(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…”
WHEREUPON THE MYSTERY OF THE 7th FLOOR WINDOW IS, MEANWHILE, SOLVED
Shiny new view from balcony window – facing south(Author photo)
Once a year we get shiny-clean windows.
It used to be twice a year, as my original contract decreed — but this is a senior living building, and senior living is, unfortunately, Very Big Business in the U.S. Which means investors want steadily rising returns, and this only happens by increasing rents (constantly) or by cutting costs (regularly, as in less frequent window-washing.)
OK, now that’s off my chest.
I love shiny-clean windows. The south-facing ones (above) stay reasonably clean all year. But my apartment has one large west-facing window, a view of reflected sunrises and shimmering sunsets. I really love my west-facing window. Its view succumbs to the grime of Post Street traffic below, but that takes a while to accumulate and Mother Nature sometimes pitches in with winter gales to clean things up.
Sunset view from west window (Author photo, long ago)
So it was with great dismay that I discovered, after the window-washers had finished the western wall and moved around the corner, that half of my west window remained smudgy.
In the grand scheme of things, a smudgy window would seem to rank fairly low among what one needs to complain about. But this is my waking view of the world, my closing view of the starlit night. Must it be gloomy, even before the San Francisco fog and embers from Canadian wildfires turn the window into a metaphor for a darkening world? (Until rays of hope return with the window-washers next August, just before the mid-terms?)
The prospect was too terrible. I complained. I complained vociferously to management, to housekeeping, to the maintenance department; for good measure. I fired off an email to the Executive Director of this establishment. One should not have to suffer a grungy half-view of the world for an entire year, I argued. Send those window washers up here to witness my distress. (I knew better than to insist on a re-do; I know costs and investor returns. I wanted, at the very least, sympathy — and at best a wash from within. These windows can be popped out for such chores.)
The offending window, west view (Author photo)
The next day a charming window-washer appeared at my door. “I actually washed that window,” he smiled. “I take pride in my work, so I’m always careful that it’s well done. Do you mind if I take a look?”
I felt heard. I sensed recompense. I led the charming window-washer to the offending window. “Do you mind?” he asked again, as he leaned across the three-foot shelf that sets the window back from the room, between built-in bookcases.
That small smudge you see on the right window (between the edges of the two sliding panes?) That is where the exonerated window-washer rubbed his two fingers. I seemed to have a very dirty window — on the inside.
Next week maintenance is sending someone to perch on the three-foot shelf and wash the inside of my window — something I’m perfectly capable of doing myself, but then, all this never occurred to me before raising such a ruckus so they may not think I have enough sense to wash a window.
May your sunrises shimmer and your sunsets glow. And may your outlook never be grungy.
ON LIFE IN THE OLDEN DAYS, AND BEING RAISED BY ONE’S SISTERS
The Moreland girls c 1944 – r to l, Helen, Jane, Mimi & the author
Among the blessings I regularly count, my three older sisters rank close to the top. A favorite niece and I, in fact — she grew up in an identical family structure — maintain that if only everyone could be the youngest of four girls we would have world peace.
Guys would have be factored in somewhere, but the only brothers I’ve intimately known are the three gems my sisters found. This is a sister-sibling story, told by the one they raised.
I’ve now outlived them all, the sisters and their three good guys alike. Looking back over how they shaped my own story is something I do, gratefully, pretty much every day — but it’s a special event of August.
Why August? Well, by August the searing days of summer are slipping into the past, the energies of fall and all its possibilities visible ahead. Baseball season is working itself into pre-pre-playoff frenzy. Everybody has left Paris and New York except for the tourists. And really, what else are you going to do with August? Having missed National Siblings Day (April 10) and International Brothers and Sisters Day (maybe March 29, maybe May 2) I decided to declare August National Youngest of Four Daughters Month.
For openers, August 2nd is the birthday of my sister Mimi. If everybody could have a sister Mimi we would definitelyhave world peace, because she would already have fought everyone’s battles.
When I arrived on the scene my sisters were approximately 2 (Mimi,) 6 (Helen) and 8 (Jane.) The story goes that they so desperately wanted a baby brother that when our father called from the hospital with the happy news they said, “Oh. A girl.” And went back to bed. But by the time I was old enough to hear that story they had rallied around and decided to bring me up as happily as they could.
Our mother was part of it all, but she was pretty much on overwhelm. The demands of being unpaid 24-hour assistant to our father in those post-Depression/ WW II years would’ve wiped out any less-determined wife; but she was simultaneously running the house, hostessing receptions, sewing clothes, gardening, darning, teaching Sunday School, you name it. Some time after she died I stumbled across a further clue to my upbringing. It was a line in a story my mother wrote for a family magazine that read, “Of course, when our Frances was born we were just tired of raising children.” Oh.
Though nearly two years older, Mimi was just a year ahead of me in school, and until marriages pulled us in different directions we were essentially joined at the hip. Just about everything I needed to know about growing up I figured out by watching Mimi — knowing full well that if I got it wrong she would step in and clean up my mess.
Mimi was utterly fearless, and uniquely competent. Once when the French door wouldn’t open I banged a little too hard on the glass pane and managed to gash my arm. I remember standing there shrieking until Mimi edged me out of the way, reached through to turn the doorknob and sped off to grab some towels. This being the olden days of small-town life, she then put me on the back of her bike and pedaled us off to Dr. Vaughan’s office to get me sewed up; fortunately we got home in time to clean up the bloody trail before our mother returned. Dr. Vaughan was a fine GP but not a highly trained surgeon; I still have the scar as a souvenir of the day.
I learned glamour and propriety from my sister Jane, who was regularly class president, prom queen, those sorts of things. It was Jane who knew how to arrange flowers, serve a soufflé, get out of a bad blind date. Once I sent my six-year-old from Atlanta to Birmingham for a weekend at Aunt Jane’s, figuring I’d learn stuff about young motherhood after he got back. These were the very olden days of air travel, when you could entrust a small child to the stewardess and know he’d be watched over until delivery to the appropriate aunt. (That kid grew up to be a pilot.)
Trying not to seem overly snoopy, I asked my son, on his return, what was best about Aunt Jane’s house. “Oh boy, breakfast!” he said. “For breakfast we had peanut butter and bananas on toast!” And why not?
Having declared for years that she would be the first to die, Mimi did just that, though still in her mid-seventies. In our last conversation, the day before that event, she reported from the hospital where she’d just been taken that her cardiologist son-in-law had come by that morning.
“I asked him to tell me, truthfully, how’s my heart as compared with his heart,” she said. “And he said, ‘about 50%.’ So I said, OK, that’s good.” Mimi never did anything half-heartedly in her life.
Jane, thoroughly exhausted from lifelong role-modeling and COPD, followed Mimi into the hereafter that same year, leaving Helen in Ithaca, NY and me across the country in San Francisco to tie up the generational story. Helen had already demonstrated how to live the good life on one’s own terms — in her home everybody sang or played chamber music in lieu of the TV they never owned — and made sure I finally married Mr. Right, their extraordinary longtime close friend.
But after her husband died and her own health declined to a point where social and cultural activities were no longer possible, Helen spent a good while going to bed and hoping not to wake up. Ferociously agnostic, she couldn’t pray for such an outcome so she did the next best thing: make phone calls saying nice things to people she loved “in case I don’t wake up in the morning.” Thus I have a message left on my answering machine not long before the night she went to sleep, with her daughter rubbing her back, and subsequently didn’t wake up.
“Frannie . . .” she says, “. . . I just want you to know you’ve been the best little sister . . .”
There should be world peace.
+. +. +
(This essay also appears on my Substack, The Optimistic Eye, where I post usually – if not always – on the political scene and activist thoughts. C’mon over any time; it’s free.)
A publication I write for featured a writing prompt recently asking what historical event is most significant in your memory and how it affected you. Interesting assignment. My life has gone on too long to choose, I think — and including recent years of the Women’s March (and other marches and tumults) quickly gets everything murky. But the prompt immediately prompted this response:
It was simply beyond belief. I think that’s why the Challenger tragedy stays so starkly in my mind. Surely there were plenty of notable others:
I was hitting tennis balls against the garage wall with my sister Mimi when our father called us in to hear FDR on the Philco radio, telling the nation that we were at war. It was December 7, 1941.
I remember Harry Truman on the train platform making a whistlestop speech after that war ended.
There were the appalling shocks of McCarthyism and the Vietnam War. There were assassinations and celebrations and tragedies. Men would walk on the moon.
When the plane struck the first World Trade Center tower, it was barely dawn in San Francisco. My CNN anchor son-in-law called from New York. My husband took the call in another room, came back to bed, and said to just go back to sleep. Later, as we made coffee and turned on the TV, he explained that decision. “I knew we’d be awake for a very long time,” he said, “and I figured you would need another hour or two.”
Each of the above events shifted the world a little on its axis for the creatures who live upon it. Any of them, and countless others we’ve lived through, have shifted our perspective to some degree. Or if not, we weren’t paying attention. Paying attention is never a bad idea.
On the morning of January 28, 1986, I was driving home along the main highway of Daytona Beach, FL, having dropped my step-daughter off at her high school. En route, the Space Shuttle Challenger launched into the brilliant blue skies directly ahead and above.
Living in Daytona, as I briefly did during the 1980s, included many memorable times at Cape Canaveral. Often when there was a night launch we’d take the fishing boat down the Halifax River, drop anchor, and watch the beauty of a flight roaring into the black sky. Daytime launches were possibly less dramatic but equally beautiful.
This one I was idly watching as I drove. Suddenly, the looping white contrails seemed to disintegrate into a large puff. Smaller contrails began to appear in the sky as they fell earthward on separate paths.
It was as if the world stopped.
Like almost every other car on the road, I pulled onto the shoulder and cut the engine. We simply stared. I remember saying out loud, “No. Nooooo.”
I don’t remember how long I sat there. I remember tears beginning to pour down my face. I remember thinking I could not go home to an empty house, and driving instead to a coffee shop next door to the church I then attended. There was already a small group gathered around a portable TV someone had placed on the counter. There were more tears of disbelief and quiet questions without answers. The coffee was free.
Here’s what we were saying, and what I learned: Life is precious. Hug someone. Try to be kind.
Because no one knows when the contrail ends and splits, or where its spirals go.
