After a too-long respite away from the keys....
The beginning of the year is always one of those times when
you reflect on things that were, might have been, and could still be. We woke up in Berkeley, having flown
the morning of Dec. 31st to SF, one of those six + hours of
westbound flying in Coach (I’d actually like to SEE the coach this was named
for) and which, when you finally step off the plane next to the Pacific Ocean,
make you think, “geez, if only I’d done the Wrong Way Corrigan trick, and
headed the other direction, I’d be eating Portuguese grilled chicken
tonight.” We have certainly
shrunk the world in terms of our ability to travel upon it. Not always in style or grace, but
compared to what it must have been like trucking across oceans in choppy wooden
boats in those post Renaissance years, we have it made in the shade. We have
come to take it so for granted that trans-continental travel is so easy that I
think we lose sight of what a trip like that used to be. As a life long aviation buff, I
still pine for the days of DC-6b’s and Lockeed Constellations, as they
represent that amazing advanced, post-war technology that existed in my
youth. And there remains something
magical about the roar of those piston engines. Frankly, when you think about it, a 28 cylinder engine like the Pratt /Whitney Wasp Major, a behemoth with four rows
of seven heads, required thousands of individual explosions every minute, and
in a plane like the C-97 Stratofreighter, did that for hundreds of minutes at a
time. All that stuff worked. It probably seemed crude by today’s
standards, but if you had been born at the time most of the engineers were who
worked on that plane, you can imagine that the Wright Brothers first flight
took place when you were a baby. A
helluva lot of progress was crammed into the first few decades of the 20th
century. As a kid in grade
school (Oakwood Elementary, class of 1958) in the 50s, we lived in a
combination of what we felt was incredibly advanced (jet engines!) and yet with
WWII only a decade earlier, a number of direct connections with things which
seemed technologically distant.
Recess, a concept which I’m not even sure has survived into
the new millennium, was a time best described as a forum for breathing
exercises, most of them involving yelling of some sort. We played marbles (two-ticks take was
standard – you actually had to hit the other guy’s marble twice before you
could keep it) which had a dizzying set of rules, the particulars of each match
decided on ahead of time. There
was even a marble tournament every spring, where a large nail-on-a-string would
be scribed into the broom-smooth dirt to create a yard wide circle where the
play would take place. Do the
words “knucks down” and “mig” mean
anything to you? If not, you
probably missed those amazing tourneys, for which you were actually allowed to
leave class to play, though in my case, most of the time I went out in the
first round. There was a hop
scotch tourney for the girls, and in what must have been seen as a giant leap
forward, I even entered that contest my 6th grade year. Throwing your hoppy-taw
accurately isn’t as easy as it looks, and in my case, making the turn around on
“8” was the death knell. But I was
happy to have tried it, even if I didn’t get very far. The standard sports at recess
included dodge ball (yes it did hurt when you got hit in the head,) tetherball, and snowballs. In what was probably a precursor of the
Hunger Games, the school would put a sign out about 80 yards from the building,
behind which was the area known as the “snow-ball zone” and in which you could
make and throw as many snowballs as you wanted at anyone you wanted to. And probably take a few in the face,
while you were at it.
In the fall and spring, I remember the “horse girls” with
fondness. Susan Decker, Linda
Wideberg, names attached to girls I haven’t seen in decades, and a few other
equus-o-philes most of whom actually owned horses at home, would spend their
recess racing around, whinnying, leaping as if to rise up on their back legs,
Blackbeauty style, and toss their
hair back like long well kept manes. We knew it was their thing, they whinnied as much as
they wanted, and when the bell rang ending recess, we’d all go back into school
ready to take on math, science,
and a host of other subjects.
The point was, we made do with not very much save our imaginations.
We boys, mostly aviation buffs of one sort or the other,
would often run around, arms spread out like the wings of a B-17, dipping in
and out of the clouds as we escaped ack-ack from near by Highland Drive. Our doodling was more likely than not
to be a scene of P-47s darting amongst the bombers high over Germany. I remember once being admonished by a 3rd
grader friend’s mom, as I pretended to make a bombing run “… bombs away over
Tokyo…” I said. She reminded me in
a firm but gentle voice… “that was years ago. We don’t bomb Tokyo anymore.” It kind of made sense, and certainly made an
impression (50+ years later, I still remember it) and I think helped me to
understand that the movies we watched about the WWII aviators, while full of
aerial “excitement” were something which for many of us needed context. My mom, a college graduate in
1938 – Stanford in Journalism, missed her
one chance at an interview with an old Salt Lake friend at the Washington
Post as it had been scheduled for September 1, 1939. She waited around for hours, but because the Wehrmacht had
that afternoon invaded Poland, her interview never happened, and what I see as
the sometimes fanciful notion of mom having ended up being a WaPo reporter, and
me, growing up in DC remains just a what-if.
Our world has changed so much in the last (insert any
integer from 5 to 40 here) years.
Watching a friends grand-kids, aged 4 and 6, play with an iPad and
laptop last night made me wonder how we ever will be able to try and keep some
kind of chain together, linking the past and present. As kids, we babyboomers at least understood much of what our
parents had gone through, and we felt connected to it. My dad, who was born in 1906 and lived
a full 88 years, was in diapers before the US Army took delivery of it’s first
airplane (1909.) Yet, dad always
was accepting of, and even excited by the ‘new:’ almost any building going up in almost any place was, for
him, a sign of progress. More than
once some hideously designed suburban office edifice would, merely because it
had come to be, get the “Look at that beautiful new building...”
treatment. For him, there were no
limits on what one could adapt to.
The mere idea of airplanes flying, cars going from early Model Ts to
dad’s favorite, a 1959 Desoto, whose fins were on loan from the Air Force,
meant of level of
dad would have loved watching this building go up
acceptance of the unknown that I have always found
striking. Yet now I worry that his
positive way of looking at the world, believing that the things men and women
conjure up can be made to be for the betterment of society, seems to have gone
the way of the billion dollar IPO, and how to game a system which has devolved
into wanting to be gamed. I hope that somewhere, 5th grade girls
still run around at recess, without their cell phones or iPads, and kick,
whinney, and toss their manes around like crazy. It would be nice if there could be a snow-ball area which
didn’t require ten adults with clipboards monitoring who threw what snowball at
whom, and regulating the kinds of childlike behaviour which shouldn’t require
outside regulation. So much of
what we knew as kids, and what we were forced to deal with on our own – with
each other – has turned into some kind of horribly misled attempt by parents to
make sure that nothing bad ever
happens, no one is ever disappointed, that every kid always wins. It’s a terrible plan for adulthood. Learning to deal with your failures is
probably the single biggest thing in success. If everything is regulated, arranged, and done in a way that
makes sure no kid fails, how will they ever deal with real life? In life there are ups and downs, and no
one is immune from those elements.
I’d like to go on and on here, but I hear the engines on the Super
Connie starting to crank, and I need to go hop in the shower so I can watch
that plane take off for the Azores, or Madigascar, or Samoa. It’ll only take three days, you know. And hey, they still offer free chewing
gum on those flights so you can chew your way through the ear-popping. Awesome. Great time to be alive. We’re just sayin’… David