“Well two people are working on this flight,” he says. (He is in 22-B)
“Yeah,” she says. “Always.” She is in 22-C, grouchy because she really likes the window and after 10 years as a loyal customer could the travel agent not remember it’s window,not aisle?
As everyone else starts scrolling through movies or settling back with eye-shades on, 22-B and 22-C lower their tray tables and open their laptops.
“David,” he says, offering a hand. “Fran,” she says. “You’re editing something? Everybody needs a good editor. What’s it about?”
“Well . . . you see. . . I’m a physicist.” Much later in the flight he will explain: Ask a physicist a question, you’re going to get a very long answer. Even if the question is posed by a writer with an Art degree who is congenitally lacking in left-brain material.
Pretty soon they are joined by 22-A (the coveted window) who had started out behind the eyeshades. It turns out 22-A (I didn’t get his name over the engine noise) is a computer science student and recognizes a good thing when he finds himself seated next to it.
David is on the first leg of a trip from one top U.S. nuclear physics research and development lab to another. I’m just going to a family reunion; not sure about 22-A. What I do know for sure is that most casual airline conversations are about the weather, or legroom. Does this interest David the physicist? Hardly.
“Inertial confinement fusion. . .” he is saying. (Introduce yourself to a physicist, don’t expect to talk about legroom.) Something about shooting lasers at pellets’ exterior to turn stuff into plasma. Finally. A word I know: plasma. Part of the blood, right? Wrong. On row 22, A-C, we’re talking about a state of matter resulting from a gaseous state that’s been ionized. Or something like that.
Actually, at one point in our impromptu post-doctoral-level lecture there occurs a new concept I totally understand. David explains something about magnetized particles by performing a visual demo of grabbing one particle and stretching it to its limit. When you let go it may zap back past where it was and into space, and now you’ve got interesting stuff going on.
You can try this at home.
There’s one down-to-earth interruption when the mother-in-law sends a photo of the physicist’s lab (as in dog) whom she’s baby-sitting. But after a while, 22-C retreats into less esoteric endeavors on the aisle-side laptop, while B and A continue. There are ongoing snippets of “the algorithms just needed…” or “fun stuff…” or “nuclear fusion reactions…” or “you run the code…” and “once you get it…” But there is only so much brain elasticity available on the aisle at 34,000 feet.
Perhaps anticipating a time when all R&D labs get shut down and a podcast host is put in charge of science, David explains that “you need physicists for national security, for medicine, for the advancement of society. Even if we’re a little weird.”
WE THE PEOPLE ARE HAPPILY BRIGHTENING THE COUNTRY, WITH CANDLES AND DANCE, SONGS AND JOY. AND A LITTLE LAUGHTER
Artwork by Laura Borealis (Used with permission)
Bring your neighbors. Bring your children. Bring your love for this country and let it shine.
This is my kind of an invitation. It was, actually, an invitation to join a recent event in Atlanta titled Unite in Light. Atlanta chooses light in these dark times for our democracy
Neighbors brought their children, and other neighbors. Children hoisted signs. Ordinary people came out for an extraordinary celebration, a ribbon of light stretching miles across the city from midtown to Stone Mountain.
“With our lights, signs and waves and the supportive honks of passing cars,” wrote one participant, Jane Branscomb, “Atlanta showed up for unity and democracy over division and tyranny.”
Jane Branscomb photo
Across the country in Seattle another group circled Green Lake, holding hands “in a giant embrace of our democracy and community.”
Melinda Branscomb (yes, they’re sisters) has a ukelele protest group, Ukes Uprising, which didn’t play at that one, but I’m told there was a “Dance for Democracy” group who brought music and danced for those encircling the lake. The whole encircling idea was simply to “celebrate the values we stand for with signs, song, and dance.”
Photo courtesy of Melinda Branscomb (far left)
The Ukes Uprising (above) musicians are not a marching band — though who knows? — so they station themselves, instead, at strategic points along protest routes. At the last No Kings Day, for example, they stationed themselves at the light rail station exit nearest to the march starting point. “Literally tens of thousands of arriving protesters walked past us,” Melinda recalls, “and folks smiled and sang along as they passed.” An estimated 70,000 singing, dancing Seattleites took part in that event.
It’ll happen again all across the country on October 18: No Kings Day #2. On the last No Kings Day in San Francisco — where people singing and dancing on the streets can usually be found somewhere if you just look — my new friend Tylor (“with an O, people always get that wrong”) was skipping along with his rainbow cape flowing behind and his Human Rights sign waving on high.
Author photo
Tylor (above) mainly laughs a lot — and it’s hard not to laugh along.
This is what I wish our Narcissist-in-Chief could figure out: laughing and loving, singing and dancing, holding hands — those are the ties that bind. And they will bind this country together again.
Officially, No Kings Day (there’s one near you!) is a peaceful national day of action in support of reproductive freedom, democracy, and accountability. A rally against authoritarianism. Unofficially it’s just a chance to get together with friends and strangers to raise candles, hoist signs, sing and dance and laugh a little. In support of a life-or-death movement.
Unfortunately, N-i-C Trump does not laugh. Oh, he makes unfunny jokes if there’s a barb in them, but his mama apparently never taught him the difference between humor and cruelty.
Cruelty never inspired people to line the streets with candles and song. Laughter overcomes humorlessness. Peaceful protest wins out over masked militias. Sometimes, in these dark days, phrases like these only sound like platitudes. But then the candles come out in Atlanta and the ukeleles tune up in Seattle and laughter ripples across San Francisco.
STRANGERS AT A DEMONSTRATION SHARE THEIR HOPEFULNESS
(Politics alert: Though I usually try to stay apolitical on this site, a Substack follower actually emailed that he, a Republican who also checks out this site from time to time, thought I should share it on WordPress. What can I say? An actual Reader Request. Thanks, Al, and enjoy, anyone else.)
“Not much,” said one young man when asked what gave him hope. “I mean, I don’t have much hope for today, or next week. But I have a lot of hope for the future. We just have to get things back on track.”
An indomitable group of strangers gathers regularly at the corner of Van Ness and Geary Blvd in San Francisco to hoist signs, wave at passing cars and cheer for democracy. It’s always a different group but with occasional familiar faces. At a recent “Trump Takedown” protest I asked a dozen or so of those gathered what gives them hope. They had a lot to say.
“People like you and me,” said one tall, grizzled Black man with whom I would appear to share little in common except, perhaps, old age. “We’re here, and not giving up.”
A lovely woman named Nacha (“like Nachos”) answered my question with a smile as she rested her sign to reach for something in her pocket. It was a small plastic envelope containing her U.S. passport and a copy of the Constitution. “I’m an American by choice,” she said. “I came here years ago because I had to leave Peru; I love this country. But I carry my passport with me always now, just in case.” I did not share with Nacha the brief feeling of hopelessness that spread through me on hearing this last sentence. Still, she smiled broadly and how could that not give everyone hope?
The demonstrators come partly just for the shared community fun. There’s a constant honking of horns, there are waves from passing cars and trucks, shouts of encouragement. One participant said to me, “I know this is San Francisco — but I also know these demonstrations are happening all over the country and won’t stop until we get our democracy back.” That gave me another shot of hope.
A young man named Tylor (“With an ‘O’ — nobody gets that right”) said he has a meditation practice that keeps him “hopeful, and on track.” Tylor also had a rainbow cape, an inclination to dance in the median strip and a Cheshire Cat smile. “Evolution,” he said while dancing (on the sidewalk,) “is a path. It may be bumpy, but the universe is taking us forward toward love and peace.” It is possible to pick up gems of philosophical wisdom at sidewalk protests.
A teenaged couple who are classmates at Washington High School gave my question serious thought before responding. “Trump’s approval ratings keep going down,” he said; “that gives me hope.” She gave a broader assessment: “When I see all sorts of people coming together with positive values . . .” she said, before turning away to smile at a white SUV with passengers waving from every window.
I came home with Tylor’s words in my head. “I’m really just paraphrasing Martin Luther King Jr here,” he said after going on for a while about the evolutionary path toward love. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
(A Medium publication I regularly write for — with the ungainly if apt name of “Crow’s Feet” — issued a writing-prompt challenge about doing things the old-fashioned way and my brain was starting this piece before I even turned the digital page. Enjoy.)
Impeccable digestive system. We’ll get this issue out of the way first.
Coffee, toast and the New York Times to start the day = longevity and the bloom of health. I’m staring at 93 next June, feeling just fine, thank you, and — more to the point here — thanks, NYT print edition.
Before I entered upon what would be a joyful, 26-year late-life marriage there was one delicate issue to be settled. We both required the print edition (in 1992 you weren’t yet a weirdo if you read newspapers) of the New York Times with our morning coffee. As if an augury of that future bliss: he needed the sports section first; I begin with page one and go straight through every section as it comes. Deal.
You cannot digest breakfast while scrolling; it is against the natural order of the universe. (News on TV? God help you.)
There’s more to my read-the-news-the-old-fashioned-way fixation than maintenance of my digestive system, however. Or perhaps the two are related. It’s the angst factor. Watch the faces of two people getting today’s news. The one scrolling through will react with widening eyes and clenched teeth. It’s the way the body handles impending disaster. But the newsprint reader? She gets the disaster one slowly and carefully printed word at a time, just the way God intended. Emotionally digestible.
OK, it’s yesterday’s news by the time it gets to your doorstep. That’s the whole point. You’ve already heard the headlines blaring from everywhere in the world including all of your state-of-the-art devices. You’ve survived the headlines, now you sit down and read what actually happened.
Not to be blunt about it, furthermore, we print subscribers are quietly subsidizing your scrollings. We don’t mind, really. We try not to talk to you about it when your nose is glued to your screen all day.
My obsession may have a tiny bit to do with having had a lifelong career as a freelance writer that spanned decades of working for old-fashioned newspapers. The newspaper world was, in the olden days, one of equal parts grit and glamour. It was also never-ending fun with dashes of enlightenment, watching the business of courthouses and penthouses, trying to communicate the truth of it all.
This ingrained obsession crept up on me slowly. When I was first beginning to read my sister Mimi and I would grab the morning paper and spread the comics on the floor before breakfast. My father, an educator to the bone, soon discovered a tool. “Girls,” he remarked, “if you’re going to read like that, at least start with the front page; then you can skip to the comics.” We actually cheated a lot, doing the comics first; but knowing we’d get a headline question with our orange juice we also spread the front page on the floor.
All these decades later, there may be a symbolism and a further lesson here: Perhaps we should all start the day reading the news on our knees.
Whatever. The like-clockwork digestive system, the mild-mannered demeanor, the frugality in every area of life except print media subscriptions — I credit it all to the foundational daily print newspaper.
Here’s to your health, New York Times print edition. May you live long and prosper.
# # #
This essay also appears on my Substack, The Optimistic Eye (@franjohns,) where I post, once a week, something positive on the political front. It’s almost always possible to find something, I promise. Feel free to visit any time; subscriptions are free.
(Heading into a short week that nonetheless promises long days of news both dark and discouraging, here’s another diversionary tale of people and politics in bygone days. You can’t make any of this stuff up.)
My husband-to-be, then a young bachelor newsguy named Bud, was looking out the window, talking to his friend Tom while waiting for a woman who had answered his house-for-rent ad.
“Interesting,” he said, as he spotted her crossing the street. “It’s Kathleen Cleaver.”
“What are you going to do?” Tom asked?
“If she wants, it,” Bud said, “I’m going to rent the place to her.” Which he did. Bud settled into the garage apartment, renting the two main floors of a dilapidated San Francisco Victorian he’d recently purchased to newlyweds Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver. Its location, at 2777 Pine Street a dozen or so blocks west of Fillmore, could have been generously described, at the time, as sketchy.
This was in 1967. It was shortly after Eldridge was paroled from Folsom and San Quentin prisons where he’d been incarcerated for eight years after being convicted of rape and assault with intent to murder. His official position with the Panthers was minister of information.
Many of the houses in the vicinity were in disrepair; others were occupied by citizens of questionable repute. “Aren’t you a little nervous about living there?” Bud was regularly asked by friends who did not come over for tea. “Why?” he regularly replied. “Either the police or the Black Panthers are here at any given time, usually both.”
In little more than a year Eldrige would win fame with publication of his prison memoir Soul on Ice, and subsequently become a fugitive after leading an ambush on Oakland police officers that left two officers wounded. Eldridge was also wounded in that dust-up and his friend and fellow Black Panther Bobby Hutton was killed.
All of which pretty much terminated the lease. Undaunted, Bud went to Black Panther headquarters in Oakland and asked for the remaining rent, which they paid.
Kathleen was the one who handled business affairs at their Pine Street domicile. She was mostly working to advance the causes of the Black Panthers, but helped the family finances by writing for Ramparts Magazine.
Landlord and tenants got along fine though they weren’t exactly close personal friends. My favorite memento of those days is a letter neatly typed on Ramparts letterhead which reads:
“Mr. Johns:
“Please excuse the delay but I have been so god damned busy with these pigs and courts and chaos that I completely forgot to pay the rent. You are very sweet to be so unobtrusive and gentle with me, I think you ar a perfect landlord and I would just like to warn you that you should prepare yourself for any day now some time of assault on this house. I think it is beautiful, I love it, I won’t go away, but the local, federal, international, secret and off duty pigs as well as reagon (sic) . . . wallace . . . alioto et all (sic) want to do us in, Eldridge first, then me. Here’s the rent.
“Peace. – (signed in ink) Mrs. Cleaver”
The Cleavers divorced in 1981 after two children and a life that must never have been dull. Kathleen followed her fugitive husband around the globe before coming back to the U.S. and laying the groundwork for him to come home too. She did post-grad work (law, etc) at Yale and elsewhere, eventually becoming a distinguished lecturer and law professor. He eventually became a Mormon and a conservative Republican. Eldridge died, at 62, in 1998. Kathleen is, as far as I know, alive and well and I would give almost anything to know if she remembers her Pine Street landlord.
Or, for that matter, 2777 Pine Street. Bud sold it not long after the Cleavers left, to help raise the down payment on another Victorian a mile or so farther west that I would later happily call home.
I suspect he sold it for something under $20,000. You could pick it up today — if it were on the market, which it is not — for three or four million. Gentrification has been kind to Pine Street property values.
I sometimes reflect on it all as I walk by the former home of my good husband, who is now, in all likelihood, on some celestial cloud trading stories with Black Panthers and other interesting friends. I try not to take offense at the plaque testifying to the nineteenth century origins of the house and proclaiming it to be the former home of Eldridge Cleaver, “Black Panther and Republican leader.”
Great-Uncle Samuel? I figured he was a horse thief. Maybe a train robber or a bank bandit — those being favorite jobs for early-20th-century gangsters.
In truth, I wasn’t sure he was actually real. When I was a child Uncle Samuel (not to be confused with the patriotic Sam) was spoken of only rarely and always in whispers. I heard enough of those whispers to be eternally curious; but no one, not my mother, aunts or cousins, would offer details or even confirm his former existence.
In 1954, as a budding reporter for the Richmond (VA) Times Dispatch, I got my mother, then in failing health, to come clean. She told me Samuel was indeed her uncle and “had died in prison,” adding that he had shown up twice in her childhood and she remembered him as a great storyteller. I made brief, unsuccessful attempts to uncover his own story.
Not a pretty story! It seems my great uncle Samuel Hardy (1869–1929) ambushed and murdered his erstwhile friend and neighbor Tiberius Gracchus (Grac) Jones in Nansemond County, VA on October 26,1908, after learning that Grac was planning to prosecute him for selling liquor without a license, among other things. The dying Gracchus is reported to have gasped, “They killed me for telling the truth.”
It took the internet and, more importantly, my committed-genealogist niece Janie in Atlanta to dig up the court records and concurrent reports of Gracchus’ dying words. Otherwise, this little snippet of family history might have been lost forever — which would have suited more than a few members of the clan now living. But for my part, I wanted the Truth.
C’mon. Anybody can have illustrious landowners or famous generals in her past; how many can boast a bona fide n’er-do-well convicted felon?
Samuel’s brother, my gentle-mannered maternal grandfather Porter Hardy, was a Methodist preacher who shepherded small, rural Virginia flocks. He was often paid in eggs or sacks of corn; he fed his family with the help of several chickens, a cow and whatever vegetables they could raise. Nevertheless, he managed to send all six of his children to college in the early years of the twentieth century. My mother, his second child, studied Latin and the classics with her parents and graduated valedictorian of her class in 1915, after two years in an actual schoolroom. The other member of the Class of ’15 was Salutatorian.
The youngest of those six Hardy (in soul and name alike) children, my greatly beloved Uncle Porter, Jr., left the family farm to enter Congress the same year that John F. Kennedy first went to Washington. These tidbits are offered as explanation for the general agreement to keep the family felon as far in the background as humanly possible.
Uncle Porter (center) & friends, c 1946 (Author family photo)
My mother’s confirmation of Uncle Samuel’s existence came as she was beginning a long descent into stroke-related dementia, so I was never able to dig out further details. It was somewhat of a stinging defeat, though, to have turned up absolutely nothing in Virginia prison records, especially since I saw myself as a mid-century Brenda Starr, Reporter.
Seventy years later I was exonerated by Ancestry.com (and Janie, my niece.) My search had been for a Samuel Mahood, my mother having implied — intentionally? I’ll never know — that the errant uncle was her mother’s brother. Had I searched those musty, pre-internet files for someone with my very own name — my given name being Frances Hardy Moreland — I might have solved at least a part of the puzzle. Oh, well.
Here’s the ignominious truth: Samuel somehow learned of his friend and neighbor Grac’s plans, probably through other friends and neighbors. There were few secrets in those rural, county-newspaper-reports-all days, and selling liquor without a license might have been only one of several shady dealings Samuel had going. The local paper didn’t reveal the back story but its account, alongside the eloquent language of the court records in Hardy v Commonwealth paints a vivid picture:
“It appears that the deceased” (that would be Grac) “in company with his next door neighbor, one J.H. Joyner, returned on the railroad train from a trip to Suffolk . . . and after lingering a short time near the office of a justice of the peace . . . left for their homes, walking together till the pathway to Joyner’s home was reached, and then the deceased proceeded in the direction of his own home nearby.”
Sadly, also nearby was my Uncle Samuel, waiting to ambush him with a shotgun blast to the stomach; and, for good measure, an additional three bullets from a pistol. After which, the court records show, “Joyner, who was not far away, not only heard the shots but heard the victim exclaim, ‘You scoundrel!’” Scoundrel indeed. It’s hard to think kindly of Samuel at all. And as the true friend approached (Samuel having by then fled into the darkness) he heard, further, the famous words, “Joyner, they have killed me for telling the truth.”
About this “they” business: it was pitch dark that night and there were no streetlights in the Virginia countryside. Presumably, the multiple weapons suggested multiple assailants to the dying Grac; as far as the lengthily-detailed trial records show, Bad Samuel did it totally on his own. He seems to have taken his pistol with him, but left a №12 bore Ithaca shotgun “known to have been in the accused’s possession” at the scene of the crime.
The plot thickens. “It further appears,” the court learned, “that the accused and the deceased, who had lived for some years within less than a mile of each other, had been friends until within a few months of the murder, when they became exceedingly unfriendly, in fact, bitterly hostile.” Samuel made little effort to protect himself from prosecution in advance. The records show that he “cherished such intense hostility toward the deceased that he had made repeated and malignant threats against his life.”
By this time, as your faithful reporter studies the records, she is becoming convinced that Uncle Samuel was not only a supremely bad dude but possibly the dumbest criminal around. Another neighbor, Joseph I. Johnson, testified to Samuel’s having recently said, “All right. If things turned out like they looked he was going to kill him, damn him.”
The whole business had to have been hard on all these former friends. Joyner and Johnson “clearly appear to be reluctant witnesses,” the records state; with Johnson adding to the above “that he did not know whom the accused was talking about, ‘whether a man or a snake or a mule or who…’” but it was “within the province of the jury to determine the facts…”
Personally, this reporter thinks there may have been more than meets the eye, or at least met the court records. All these gentlemen appear to have been young bachelors. Was there a lady somewhere in the background?
Early on during the court proceedings much was made of the fact that the jury was allowed, “in company with two officers, to attend a moving picture show wherein two suitors for the hand of a lady quarreled, and one of them lay in wait along a road, attacked his rival with a dagger, and felled him to the ground.” The court officers were declared “highly censurable” for taking the jury to such a moving picture show, but the trial proceeded.
If there was a redeemable quality within Samuel Hardy, it never showed up in the court records or family whispers. Not only did he show no remorse and pay no respects to the neighbor family, but as soon as he heard about bloodhounds being called he “mounted a wagon and rode into the forest and remained there until all fear of being pursued had past.”
So here are the facts: Two generations separate me from a murderer, a faithless friend, a dim-wit criminal and a coward. Good grief.
Convicted and sentenced to the electric chair, Samuel went to prison and stayed there for a very long time. No family records indicate that anyone ever went to visit him (though who knows?) and they are unlikely to have been able to afford lawyers. But the wheels of justice grind slowly onward. Samuel died — under circumstances never recorded but presumably in prison — in 1929.
My only consolation is that rumored storyteller reputation. Perhaps it’s the hidden gene that led me to a perfectly respectable MFA in Short Fiction.
Otherwise, the only hope for family redemption lies in niece Janie’s discovery of an earlier possible ancestor who may have been a delegate to the Continental Congress.
This one lived from 1758 to 1785. He had to have been somebody’s uncle; his name was Samuel Hardy.
THE WONDERS OF MODERN SURGERY, REPORTED IN REAL TIME
(TODAY’S DIVERSION FROM OTHER WORLD NEWS)
You’ve got to love modern medicine.
I arrive at the Kaiser Musculoskeletal Medicine Department a few minutes early for my 9:30 appointment. After all the ominous worst-case scenario documents are signed and promises made (in writing) not to sue if they happen, enter the surgeon. She confirms which of my knobbly toes it is that we plan to un-knobble a little, whips out a magic marker and writes herself a note: “Yes!” . . . with arrow just in case.
Re-enter the assistant.
The assistant has more to do than the surgeon it seems to me. She was responsible for getting my signatures on all the right pages, and now she’s busy making my foot look ready for the barbecue pit.
Enter the surgeon again, suiting up in blue paper and whipping blue paper over and under the scene of the action. After that she starts erasing her messages to self and playing around with Q-tips, while the assistant is discussing cataract surgery she (the assistant) has scheduled for tomorrow. “Eww,” says my toe surgeon, “shot in the eye! That sounds awful!” I’m hoping we don’t start mixing up eyes and toes here, but having had cataract surgery myself I join in with the assistant to assure the toe surgeon that cataracts are no big deal. Just to be clear, my own eyes are closed by now; I did not choose to watch. But couldn’t resist holding my phone up to record what was underway.
The surgeon has gone for the X-acto knife. Is there a desk drawer in America without an X-acto knife? Surely not. But I’ve been watching the assistant pour Betadyne over my foot and everything else around including the instrument tray, so I’m assuming this isn’t just any old X-acto knife. My guess is that the X-acto people have a surgery division which churns out knives for toes exactly the same as the ones for crafting that are in every desk drawer, but the ones for toes cost some 500 times more. God only knows how much the ones for hearts cost.
Approximately 10 minutes later, the deed is done, the surgeon has congratulated us all and departed, the assistant pulls a sock over my bulkily bandaged foot, finishes up with a stylish new boot and voilà! I am into a Lyft and back home for coffee at 10.
Next week: resumption of the 3 or 4 mile daily walk, all ten toes in synch.
WHILE I WAS LOOKING FOR A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON EARTHLY NEWS . . .
NASA photograph, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope
Winding up a week of not great news the leader of the free world sat down with the autocrat responsible for untold crimes against humanity and a devastating, ongoing war. Very little good news on Planet Earth.
Taken by Hubble, the photo shows “a small portion of the Rosette Nebula…5,200 light years away.” There are dark dust clouds and “just visible in the upper right of the dark cloud, a young star fires jets of plasma…”
