My Bicentennial Summer

Ann Arbor, 1976.  I had friends then, and family members who loved me, but they were scattered to the winds.  I was doing legal piecework, for a pittance, in the Great Hall of the University of Michigan Law School.  I had found a small and spartan room, also for a pittance, in a fraternity that was all but otherwise empty that summer.  While I must have, I can't recall exchanging a single word with another person in that house while I lived there.  I was broke, lost, lonely, a loser.

I did not know it at the time, but back home my mother only had months to live.  Perhaps her suffering, and the gloom that pervaded the little household that she shared with my father and my sister, made their way subliminally to me, collecting red rust and hopelessness as they traveled through and around Albany, Schenectady, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Erie, Youngstown, Cleveland and Detroit, all of them emblems of decline, decay.

The thing about that summer: even if an angel or a psychic healer had descended to show me then the life trajectory that was to follow -- many more friends, a wife and two kids, a complex and successful career, material rewards that were beyond my childhood imagination -- I don't think it would have made much difference.  I was locked in a near suicidal space like a bug in primordial amber.

What would have made a difference?  A girl of a certain sort, I think, of which there were many still in those late hippie days.  She might have dropped me a friendly smile across the bar at the old Blind Pig, a locally famous blues joint that I did not exactly frequent, but dropped into from time to time, always alone, to nurse a beer.  Her gesture would have had to be direct and unambiguous, because I always assumed that if the girl was sending signs of availability, it was not availability to me, and even then I would have been awkward on the uptake.

If anything had happened at all, it would have accelerated very quickly.  It was as if I had two, discrete pressure vessels within me, both about to burst.  One was called "Accumulated Grief" and the other "An Aching for Love."  I could have turned the spigot on the first in the privacy of my chamber at the fraternity, and the second in a spontaneous embrace under a streetlamp, at the tail end of one of those strong Midwestern thunderstorms, just down the block from the Blind Pig.  From such beginnings often spring heartbreak sooner or later, but the ride would have been worth it.

 

Sound Adjacency

Lying in bed with eyes wide shut precisely at dawn, a sound intrudes that could be one of two things, equally: (1) a woodpecker working the very resonant trunk of a newly-dead tree; or (2) a cellphone ringtone, one of the simple ones that tries to mimic the ringtone of an actual telephone.  

Blind people must have to navigate such sound adjacency often.  With practice and a heightened focus, they get very good at it.  They seldom mistake the sound of a gentle summer rain for sustained applause, for example.

 

From My Back Porch

The back porch of the boat that is, on its mooring in the Parker River, Plum Island Sound.

It's a scorcher.  The thermometer in my car on the way home reads 99 degrees.  But it's pretty comfortable.  The canvas over my head shields me from the sun, and there is a strong breeze out of the northwest.  Late July in these parts is peak time for "greenheads" -- vicious little horseflies -- but this summer they seem to be sparse and, yes, listless!

Two heart-warming vignettes that make me glad I came to do nothing in particular, both throwbacks to a time and place not tainted by our incessant technology.

First, I spy a classic wooden catboat charging in my direction across the Sound.  The vessel is well known here, sporting as it does a big white mainsail, but with a large blue stripe making a diagonal, and within a stylized American flag.  I don't know the captain/owner at all, but I can say with some confidence, based only on the local culture, that this patriotic display is not of the aggressive, "in your face" kind; it is softer and more traditional than that.

I can tell that our captain intends to split the difference between my boat and the little sloop moored behind me, and then to tack over smartly towards the northeast, making his way up the Sound.  In the event, he can't quite accomplish it; the boat luffs up and loses most of its momentum.  But I can see that the captain is in control.  The boat retains enough momentum to slough off to the northwest, avoiding collision.  Only after 20 or 30 yards of separation thus achieved does the captain let her fall off again to a close reach, fill her sails and indeed tack over smartly.  Twenty minutes later, the big sail is just a dot on the northern horizon.

Second.  There is another such catboat moored to my right, with a light tan sail cover wrapping its boom and lowered gaff.  I know it as a near neighbor, but I have never seen anyone on it.  Abruptly, three young girls in bathing suits, fifteen, sixteen? (I could get a better idea with my binocs but that would invite allegations of creepiness), pop out of the cabin and blow up a very big, pink swan.  Think a poolside Rubber Ducky raft.  They tether it to the stern of the catboat, throw it overboard and jump in for a long frolic.

The Sound is notorious for two things not conducive to swimming -- cold and strong currents.  (I know two grown men who have died in this very anchorage.)  But the tide is now completely slack at its ebb, and one of the girls, her voice carrying with the legendary clarity over the water, declares the sea's temperature "a lot better than it was!"

There is a feature of the lower Sound, roughly 100 yards from my boat, maybe 75 yards from theirs, called Middle Ground.  It is an area of shallows about the size of a football field.  It becomes a little island, "uncovers" that is, but only about an hour each side of low tide.  Right now there are a couple of small boats beached there, and a man walks his dog in water that is maybe three inches deep.

The three girls make the swim to those same shallows, tugging their raft along with them.  There they soak the sun; I notice with admiration that their banter with one another is totally without teasing or malice.

But then another hour has passed.  They have to make it back to the catboat, and an incoming tide has set in.  I worry for them.  What if they have misjudged, and it becomes too strong for them to make headway against it?  And where, by the way, is there any kind of adult supervision to ensure their safety (and, it's true, take much of the joy out of their frolic)?

They have not misjudged anything.  To the contrary, the tether between their raft and the mother ship is slender but very long, and it's still attached.  When they make their way against the tide (which is, in fact, pretty gentle on this day and at this time), if they tire they can jump onto the raft and simply pull themselves back to safety.

I have two thoughts.  One is about how much I wish that my own mother's fear of the water had not prevented me and my siblings from becoming such little fish when we were young.  The other carries the clock forward about ten years from now when, statistically speaking, there is a pretty good chance that I will be gone.  The girls, though, will be in fine form and in fancy dress, together, as each in turn takes a husband.  And a few years after that, the cares of adulthood will have made themselves felt; in Philip Larkin's words, those cares will "gather like a coastal shelf."  But the three, lifelong friends, will still have memories of lazy summer days like this one.

 

Once Again, for Emphasis

And let's remember, in this game only, the correct QUESTION is the correct ANSWER!

Alex Trebek -- "What is the specific heat capacity of a potato?  What is the specific heat capacity of a potato?"

 

Visitors From Our Future?

Over the last ten years or so, I have placed myself under such an avalanche of information of a roughly paranormal nature, some of it compelling and some of it clear nonsense, that I feel it as a permanent burden on my back.  And yet, curiosity nudges me forward.

At the fringes of the fringe is the phenomenon called "remote viewing" or RV -- the supposed ability to see things that are far away geographically, or even in time, when asked to focus in a particular way.  It is said that everyone has this ability to one degree or another, and that it can be honed with practice.  It is also said that during the Cold War, the US and the Soviets each had secret programs to use RV for purposes of spying on the other; for example, an American psychic was able to pinpoint the precise location of an underground facility in which the Russians were building the largest submarine that the world has ever seen.

The phenomenon right now bumps up against our latest mad world-historical event.  Primitively-drawn pictures are circulating on social media.  They are said to have been sketched a few months ago by RV practitioners.  One quite clearly shows a crowd of people, a figure at a podium, the cross-hairs of a gun, and stray verbal cues, among them "assassination" and "failed?".

It will be easy enough to verify, or to debunk, the validity of these pictures in this our world of social-media foreverness.  And if they are real, what do they mean?

One theory purports to tie them to the notion that time is navigable, as in an H.G. Wells novel.  This notion is advanced now as well in an entirely different context -- the examination of the so-called "Nazca Mummies" found in the coastal deserts of Peru.  These desiccated creatures, which share features of homo sapiens but also of reptiles, are said not to be extraterrestrial, but to be our own descendants, returned in 800 A.D. or thereabouts, perhaps to steer our development away from some catastrophe.

But many scientists and philosophers long have educated us about a paradox that would seem to make time travel impossible, a self-cancelling circularity of causation if you will.  If I were to go back to Westport, County Mayo, in 1900, and to convince my maternal grandmother, Mary McGreal, not to board the boat for Boston, then I, of course, would never be.  I would disappear, in which case I couldn't very well go back to Eire.

The larger picture, though, is that things indeed and not just in my understanding of them, grow curiouser and curiouser, as if the world is facing right now a foundational shift, "slouching towards Bethlehem to be born."

 

In the Lowest Times of My Life

Which times came early on, in my adolescence and then sporadically into my twenties, I felt an isolation from other people so deep that it skirted the edge of madness.

I did not hear voices that were not there, but the actual heard voices, even of loved ones, passed through a filter that made them sinister, malevolent, without regard to what was actually said.  It was a phenomenon that you couldn't walk or run away from; after all, you take your broken mind with you wherever you may go.

Happily, these incidents were rare and short lived.  When they subsided, I felt as if I had been welcomed back into a zone of comfort, but I told no one about it.  To be permanently in such a place, in those days when treatment might consist of blunt-force drugs and physical constraints, would have been a horrible fate indeed.