three other guys, all older than me by a fair bit. The driver was maybe in his mid-thirties with a sort of "all over beer belly" if that makes sense. He talked about his band, a bar band from the sounds of it. They did a lot of Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry songs, with an occasional Elvis cover tossed in. It sounded like fun.

The next guy was a little older and scrawny. He told us that he preferred to work "janitorial," which I understood a lot better by the end of the day.

Rounding out our quartet was a middle aged black man who slept most of the way out, obviously a bit hung over. I think he was older than the other two; he certainly seemed older, and more worn out, or maybe worn down. I do not recall my other companions treating him with any disrespect, nor, to the best of my recollection, did I. We were, after all, in the same boat, or at least the same beat up old car.

We arrived at the work site at about the same time as another car from Manpower, and that one included the manager, whose job it was to synch up with the work site boss and get us all started. However, the work site manager, the guy representing the guys who were paying the bills, wasn't there, so the Manpower guy went off in search of him. It was still morning cool, though the sun was beginning to make its presence felt, and we looked around at the boxcars and the flatbed trucks that the logs were to be loaded onto, and, well, then we looked around some more.

At one point the black man, who'd wakened by now, but was still bleary eyed, came over to me and asked, "If the man don't show up, will you make sure we all get paid?"

I think I stammered something about how I'd do my best, or whatever, but the seeming weirdness of the request roiled my brain a bit. Me? What kind of grease did I have with the system? I was as clueless as I could be, and just passing through, so to speak. Fortunately, I didn't have much time to think about it, as our boss and their boss showed up pretty soon thereafter, and set out the work orders. I think they decided that the black guy was maybe too fragile to stand the hot work, so they took him elsewhere, I hope to do something to earn his pay for the day, but I never saw him again so I cannot report.

I've met broken creatures in my life. I once saw an institutionalized woman who talked of nothing but the wires that had been installed inside of her. There was a guy in Berkeley in the 1970s, known as "Serge, the Microbe Man," who would stand on a street corner and babble strange theories about organized crime bosses and "direct light encounters." Too much acid was the story told about Serge, who'd once been a promising student in physics. I've met meth addicts so far gone that they seemed like meat ghosts, no souls left, just reflexive need and motion. I've known people so depressed that they could barely find the effort to breathe.

The man who asked my for my help, help I really could not even think of how to deliver, he was not as broken as any of these other folks. He seemed more defeated than broken. Yes, I'm sure he was probably alcoholic, and maybe he'd have been better off if he quit the drinking. Or maybe he was just circling the drain, and trying to make the pain less intense.

But why me? I've thought about it over the years, and the best I can come up with is that I was still rising, still someone upon whom fortune was smiling. Sure, at the end of the day, I was as hot, dirty, and tired as anyone else on the crew, but I'd go home to a nice suburban home, shower, and get a good night's sleep, with the expectation that things would get better, if not tomorrow, then certainly in the weeks or months after that. I was the college boy. I was on the track to eventually, maybe, even be The Man.

And sure, matters of race and class loom very large in this sort of exchange. The fellow I spoke to was old enough to remember when lynching was a common thing in the South. Whatever schooling he'd had had been in a segregated school. Hell, it was only a few years earlier when he wasn't allowed to eat a most lunch counters in Nashville, and I imagine that he still didn't break out of the old channels very often.

In the years since, I've sometimes consulted for, and advised The Man, sometimes opposed The Man, and on occasion, I've even flirted with being The Man. I'm especially not good at that last one. Truth to tell, most of my dealings with The Man have been fairly problematic, so there we are. And I'm bound to wonder, how much of my failure at that particular aspect of human existence comes from the fact that I never, ever want anyone to look at me again like that old black man looked at me that day?

Habitats

I was recognized as quite the knurd when I was still quite young, though no one used that word where I grew up. The word for us back then was “brain” or “smart aleck” (later “smart ass”). It was generally assumed that I was interested in space, the space program, and rockets.

As nearly as I can tell, I may be the only person in my cohort who was never interested in blowing things up, and that included rocketry in general. Even in my interest in nuclear physics (which I later learned was actually nuclear chemistry and nuclear engineering), I was more interested in reactors than bombs. As for rocketry, I picked it up the way I learned country music. When it’s what everyone around you talks about, you learn some of it.

I was interested in astronomy, however, and I have always liked the deep space probe findings. I just was not that interested in how to get the probes to where they were going. Similarly, I did have an interest in some of the things that would go along with space colonization. To that end, one of the earliest things I ever tried to do with my trusty chemistry set was to grow some plants hydroponically. My effort met with dismal failure; I found out very quickly about root rot and the perils of constant immersion on several kinds of plants, including potatoes. To this day, the only plants I’ve ever grown have been in soil.

Nevertheless, I persisted in my interests; one of the attractions of the field of environmental modeling, in fact, was the notion that it would be possible to use such engineering tools to analyze and perhaps design, self-contained ecologies. It was in all the space novels, right?

But the whole thing seemed to be moving so slowly. A guy I lived with for a year after I first moved to Berkeley, Steve Ellner, is now a professor of biomathematics at Cornell, and one of his ongoing projects is a system of connected pools with water flowing through the system. His research team uses the setup to examine some basic ideas about ecosystem stability. And I mean really basic things like the onset of chaotic behavior and limit cycles, things that should have been studied thirty years ago.

There was a NASA program called CELSS, Contained Environment Life Support Systems. It was supposed to address the question of long term life support environments for manned deep space missions, like a Mars mission, or a Moon base. They gave up on doing something like it for the Space Station, because it turns out to be a lot easier and cheaper just to supply things from Earth, but the farther out you get, the more the economics change. But, as nearly as I can tell, the CELSS program was cancelled a few years ago. I say “as nearly as I can tell” because there doesn’t seem to be a lot of information about the program cancellation, just a cessation of work. It’s as if it just died a lingering death through disinterest.

Then there is the case of Biosphere II. On the inevitable convention panel, I once heard a supposedly knowledgeable person explain that it failed because “as any engineer can tell you” concrete oxidizes as it hardens, and that sucked oxygen out of the air. So the Biosphere II designers were just stupid, you see. Anyone with any sense (like the speaker, I daresay) could have gotten it to work.

In fact, concrete does not “oxidize.” It does absorb carbon dioxide, however, and that was actually beneficial to the folks in Biosphere II. Because they’d put in a lot of soils that were high in organic matter, and the soil bacteria oxidized the organic matter to CO2. If there had been no concrete, they’d have had to put in CO2 scrubbers, because there was no way the plants in BII could have absorbed all the CO2, and CO2 is a toxic gas, lethal at above 5% concentration.

The real problem with Biosphere II is that it had never been done before. Things that have never been done before don’t always turn out to be easy; sometimes they’re downright difficult, and occasionally they are outright impossible.

I don’t think that self-contained habitats are impossible. After all, we live in one such habitat; it just happens to be really, really big. What we don’t know is how small one can make a habitat, and how much control you have to put on it to make it small. And when I say we don’t know, I mean that no one has any idea. None. Because, as I just said, no one has ever done it.

In my experience, people who want to colonize space are of the belief that habitats are the easy part; they spend all their imagination on new and spiffy ways to get into space and none on how anyone is going to live there. But if we could make self-contained habitats, they would have enormous benefits for living here on Earth. We could put people into deserts, rain forests, glaciers, swamps, under the ocean, anywhere, without running the risk of destroying the local ecology. Such a technology could be of enormous benefit. And once we have it perfected, then moving people into space becomes a much easier task, if they really want to move into space, as opposed to just leaving the Earth because we’ve made such a mess of it.

Sensei

To the memory of Steve Sasaki, who taught many things that I needed to know. –Dedication of SunSmoke

Steve Sasaki Sensei was my first Aikido teacher. He founded a dojo in Berkeley, CA which was then named Aikido of Berkeley. It was first in a small cinderblock building on San Pablo Avenue and the corner of, I think, Delaware. A bit later, we moved closer to University Avenue, at 1812 San Pablo, to a site that is now the home of Berkeley Aikikai, under the direction of Ichiro Shibata, Shihan (Master Teacher). Berkeley Aikikai and my own current home dojo, Eastshore Aikikai, are affiliated with different sub-organizations of International Aikido, but both ultimately defer to Hombu Dojo, the original dojo of Morihei Ueshiba, O'Sensei, the Founder of Aikido. Such is the nature of martial arts politics.

Sasaki Sensei was a Japanese-American who came to Aikido late in life. He credited it with saving his life, and giving it a purpose. "I used to live upstairs from a bar," he once said, with the clear implication that he spent most of his time downstairs. He was introduced to Aikido by the legendary Koichi Tohei, the Chief Instructor at Hombu Dojo, who had been sent to the United States to create an Aikido organization. He did that task superbly, then broke with Hombu Dojo and created the International Ki Society as his own fief, creating great political rifts, some of which linger to this day.

Sasaki Sensei did not follow Koichi Tohei to the Ki Society. Instead, he remained a student of another teacher, Akira Tohei, Shihan, of Chicago. Then, in the early 1980s, while we were still at the older Delaware Avenue dojo, Kazuo Chiba Shihan came to America and settled in San Diego. Chiba Sensei's arrival had a galvanizing impact on the U.S. Aikido Federation Western Region, as he was both charismatic and practiced a style of Aikido what was notably more "martial" than anything most of us had encountered. I remember being entirely flabbergasted in the first seminar that I attended, amazed that Chiba Sensei's ukes could actually survive what he put them through.

There were, at that time, four USAF Shihan in the United States, Tohei Sensei (Chicago), Chiba Sensei (San Diego), Yamada Sensei (New York City), and Kanai Sensei (Boston). In late 1983, Aikido of Berkeley hosted a seminar at which all four of these notables were in attendance. It is my understanding that it was the first time that all four had been together to teach at a single event in the United States. The attendance was too large to fit into even the new, larger space at 1812 San Pablo, so we rented an auditorium on University Avenue. There was a severe storm that hit during the event, and for a time we trained in near darkness. Soon, however, some of the hypercompetent fellows that formed Aikido of Berkeley in those days, had a portable generator up and running and the lights came back on.

The seminar was a personal triumph for Steve. He'd created a local organization of national stature. The previous year he'd also fulfilled a lifetime dream of visiting Japan; he'd never even learned Japanese as a child.

A few months after the seminar, he died peacefully in his sleep.

He'd had a rough life, no doubt, and he'd already had one heart attack, on the mat, in fact, so it was not surprising, except that it was a complete shock. So it was an unsurprising shock, as it were, one of fate's little oxymoron's. One evening he didn't show up at the dojo for class, so the class was taught by a senior student. The next day I got a phone call telling me that Steve was dead. He was not yet 60, I believe.

There was a memorial service at the dojo, based on something that I later stole for Emperor of Dreams: "It is said in zen tradition that the soul is a candle flame; it does not go anywhere when it goes out. But while it burns it can light many other candles."

The dojo service was one of candles. Everyone who attended, many in full gi, one by one took unlit candles and lit them from a single candle that was burning at the shomen, the shrine in front of the practice mat, where the picture of O'Sensei traditionally resides.

I don't really recall how many people there were at the memorial. Dozens, scores, well over a hundred, I believe. At the end the entire space was ablaze with light. Shadows were abolished, and darkness fled the light.

Just offhand, I can think of six dojos that have been founded by those who were Sasaki Sensei in the early 80s, and I'm sure that there are others that I do not know about. The impact of his organization and teaching persists, and will persist even after all of his students are gone.

In a proper eulogy, I would recount some of my personal memories of Steve. I would mention the time at a party when he looked at my then painfully thin figure and say, "You need more hara" (center), and touched my belly, producing a bit of laughter from everyone, including me (I have more middle-aged hara now). I would tell the story of his saying that I needed to show more "gumption" in dealing with higher ranked students in my discharge of a particular dojo duty, and how that led to me being threatened with bodily harm from a fellow I knew to be bluffing. I would try to reproduce some of his speech cadences, or how good it felt to get a smile out of him on the mat. I might describe his girlfriend, a tall, strawberry blonde who went with him to Japan and stayed there. I might simply describe some of the many differences between training then and training now.

But I cannot recover enough memory to do him justice, and my abilities are limited. I will say that he taught me a great deal about how to have a good life, and that it is possible to have a death that is not tragic, even one that comes much too early for those around you.

Several days after the dojo memorial service, Steve was buried in a cemetery plot near where I lived in North Berkeley. I hiked down the hill to attend the memorial service there, a traditional open-casket viewing in the small chapel associated with the cemetery. I sat for a while in the little chapel, Steve's body in the front, and I felt what I always feel at such things, a sense of emptiness. Nietzsche had it almost entirely wrong, I think. When you stare into the abyss, nothing stares back at you at all.

Then I heard some whispered conversation from out in the hall, then laughter from some of my fellow dojo members. So I got up and went out into the hall. Because that was where Steve was, you see.

Sweet Melissa

Freight train, each car looks the same, all the same.
And no one knows the gypsy's name

No one hears his lonely sigh,
There are no blankets where he lies.
In all his deepest dreams the gypsy flies
With sweet melissa...

-- Allman Brothers Band

In the first semester of my sophomore year at RPI, my living arrangements broke down completely and I moved into a big house with a lot of other guys on Hoosick St., where I passed the second semester in the bright haze of the Student Revolt that thrashed the U.S. college scene in the spring of 1970, after it became clear that Nixon's secret plan to end the war in Vietnam included a lot of war in Laos and Cambodia. There was also the Kent State thing and everything everywhere went kerflewy for a while, even in so conservative a place as RPI.

By the end of my sophomore year, I decided that living off-campus wasn't really that grand, and besides, I had a lot of on-campus responsibilities, plus, no automobile. So I went to the campus housing office and put my name in. The mad rush for the best housing had already subsided and all the better quarters were supposedly gone. But RPI had a policy of housing any student who asked, so I was sure to have a place to live. It was just a crapshoot as to how bad it would be.

That summer, my folks moved to Illinois from Nashville, and I helped them move. I made some halfhearted attempts to get a summer job, but non-farm jobs in southern Illinois are not thick on the ground, and I had no farming experience to speak of. So that was the one summer in my high school and college years when I just basically loafed.

I returned to RPI to discover the damnedest thing: for years, all RPI co-eds were housed at Burdett Avenue Residence Hall. BARH also held a fair number of male students, the fraction of RPI students who were female being that small. Also, for years, the freshmen co-eds complained of the arrangement. All other RPI freshmen were down in the Freshman Dorms, strange brick-and-cinderblock buildings with names like Nason Hall, Crockett Hall, and (the one I'd been in) Hall Hall. The freshmen women felt left out of ordinary freshmen living, disconnected from their incoming class, as it were.

So in 1970, the powers-that-were decided to do something about it, and that "something" was to make some additional renovations to one of the freshmen dorms, Warren Hall, to be specific, and use it to house the freshmen co-eds. Actually, again owing to the small number of freshmen women (I believe there were about 80), it was only the top two floors of Warren that housed the freshmen co-eds. The bottom floor held the lounge and about 60 upper class men and women.

One of those 60 was me. Go figure. I'd won some sort of strange lottery. The rooms were doubles, and each had its own bathroom, which put it way ahead of the rest of the freshmen dorms, which had communal bathrooms at the end of the halls. There's nothing like waiting for a shower on a cold morning, or finding all the toilet stalls occupied.

Warren Hall was also about 200 yards away from the Student Union, where I was to spend most of my time that year. Going into my junior year, I was still nominally the editor of Perspective, ostensibly a magazine of politics and philosophy. But I'd managed to put out two issues, not quite single-handedly, and there was never to be another. I might have turned it over to some of the New Left type guys who were kicking around, but I didn't get along with them in those days. (We're happy to spend time together at reunions, nowadays, but I can't say who has changed more, me or them. It's probably irrelevant at this distance).

In any case, I was also managing editor of the Rensselaer Engineer, which had a better budget, an actual staff, and better cachet with the professors and such. I wound up spending a lot of time that year on Engineer activities.

Early in the semester was "Activity Day," or some such, where all the student activities that had any connection to the Student Union (i.e. practically all of them, since the SU doled out money) set up a table in the Union and begged, er, asked the new freshmen to join up. I was working a small table for Perspective, but also lending John Benson, the Engineer's editor a hand, since there was (let's face it) more interest there.

I remember practically nothing of the entire afternoon except the moment when Melissa walked in.

She had, I learned later, recently given up on trying to straighten her hair, straight hair being the fashion at that time. I think the idea was to look like Joni Mitchell, which is a really great idea for Joni Mitchell, but not so good an idea if your hair is naturally curly. Melissa's was not quite Afro curly, but it did not take to the idea of straightening, and on that day, it was a halo around her head.

Also, the day was one of those bright, overcast days, where there are no shadows, but the light can nevertheless be enough to make you squint. But Melissa did not squint as she came into the room; her eyes did go a little wider, however, and the light from behind us caught them and the blue of them gave me that pressure in the forehead that says, "Okay, you got me. I'm hooked. Just reel me in and fry me up."

There were only maybe two or three other women in the freshman class who were in the running for "best babe," or whatever phrase one uses to try to cover the aching need that wells up within us when confronted by that which we desire. Melissa was the most striking of the lot. And, as you may have already noticed, she lived in my dorm.

One night, I visited her in her room and. we violated the dorm rules by my staying past the time when visitors were supposed to leave. By several hours. We left the lights off, and eventually we had to put a towel to block the light that seeped in under the door, because our eyes had become so dark-adjusted that the slit of light hurt our eyes. We mostly talked, in that time-honored tradition of young about-to-be-lovers, and even at this distance I am reluctant to reveal any of the things she told me. I have no idea what I told her, other than that I'm sure it was equally personal, equally precious, and equally unimportant to anyone other than ourselves.

Likewise, the other details of the "us" that existed for a while are not that interesting to outsiders, at least that would be my guess. But there are some lessons to be learned from the ending of it.

I don't think that much of it was my fault, though I am predisposed to grab all the blame I can manage. Essentially, Melissa could not take being at RPI. The workload was a factor, I would imagine, but not that great of a factor. No, the real problem was that Melissa was simply not able to handle being the object of everyone's desire.

Consider. If a girl is somewhat pretty, or even beautiful, in ordinary circumstances, well, there are still others who occupy that ground. In a high school of, say, 3000 students, the top 2% of the girls, (by whatever measure of attractiveness you care to use), still number around 30. Moreover, there are still plenty of other girls around, so the boys aren't all vying for the affections of just those 30.

But at RPI, the top 2% of freshmen coeds in 1970 calculates to 1.6. And there were 1000 male freshmen, and four times that number of other male students. In a random lottery, the odds that Melissa would fall for me would have made drawing to an inside straight look like a sure thing. So I was exceptional. Okay, fine. But she was even more so.

Simply having "a guy" was not nearly enough. Of the thousands of other students at RPI at that time, how many were so socially dysfunctional that they would pester the most attractive woman around, despite who else she might be seeing? Maybe if I'd been the jealous sort, always around, always snarling at any other male who looked at her, then maybe Melissa's phone would not have rung two or three times an hour with some guy at the other end asking her out. Some guy she'd never met or barely remembered. Maybe. But I was not that sort of boyfriend, and, frankly, if I had been, I don't think we'd have lasted as long as we did.

Eventually she could not take it any more. She saw the worst of male behavior on a regular basis. Regular? More like continuous. And she got so tired of it that she had to leave.

So she did. She left RPI, and she left me. She broke up with me first, explaining that she had to leave and that I was a major reason for staying, and, well, it's both flattering and distressing to be given that as a reason for a breakup. There were a few scenes between us before she left, and I accept full blame for those.

Then she was gone. I tried maintaining a correspondence, and that worked for a little while, and then it didn't. One thing about this writing thing is that it takes a while to get it under control. I suspect that had something to do with it. But, ultimately, who knows?

I think of her occasionally, and I have the heartfelt hope that she had a good life after she left RPI. She deserved the best. She deserved better than I was at the time, even, and you know how full of myself I can be.

I didn't have much of a social life for a while after Melissa left. That's the way it is with romantics. My next lover was the wife of a pretty good friend. That's the other way it is with romantics. We do so like to play it safe.