Monthly Archives: April 2018

Symphony 125

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Neil gathered up the papers with questions that lay scattered around the floor. He sighed as he tossed the terse, misspelled queries into the wastebasket.

There was a soft knock at his door. He looked up to see Lisa Cobb standing with one hand on the doorframe and a face full of worry. He forced a smile and said, “Did you miss the bus?”

She nodded and said, “Can I come in?”

“Of course.”

“I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble.”

“I don’t understand.”

She came in and stood before him, holding her underlip between her teeth to keep from crying. As soon as Neil recognized the depths of her distress, he seated her and sat beside her. Her hands twitched on the desk top and he reached out to take them in his. A single tear streaked her face.

Lisa said, “When you were in trouble last month and had to go to the school board, Mama told me it was because you stayed after school with some girl, and she said you did things to her. I don’t want you to get in trouble because of me.”

Neil considered the depths of experience that must be behind her to think such thoughts at her age. He said, “Let me worry about that. What is on your mind? It’s more than missing the bus.”

She sobbed, “I missed the bus deliberately to talk to you. I mean, to talk to somebody. I was going to talk to Ms. Kelly, but she left. I ran after her, but she didn’t hear me and she just drove away.” 

Lisa was shaking like a leaf. Neil reached out to her, then drew back his hand. She saw the aborted motion and turned her head away. She started to get up to go.

Silently, he cursed himself. Let them fire me, dammit, he thought. What good am I to myself or these children if I am afraid to reach out to them.

He caught Lisa as she rose to go and pulled her back into the seat beside him. All the dams burst and she sobbed herself out against his chest. The minutes crept by. Despite his best intentions, Neil’s eyes roved around the room as he prayed that no one would come in until she was calm enough to sit up. He hated the thoughts, but he had learned self-preservation the hard way.

Finally the sobs died away. Lisa pushed off from him, went to the sink, and washed her face. He left her alone until she had finished, then said, “Come over here and tell me about it.”

She crossed to the chair near him and collapsed in exhaustion. Her tears and his comforting had forged a new bond between them. Now she could speak. “You and Ms. Kelly said that if anyone ever tried to touch us anywhere or any way we didn’t like, that we didn’t have to let them?”

“That’s right. You have a right to privacy with your own body.” There was a cold knot in his stomach as he thought, Here it comes. All of her hints have been leading to this.

“And you said that if that ever happened, we should let somebody we trusted know about it?”

Neil asked gently, “Who is it and what is he doing?”

Sobs wracked her again. It was all she could do to get it out a sound. She stammered, “My mother’s boyfriend is trying to make me go to bed with him.” more tomorrow

480. Mairi at Culloden

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272 years ago today, the last battle took place on British soil. Followers of Charles Edward Stuart (aka Bonnie Prince Charlie) met British forces under the Duke of Cumberland on Culloden moor. Like all battles, it was a confusing, bloody mess, but it had the virtue of being decisive. The reprisals which followed brought highland culture largely to an end.

The mists of nostalgia roll over the Battle of Culloden, casting it in a romantic light as the last day of Scottish independence from the English. Sorry, but it was nothing like that. There were Scots on both sides of the fight. The “champion of the Scots” was the grandson of a deposed British king, born in Rome and raised in France, now fighting to regain his grandfather’s throne in London. The highlanders who followed him were despised by the lowland Scots who fought on Cumberland’s side — but the lowlanders’ descendants now claim clan membership and wear kilts — even though kilts hadn’t been invented yet in 1756.

I would have sworn that I would never write about Culloden, until I saw a brief note in an article about the history of oats in Scotland which described the actions of a Scotswoman who sat down beside the road leading from Culloden and cooked oat cakes for the soldiers, knowing they would need food to survive. Her simple and humane reaction to the conflict moved me to write this poem.

Mairi sat down by the side of the road

The night was filled with the sound of men
And the moan of wind in the heather,
As Mairi’s kinsmen went south toward the field,
That Charlie had set for the meeting.

Three sons of Mairi came out of her hut
And kissed her cheek as they left her
With Ross the youngest trailing along
To see what the battle would bring.

Mairi took oats from the pantry shelf,
There was not enough to please her,
So she dragged in a sack from the loft of the ben,
Took peats, and salt, and her griddle.

Then Mairi went down to the side of the road,
Built a peat fire and kneaded the grain,
Heated her griddle and cooked fat cakes,
To stack for the coming of day.

“They will come,” she said, “in the morning,
And all through the rest of the day,
Strutting proud or running scared,
Theyʼll be hungry either way.”

The oat cakes sizzled; the smell was fine;
She flipped them and stacked them and listened
To the musket fire from Cumberlandʼs men
And the deeper roar of his cannons.

The cries that went up as the claymores flashed
Were too distant for Mairi to hear,
But Ross would come back from where he watched
To tell how the Scotsmen had fared.

Then a sudden wind, and the fire flared up,
She shivered as pain rushed through her.
Three quick shocks in her empty womb,
And her heart in her breast went numb.

Her hands dug deeper into the oats,
And flew at the task of the kneading,
The stack of bannocks at her side grew tall
For she knew now that they would be needed.

Then Ross came running from the battlefield
He could only come out with a groan.
But Mairi knew without any words
That his brothers would not return.

******

The first man she saw was limping hard
With his leg bound up in a rag.
A highland face, with matted red hair,
He was lean as an iron bar.

A hungry man with a strangerʼs face;
Mairi gestured to the cakes.
He picked one up, took a bite, and sighed.
“God Bless you,” he said, and moved on.

The second man was a stranger, too,
He said, “Mother, it was awful.”
“Eat,” she said, “and move along,
I’ll pray that you find safety.”

The third was young, more a boy than a man,
With face flat and eyes that were dry.
Half held up by a second youth
Who coughed along along at his side.

“Take cakes and eat,” Mairi started to say.
But the coughing youth shook his head.
“I thank you, Mother, but let them go
To living men instead.

My friendʼs bled dry; thereʼs a ball in my lung;
Weʼre as dead as the ones behind.
Just show us a hidden place to crawl in,
And a quiet place to die.”

Mairi worked on, with a clenched up heart
While Ross fed peats to the fire,
Saving the lives of the fleeing men,
For hungry men soon tire.

All through the morning and the afternoon,
Those who lived to flee streamed by them,
Mairi rolled dough in her aged hands
As she mourned for the dead and the living.

For even these battered and tattered men,
Who would leave the field still living
Had lost more than battle, kinsmen, and sons.
A whole way of life had died with them.

And Mairi knew, with foresight clear,
That the winners would fare no better.
That the losers had lost, and the winners would lose,
All except for the rich and the English.

Then the last cake was gone, and Ross was gone,
Sent on with the last survivor.
Up past the river and into the hills.
To hide for a while in the heather.

Down the road she saw them, a mile away,
The Redcoats at last were coming,
Marching proud with bloody swords.
                Mairi stood up and put out the fire.

Symphony 124

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Ninety percent of the girls had watched the film calmly for knowledge, but only ten percent of the boys did. They had all come in to prove how much they knew already. As a consequence, they learned very little.

Their questions were different. They did not care about babies except to ask about defects and oddities. Their concern was the sexual act itself. If the questions had not been anonymous, probably none of them would have been able to ask anything. Preserving their image would have killed the whole experience.

They wanted to know:

“What is a hard-on?”

“What is masturbation?”

“Does it make you go blind?”

“Does it feel good?”

“Do girls masturbate?”

“What is a wet dream?”

“Does everybody have them?”

“What is a dick?”

“What is a cock?”

“What is a peter?”

“What is a boner?”‘

“What is an erection?”

“How can you keep from having them in public?”

Neil did his best to answer each question as simply and calmly as he could. Half of the questions were simply an attempt to bring their slang language into line with the new information the film had presented.

“How big is a penis?” Neil held his hands about six inches apart.

“Is everybody’s the same size?” 

“It depends on the situation. It varies a lot even for one person, from one erection to the next.”

“Do women like big ones better?”

Neil thought, How the hell should I know? and passed the question to Fiona. She fielded it gracefully and turned it around, pointing out that women weren’t as much interested in size as they were in tenderness and love. 

The boys didn’t even bother to listen to that answer.

By the time the boys left, running out into the playground to find some sixth grade girl to embarrass, Neil was exhausted and depressed. He and Fiona looked at each other and she said, “What a disaster.”

“Is it always like that?”

“It has never been like that before. The girls, yes; they were just the same as always, but the boys were terrible. You must be a bad influence.”

Neil invoked a four letter word he seldom used, and added, “Don’t even joke about that.”

“You know what I think? I think they have probably been like this every year and I just never got the chance to see how they acted because Tom or Glen always took this section alone.”

“It wasn’t that they were interested in intercourse,” Neil said, thinking aloud while he tried to make sense of it. “They weren’t; not really. I’ll bet you every one of them is a virgin.”

“You would have a hard time convincing me of that any more, even at their age.”

“It was all posture; all gesture; all trying to keep their places in the pecking order.”

“Pecker order, you mean!”

“That’s too close to reality to even make a good pun.” Neil gave up trying to put his feelings into words. He could only ask himself if he had been like that at eleven years old; he must have been.

Once again he faced the cruelty, the vanity, and the ignorance of the macho image. How did a boy go from that to become a real man, and why did so many veer aside from the harder path to become predatory womanizers, wife beaters, rapists, and child molesters? And what could he do to help them along the right path?

Fiona bid him good-bye and left. He gathered up the papers that lay scattered around the floor. It would not do for their questions to be found and circulated around the playground as a source of dirty fun. more tomorrow

Symphony 123

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When it was over, Fiona said, “I will take any questions, or you can direct your questions to Mr. McCrae. Also, just in case anyone is too shy to ask their questions out loud, you can write your questions on these pieces of paper and hand them in anonymously.”

It got very quiet in the room. For the first time since the film began, the girls began looking sideways at Neil. He would have given a hundred dollars to be someplace else, but if he let himself look embarrassed, the girls would surely be, so he kept his face expressionless. It was a major struggle.

No girl spoke, but several were writing questions on paper. Before the matter had gone past bearing, the first written questions began to come in. As soon as Fiona began answering them, the tension eased.

The questions were mostly about menstruation and period hygiene. Fiona answered fully and without hesitation. That put them at ease, and other questions began to flow in. Soon they were coming faster than she could answer them. Most were written, but a few were beginning to ask questions out loud. They wanted to know where twins came from. Fiona tossed that one to Neil to bring him into the conversation, then took the next one on nursing babies.

They were a little interested in menstruation, and very interested in babies — particularly in twins and birth defects and whether brothers and sisters would have two headed babies if they got married — but they had few questions about the sexual act itself. That was the present level of their maturity.

One girl asked a question about getting pregnant, and Fiona used it as a springboard. It was apparent to Neil that she had been waiting for that particular question to surface. Fiona explained clearly that if a girl had had her first period, and she had sex with a boy, she could get pregnant.

“Even if you just do it once?”

Lisa Cobb asked the question, but you could see from the incredulity in their eyes that they were all thinking the same thing. Yes, Fiona assured them, one time was all it took. Neil chimed in to reinforce her statement.

“But that’s not fair!” Tanya Michelson said.

Fiona went with that sentiment, emphasizing the need for caution because life wasn’t fair.

There weren’t many questions directed toward Neil, although Fiona handed him enough of the general ones to make it look like he was participating fully. It really did not matter. When the girls went home, they would have have seen a man and woman working together and discussing sexual matters freely and without embarrassment. If that was all they got out of his presence, it was worthwhile.

Fiona got another question she had been waiting for. Lupe Ochoa asked what contraception was and Fiona answered in detail, telling what worked and what didn’t — emphasizing that the rhythm method didn’t — and how it was used. If Fiona had taught those things directly, she might have been in trouble, but since she was only answering a question . . .

Eventually they ran out of time. The girls had already run out of questions and were asking the same ones over and over. Fiona took the girls out into the playground while Neil rounded up the boys and herded them into the room. 

# # #

When Fiona returned, they started the video again. The boys reacted differently to everything. Their stance as they entered the room, and as they watched the film was different. Where ninety percent of the girls had watched calmly for knowledge, only ten percent of the boys did. more Monday

479. Snap at his Bench

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Here is a peek at Like Clockwork, the steampunk novel I’m working on now.

Snap worked every day in his shop, sometimes on maintenance, sometimes on new toys. Day after day, the children cleaned and polished and wound the mainsprings on the toys that he had already built. It would have been cacophony if all the toys had all run all the time of course. Even a good thing can be overdone. Still, every day at least ten of the clockwork toys whirred, clanked and blatted (if it was a clown) or sang (if it was a doll).

The ships whose sails shifted with the wind were entirely Snap’s. So were the several kinds of self-bouncing balls, and the elfin forest of trees that waved their branches to an unfelt, fairy wind. The toys which had faces were his and hers — the mechanism was by Snap and the wood or porcelain flesh came from Pilar’s hands. The dolls which cooed and snuggled in a child’s arms had hands and faces of of clay that Pilar had moulded, fired, and glazed.

Every iteration of the year, a dozen new creations were added. Hundreds of toys lined the shelves and a few each day clanked, chirped, crawled, waltzed, rolled with laughter, and bounced in acrobatic arabesques. Their motion came from Snap; their expressive faces came from Pilar.

Rarely did anyone buy them. Once a year, perhaps — almost never twice in one twelvemonth — someone from the other London made his way to the street outside, saw the sign that said Like Clockwork, looked through the window at the wonders inside, and entered. Then one of Snap’s and Pillar’s clockwork offspring would reach the outer world, and for a time there would be meat in the pot, and new brass, paint, clay and springs for future creations.

Their daily bread came from Pilar, who worked alone in a back room with a spring pole lathe and carving tools, making nutcrackers, jester’s heads and crudely carved puppets. She had no more than six or seven patterns, and she produced them quickly in the time she could spare from other work. They sold for a shilling, but they sold. There were thousands of children in Luddie London without toys, and a few parents who would set aside a penny here and a penny there until they could buy one of the toys Pilar made.

Eve, Lispbeth, and Pakrat were an integral part of the enterprise. Snap called them his sweepers and dusters and winders. They kept the place spotless. The delicate machinery of the toys demanded it, and Pilar demanded it. The children worked continuously, but joyfully. No one made them come each morning.

Outside the toy shop lay hunger and cold, fog and soot, bullying and torments. In the streets and alleys and tenements life was lived by the law of strength, augmented by the rule of want.

Inside was warmth and kindness. Even Pilar’s stony look seemed a mask over a beating heart — but it was such a good mask that the children were afraid to take chances with her wrath. Snap was a massive presence at the workbench, short and thick with muscle, with fingers that were always bleeding a little from scrapes and punctures given to him by slivers of brass or steel or wood, but ignored in his fierce concentration. From time to time he would look up and smile, at Pilar or one of the children, but his eyes always turned quickly back to his task.

Inside there was food, simple and not plentiful, but always there, always to be counted on.  And work, unending, undemanding, unpaid. In the mind of each child there arose a formula, as sure and unrelenting as algebra — work equals warmth, work equals food, work equals safety from the world outside the shop, work equals acceptance.

Work equals self-worth.

Symphony 122

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The sex ed. class was scheduled for April twenty-first, a Friday. The whole day was skewed by the class; other subjects were shortened and shifted to leave the last two hours of the day free.

The girls went first, while Tom Wright took the boys out for an extended P.E. period. The boys class was scheduled to last right up until the busses left, so they would have no time to stand around and paw the ground while comparing notes, nor to search out the girls and harass them with their new knowledge.

The girls entered the room in a state of high nervous tension. Neil had the same feeling. He sat at one side of the room where he could be seen and ignored. For the most part, the girls chose to pretend he wasn’t there.

Fiona laid down the ground rules. “Today we are all going to see a film about growing up, and the changes your bodies go through when you do. Mr. McCrae will be here for the film and for the question period afterward so that he can give us a man’s perspective. If you have any questions you want to ask him, feel free. The same goes with me. Today, you may ask any question at all. There are no stupid questions and no embarrassing questions. We want you to know the facts. If you wait to ask your friends these questions, chances are they won’t know any more than you do. Now is the time to ask.”

Fiona turned on the video. It was quite good for that age group. Parts of it were outdated; the black teenagers still wore Afro hairdos and the clothing was out of style. It used young actors telling each other their problems in a story setting to cover acne, the awkwardness of a first date, growth spurts, and all of the other “safe” aspects of the children’s budding sexuality.

The more “hard-core” sexual topics were sandwiched between the less threatening ones. Accurate but faceless and impressionistic drawings showed external sexual characteristics, and showed a comparison of the growth cycles of two girls, one maturing early, the other maturing late. Menstruation was explained, and the narrator gave the girls advice on how to treat their periods. The internal sexual organs, sperm and eggs, and the cycle of reproduction were also shown by drawings. The male sexual organs were shown in an unshaded line drawing as they went from rest to erection and then to orgasm. However, as the penis became erect, its tip ended up off camera so the spurting of semen was not seen.

In all, it was accurate but bland, slightly boring, and quite non-threatening.

After the first three minutes, the girls forgot Neil was there and he could observe them at his leisure. They had come a long way this year, but some of them still had a long way to go. Rita Morales had had her fourteenth birthday in February. She was tall, slender, and her breasts were fully formed. If she did not begin to control herself, she would probably be pregnant within the year. Rosa Alvarez took in the film the way she did her math, as something she needed to know and intended to remember. There was no evidence on her face that it meant anything personal to her. Stephanie Hagstrom looked on with the intentness of someone who already knew the outline and was filling in the blank spaces. Skinny, tiny, undeveloped Randi Nguyen sat fidgeting and looking around for something more interesting. Her hormones had not yet kicked in, and this video was a matter of complete indifference to her. more tomorrow

Symphony 121

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“If Oscar doesn’t stop acting stupid now, stupidity is going to become a reality for him in a few years.”

“So tell him.”

“I have, repeatedly. It doesn’t do any good, because he wants to be stupid.”

Teixeira slammed his chair back as he got up. “That is the most preposterous thing I have ever heard. I think I know what will cure Oscar. I’ll pull him out of this ridiculous little school and transfer him to some place that can handle him.”

“John.”

“What!”

“If a witness on the stand were to suddenly start to sweat and become defensive, what would you think?”

John Teixeira paused with his hand on the door. He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. Neil could see the point go home. He looked back at Neil, puzzled by his own over-reaction.

“John,” Neil continued in a mild voice, “Oscar isn’t just playing dumb. He’s playing dumb Mexican.”

Teixeira’s voice was ominous as he said, “Exactly what does that mean?”

“I’ve worked with Oscar for eight months now, but I’ve only met you a few times. I can’t say I know you well, but this is the impression I get. You are Chicano. Your skin says it, your name says it, the shape of your face says it — but absolutely nothing else about you says it. You dress white, talk white, shake hands white, live white, walk white. You probably pee white, if you’ve been able to find any difference. In everything you say and do, you are telling your son that to be successful, to be intelligent, he has to be Anglo. He can’t be both Chicano and bright. I think you have forced him to make a choice between those two, when no choice was necessary. And I think he has chosen to be Chicano.

“John, I don’t think I can help him. I don’t think anyone can but you. You have to teach him he can be both Chicano and bright, both Chicano and successful. And you can’t just tell him. I think you are going to have to stop being afraid to be a Chicano yourself, before you can reach out to your son.”

Teixeira slammed the door behind him on the way out.

Neil sat back, discouraged and angry with himself. He should have sugar coated his words so that Teixeira would listen to them. By throwing them out like an accusation, he had probably destroyed any chance of helping Oscar.

# # #

Neil continued to watch Oscar’s lack of progress, and to search for a solution that did not require a change of heart on John Teixeira’s part. Then, a week later, Oscar came to Neil and said, “What are we going to do for Cinco de Mayo this year?”

“I don’t know. I never thought about it. Do you normally do something to celebrate it?”

“Of course!”

“What?”

Oscar described some of the things that had been done in previous years. It was all Neil could do to keep the triumph out of his face, but he managed to look disinterested as he said, “That sounds pretty lame.”

“Lame! Cinco de Mayo is as important to us Chicano’s as the Fourth of July is to you Anglos.”

“Tell me why.”

Oscar tried to explain, but he was intelligent enough to realize that his arguments were based on emotion and empty of fact. When he had ground to a halt, Neil smiled and reached out to squeeze his shoulder. “Oscar, I said the celebrations you used to do sounded lame. I did not make fun of Cinco de Mayo itself. I just think it needs to be presented better. Now, here is what I want you to do . . .” more tomorrow

478. Poetic Writing

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           People, I think, read too much to themselves; they should read aloud from time to time to hear the language, to feel the sounds.
          Homer told his stories accompanied by the lyre, and it was the best way, I think, to tell such stories. Men needed stories to lead them to create, to build, to conquer, even to survive, and without them the human race would have vanished long ago.
                               Louis L’amour  The Lonesome Gods  pp. 115-116

I am writing this on February 12th, to publish on April 9th. All the slots until then are filled with posts about teaching and space exploration, all tied, more or less, to my teaching novel that is winding down over in Serial.

I have also been reading The Lonesome Gods, for the umpteenth time, where I ran across the quote above. It was timely, since I just stayed up late last night finishing a poem that has been rattling around my computer for about five years, and placed it into a post. It will come out next week, keyed to the anniversary of the event that inspired it.

Old fashioned rhyming poetry can be wonderful, but it often suffers when the poet has to fight to fit content to rhyme. Modern poetry doesn’t seem like poetry at all to me. I often like it for what it has to say, but if you can retype it into your computer minus the return-key strikes, and turn it into a good opening paragraph for a story that never got written, how is that poetry?

Everyone in the world disagrees with me on this, but that’s okay. I’m used to that.

My favorite type of poetry is rhythmic, without slavishly following a pattern. Think Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, or Rabindranath Tagore. I follow their lead, without aspiring to their quality. I am a novelist by moral necessity. Poems just come to me, and not too often.

My favorite type of prose is poetic in its rhythms. L’amour often reaches that peak, but not consistently. The quotation above, about poetic language, doesn’t rise to poetry. The opening paragraphs of Bendigo Shafter do:

          Where the wagons stopped we built our homes, making the cabins tight against the winter’s coming. Here in this place we would build our town, here we would create something new.
          We would space our buildings, lay out our streets and dig wells to provide water for our people. The idea of it filled me with a heartwarming excitement such as I had not known before.

Of course it doesn’t hurt that the content is the American Dream. Also from The Lonesome Gods, this passage strikes me as poetic:

And now I was back to the desert, back to the soaring mountains behind my house, back to the loneliness that was never lonely, back to the stillness that held silent voices that spoke only to me.     p. 202

When I was a new writer, I rested my fevered brain between writing sessions with Louis L’amour, because his westerns were completely different from the fantasy and science fiction I was writing. I learned a lot about poetry from him, along with a lot of cautionary tales about clunkers. I’ll spare you examples of those.

What he says in the top quotation is good advice for writers. Always read your own work aloud.

My writing goes roughly this way. First comes a draft that probably needs a lot of help. The second time through, I translate it into English — that is, I turn beagn into began, and Thmoas into Thomas. Feel free to skip that step if you don’t have dyslexic fingers. Then I run the spell checker. Finally I read it slowly, softly, and always out loud. By this time, my eyes have seen the page several times, but my ears are hearing it for the first time.

The ears will catch what the eyes miss.

Symphony 120

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His morning class was a constant struggle between Sean and Duarte, but their pulls on one another, however much they might disturb the harmony of the class, were counterbalanced by the steady driving purpose of Stephanie Hagstrom. She was the center around the which the whole class moved. She was unaware of this herself, but without her half of the music would have gone out of the class.

Oscar Teixeira was the center of the afternoon class, but he was a melody still looking for a key. Neil had watched Oscar for eight months now, and he knew that the boy was not trying to be difficult. Deliberately failing the CAT test had been out of character; it had been a message of desperation sent to his father.

From time to time, Neil talked with John Teixeira. It was not that he wanted to. He hated every minute he spent with that most irritating man, but as the year progressed Neil became more and more convinced that John Teixeira was the real problem in Oscar’s life.

# # #

Neil had a meeting with John Teixeira during the second week of April. Teixeira explained that he had come directly from the courthouse without taking time to go home. He gave the impression of a man on the move. Neil was sure that John Teixeira was exactly that; he was equally sure that John Teixeira wanted everyone to know that he was.

Teixeira was able and intelligent, but he was using his abilities to cloud the issue. Neil decided to attack the problem from that angle. He said, “John, the last time we talked, I went away feeling like I had been led around by the nose. I don’t think you meant to do that, but you strike me as a man who only tells what he wants to tell. You also strike me as someone who can hide the fact.”

“You aren’t a psychologist. I don’t know why I should tell you anything about my private life.”

“Fair enough. I am not a psychologist and I would be the last person to pose as one. I can’t make an instant diagnosis and ‘cure’ the boy like I was some kind of faith healer. But I have been teaching for five years. I have dealt with hundreds of students, and I might see something that would be useful.”

“I don’t know why we have to talk about Oscar’s home life at all. He has a great home life. His problems are at school.”  Teixeira’s face was closed. His mind was padlocked shut. His eyes were video cameras scanning the premises for intruders.

Neil had to get through that barrier before he could accomplish anything useful. He said, “Oscar is the only student who is faking stupid. He has a unique problem, so the cause must be unique to him. From what I’ve seen, the thing that sets Oscar Teixeira apart from the other students is that he is John Teixeira’s son.”

“That’s absolute nonsense. The thing that sets Oscar apart is that he is smarter than any of the rest of them.”

“He is intelligent; he’s probably the smartest child here. But he isn’t that much smarter than Stephanie Hagstrom or Tanya Michelson, and in two years time, Tasmeen and Rabindranath Kumar are going to run right past him. If he doesn’t stop acting stupid now, stupidity is going to become a reality for him in a few years.”

“So tell him.” more tomorrow

477. They Never Flew (2)

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NASP

Continuing from 472. Teaching Space and 474. They Never Flew (1), this post will discuss three manned space programs that never happened.

Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon were the presidents who took us into space. Whatever you think of any of them, they will always have that marked down on the positive side of their ledger.

Other presidents aspired to join them. How much of their thinking was patriotic for America, patriotic for all of mankind, or pure political calculation, is way outside the realm of my knowledge. I’m going to give them all benefit of the doubt and just talk about the programs themselves. You can spin motives any way that suits you.

Regan proposed NASP, the National AeroSpace Plane, also called the X-30. In his 1986 State of the Union, he said that we should produce a vehicle which would be “a new Orient Express that could, by the end of the next decade, take off from Dulles Airport and accelerate up to twenty-five times the speed of sound, attaining low earth orbit or flying to Tokyo within two hours.” It was an exciting idea, coming out of DARPA where it had begun as a black project.

NASP was supposed to produce two prototype planes, but neither was ever built. That doesn’t mean that it was a political scam. The technological difficulties of the project were staggering.

In detail, NASP was cutting edge. As an idea, the horizontal launch of a spacecraft was old in science fiction. There it was usually accomplished by electromagnetic technology, with ground based and powered launchers and only maneuvering fuel on the vehicle itself. See many early Heinleins, especially Starman Jones and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

One reason rockets take off vertically is to get mostly out of the atmosphere before achieving speed. That way, massive friction is only a reentry issue, when it can be used to advantage.

NASP was a jet, not a rocket. It had to operate primarily inside the atmosphere. This has the advantage of avoiding carrying oxidizer, but has a series of disadvantages. Friction heating is an obvious one. In addition, its engine would have to operate in three modes — as a relatively conventional jet at takeoff, as a ramjet once sufficient speed had been achieved, then as a scramjet (supersonic ramjet) once it passed the speed of sound.

At that time, no one had successfully built a scramjet, and NASP didn’t make it happen. The first scramjet, the X-43, made a brief flight in 2001, eight years after NASP was cancelled.

No one has successfully built a skin that can withstand reentry level heating on a continuous basis, either. NASP was too far ahead of its time. I spent a few years explaining to my kids how it was supposed to work — before it didn’t work, and silently crept away.

Then came Venturestar, which, if it had been successfully completed, would have done what the Space Shuttle was originally designed to do. It was to be a vertically launched, completely reusable, single stage to orbit vehicle with a wider and more efficient lifting body that would have allowed it to land, in emergencies, on shorter runways than the Space Shuttle.

To do all this, it would require new and untested technologies, including composite material LH tanks, a new tile-free heat resistant skin, and an aerospike engine. The project was divided into two parts. To demonstrate the feasibility of the new technologies, a one-third size, unmanned model of the VentureStar, called the X-33 was to be built and tested, and only then was a full sized VentureStar to be constructed.

Things did not go well. When the X-33 was partially completed a version of its composite LH tank was tested and failed to hold pressure. Alternatives existed, but the decision was made to cancel the project. The funding for the X-33 was a complex mixture of commercial and governmental funds, and continuation depended on all parties agreeing. That didn’t happen. The Air Force was still part of the mix, as with MISS and the Dyna-Soar, as with the black missions by the Space Shuttle, but their request for continued funding was denied. The Air Force eventually got the X-37b instead. The X-33, and with it the VentureStar, disappeared. For a view that the cancellation should not have happened, click this link.

From the perspective of a science teacher, VentureStar had been a godsend, full of all the excitement the Shuttle and NASP had lacked. Once it failed, my kids had no future in space that they could personally dream about.

Then came Project Constellation. By that time, my days as a teacher were coming to a close, so I did not have to face the daunting task of generating enthusiasm for a cobbled up rerun. Ares I, the small booster, was built out of Space Shuttle leftovers and Ares V, the large booster looked suspiciously like a Saturn V reboot. The Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle was an oversized Apollo capsule and the Altair moon lander was a LEM on steroids. Not only was Project Constellation going to do again what had been done forty years earlier, it was going to use essentially the same hardware.

I didn’t buy it. I didn’t try to sell it to my kids. It died four years after it was floated.

The future isn’t dead. The Space Launch System continues where Constellation failed and private enterprise has more strongly entered the mix. Today’s science teachers should be able to say, “You might be the first person on Mars,” with a straight face. I continue to hope.