Tag Archives: memoir

38. Sidetracked by Mark Twain

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200px-Beowulf.firstpageMark Twain said:     (see posts 18, 19, and 20)     “(In the beginning a writer) has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He . . . can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself . . .”      

Been there; done that. Spirit Deer and Jandrax presented themselves to my typewriter with reasonable speed and ease. My third work, Valley of the Menhir, was a kakai of a different color.

          (Kakai – the native riding beast of the World of the Menhir.)

VOTM actually came to me about three years before I had any idea of becoming a novelist. I was stationed at a California naval base and my wife was with me. She was working at the base library and taking a reference librarian class at a local junior college. I took it with her, for company. One night in the college library, waiting for her to finish her work, bored, I took down a copy of Beowulf. I opened the book and the words “all that lonely winter . . .” jumped out at me.

I slammed the book shut and put it away. I didn’t know what part of the story I was in, or what the actual context was, and I didn’t care.

I had had a vision of a young boy in the open window of a stone tower, looking out across a leafless, snow bound landscape. He was newly an orphan. The master of the tower had saved him, but in doing so, the boy had become captive to his world’s expectations. He would now have to spend his childhood in preparation for gaining revenge on the slayer of his father. But he wanted no revenge. His only feelings for his cold and distant father was a vague fear, even now that he was dead.

I wasn’t a novelist yet, but I knew a story when I saw one. I didn’t know I would still be haunted by it forty-some years later.

More next post.

34. A Very Young Teacher

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101One sultry afternoon in late spring the principal came running into my ninth grade classroom and shouted, “Boys, get on the bus. There’s a prairie fire.” All the boys from all four grades – about fifty of us – piled into the school bus and roared off west of town. Local farmers with milk cans of water in their pickups and bales of gunny sacks were already there. We grabbed wet sacks and went to work, and during the next three hours we fought the fire to a standstill.

Not one boy hesitated and not one parent complained. Small town Oklahoma in 1962 was a very different place than anywhere in America today. It was a good place to grow up if you wanted to become a man, and the sooner the better.

Two years later, I was one of two students in second year German when the English and German teacher was severely injured in a car accident. He was out for six weeks. The only substitute teacher in the area was a million years old, and she didn’t speak German. She got the job.

About the second day, the principal pulled me aside and said, “I want you to teach the first year German class.” I said yes. Then or now, I can’t imagine giving any other answer.

He put the substitute into the library during the hour German was taught and pulled me out of the class I was supposed to be in. It was tough. My German wasn’t as strong as it should have been, but it got better fast. Every night I typed up worksheets on my old manual typewriter, and every morning the school secretary made copies. I worked the kids hard and put up with a lot of silliness. A class full of sophomores is never going to really listen to a junior, even when the principal comes in regularly.

Can you imagine the lawsuits if that were to happen today? After about a week, the principal asked me how I was doing. I said, “It’s working. I’m studying at night, staying one chapter ahead of them, and trying to seem like I know more than I do.”

He patted me on the shoulder and said, “Son, that’s how we all do it.”

33. Here Come the Bombs

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170px-Fat_man

I was a child of the cold war. I loved science, science fiction and I studied atom bombs with a gleeful avidity that embarrasses me as I look back on it. Our nearest city was Tulsa, which would probably have been a target, but we were forty miles away and no one took the Russian threat seriously except me; and I wasn’t scared, just fascinated.

Eventually my high school spent an hour on Civil Defense training. I was a sophomore, but they gave it to me to present. That kind of thing could happen fifty years ago in a small school when none of the teachers knew anything about a subject and didn’t want to learn, but just wanted to check off an obligation to the state bureaucracy.

It was my first experience with a captive audience. I can still see the looks of massive boredom as I explained what we could expect if Tulsa got hit.

In literature, this period saw the beginning of a subgenera that might be called what terrible tragedy will technology visit upon us next? Next. Not someday, but tomorrow. This immediacy drove some of these novels into best seller status, and fed Hollywood with movie plots.

Fail-Safe detailed an inadvertently launched airstrike by the US against Russia. It’s ending was chilling, but unbelievable. On the Beach was all too believable, a slow downsliding as nuclear survivors in the far southern hemisphere succumb one by one to fallout. In its final pages, the elegiac tone resembles the empty Earth after all the transformed children have gone in Clarke’s Childhood’s End.

Believability was not an issue in Level Seven. Told in academic prose, the story of a group of scientists sent to the deepest level of the most advanced fallout shelter unfolds with the unemotional certainty of an equation as these men of science carry on their lives deep underground while all life on the surface has been destroyed.

I had read these books and understood their messages, but I was a teenager. I wanted light and life and excitement, interesting technical exposition, and a hopeful ending. That’s what Philip Wylie provided.

Wylie’s novel Tomorrow is the book I liked best. Most of what I gave to my long-suffering fellow students at that high school event came from it. There were bombs, there was massive destruction, but there was also survival. Wylie’s Tomorrow ended with hope.

A real nuclear strike would not have been so benign. Looking back over fifty years, I still can’t believe any of us got out of the twentieth century alive.

31. Discovering Khyyam

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412px-033-Earth-could-not-answer-nor-the-Seas-that-mourn-q75-829x1159My novel A Fond Farewell to Dying opens with a quatrain from the Rubyiat of Omar Khyyam.

Oh, threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!
One thing is certain – This life flies;
        One Thing is certain and the rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has bloomed forever dies.
Khyyam/FitzGerald quatrain LXIII

It was the perfect setup for a book about people deeply aware of the fleetingness of life and trying to find their own kind of immortality.

Edward FitzGerald is the scholar whose translation of Khyyam is most widely known. He took a mass of unrelated quatrains, translated and arranged them, and gave them a unified voice. Although called a translator, he might better be called the co-author.

Khyyam was a Persian, but not a Muslim. He was one of the leaders of the old order, recently deposed by Muslim conquest. This accounts for the wine bibbing and the questioning attitude toward God, which otherwise would seem odd, even dangerous, among the Sultans, camels, turbans, and oases which fill the poems.

I first encountered Khyyam on a high school field trip to visit nearby University of Tulsa. I managed to sneak a moment in the university bookstore, and bought the most interesting paperback I could lay hands on quickly. It was the Rubiyat. I read it on the bus ride home and was immediately hooked.

The Rubiyat is the perfect book for a questioning young man just beginning to find his own voice and his own mind. Khyyam questions authority; in fact, he questions the ultimate authority, God himself. It is not a book for atheists though, unless they are simply looking for literary support for their opinions. Khyyam was no atheist. You can’t call God to task as he does, unless you believe in Him.

Oh, Thou who Man of baser Earth didst make,
And ev’n with Paradise devise the Snake:
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken’d – Man’s forgiveness give – and take!
Khyyam/FitzGerald quatrain LXXXI

A book full of rebelliousness will catch a young man’s eye, but it is the beauty and wisdom in every line which makes it remain a treasure in later life.

29. Worthy of Praise

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WOPI started out to be a scientist, then defined myself as a writer, but along the way I became a teacher. Not an educator; that term is ruined for me by the fools in high places who have all but destroyed our schools.

I want to acknowledge some of my own teachers, but since I didn’t live a traditional childhood, this won’t be traditional praise. None of what follows will make sense unless you remember that my elementary school class had only eight students and my consolidated high school only brought the number up to thirty-seven. A larger school would have led to a different experience, even in Oklahoma in the early sixties.

My typing teacher was tough, knuckle slapping perfectionist, and she wasn’t afraid of public opinion. We called her The Warden. She was the only teacher who ever gave me a B. Dyslectic fingers killed me, no matter how hard I tried. She gave me exactly what I deserved and I respected her for it.

Later, when I was teaching science, my favorite exercise was a long term project where students had to build a gizmo to perform some physical feat. It was different every year, and they could only build it in class to keep their parents’ sticky fingers out of the works. Every year kids who only knew computer games and multiple-choice tests found themselves depending on their teammates who knew how to use hammers and wrenches. It was humbling to them; I smiled serenely and remembered The Warden.

My math teacher had a sense of fun. Whenever an unknown appeared in an equation, he would draw something barely recognizable as the back view of a bunny and say “That represents the number of rabbits in Rogers County”. His grin was infectious; he always looked like he was about to break into laughter. He kept us moving at top speed and made it impossible to hate or fear math. From him, I learned how to teach.

In science, I typically had read the textbook by the fourth week. I sat quietly in class and answered only enough questions to show I knew the material, then let the other students take their turns. My science teacher’s gift to me was trust. He let me work in the lab unsupervised except for his presence next door. I spent my study halls there building science projects, and that is where my science education really happened.

My English teacher gave me similar freedom out of a mixture of wisdom and laziness. I turned in every assignment early and better than required; in exchange I frequently wandered the school at will when I was supposed to be in his classes. I would never let one of my students do that, but it worked for me. I spent my time running errands for teachers, building things for the school, or working in the science lab.

It would have been a disaster for most kids, but it was the perfect education for me.

At home, my parents were hyper-controlling. Freedom was not an option. When I scored high on the National Merit Scholarship test and wanted to go to Michigan State University, they would not let me apply. It would have let me to move beyond their control.

My high school counselor let me fill out the application forms in his office and use the school as a return address, so my parents would not know until it was too late. He was putting his career in jeopardy, but I think he saved my life.

27. That Was My Childhood

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1280px-Apollo_11_Lunar_Module_Eagle_in_landing_configuration_in_lunar_orbit_from_the_Command_and_Service_Module_ColumbiaIt was pledge week at PBS. They ran the biography of Neil Armstrong for the upteenth time. My wife and I watched it for about the third time, and when it was over, she said, “That was my childhood.”

I knew exactly what she meant. She and I were soul mates long before we met. Pardon the corn, but it’s true. She grew up in Michigan and I grew up in Oklahoma; we met in college. But when we were children, we were both science nuts long before Sputnik. We both repeatedly checked out Vinson Brown’s How to Make a Home Nature Museum and followed the instructions. We both checked out books on how to grind the lens on your own reflecting telescope, but neither of us made one because we didn’t have the money to buy the glass blanks.

On October 4, 1957, Russia orbited their first satellite. I was in fifth grade when the teacher went up to the front of the room and wrote Sputnik on the board. She said it meant Earth-moon in Russian. It didn’t, but we knew almost nothing about the Russians then. A few days later, she wheeled a cart into the room. It had beakers beneath, a tiny sink, and a hand pump. Oklahoma schools had instituted science as a middle school and elementary subject for the first time.

I kept track of every satellite we launched and every rocket that blew up on the pad. There were a lot of them. When the Russians launched Muttnik (the nickname was American) I was fascinated to see a living creature in space. All my schoolmates said only the stinking Russians would send a dog up there to die.

I watched the Mercury astronauts first press conference and quickly got to know them all. I was thrilled when Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth. Everybody wrung their hands because a Russians got there first, but I didn’t care. We were in space – and we meant people, not Americans.

I watched Shepard’s and Grissom’s launches, and cheered when Grissom didn’t go down with his capsule. In Michigan, my future wife was collecting every magazine that covered the Mercury program.

I was at school while John Glenn was in orbit, so I missed something monumental in our family history. My father, who thought the space program was a waste of money, got off his tractor and came in to watch the televised coverage. He later said, “I just couldn’t work until we got that old boy back safe.”

The rest of Mercury, Gemini, the beginnings of Apollo – I never missed a mission.

I had discovered ecology, at a time when nobody knew what the word meant. I spent my junior year building an Ecosystem Operable in Weightlessness for the regional science fair. It was complicated, cutting edge, and more than I could actually complete by fair day. I won’t bore you with the details, but it helped get me a Fleming Fellowship the following summer. That gave me a chance to work with real scientists and to see some of the world beyond my tiny town. Those were the people who suggested I should apply to Michigan State.

At MSU the Biology department cared nothing about ecology. I was a few years too early; if you didn’t need an electron microscope to see something, it wasn’t interesting – to them. The closest thing to behavioral biology was Anthropology, and that is where I ended up. And where I found my wife.

We married in 1969 and took off for a long drive around the US, visiting relatives and national parks. We got back to to East Lansing in mid-July, following Apollo 11 on the car radio. On July 20 went went in to the student lounge of her old dorm and sat with dozens of college students watching a grainy black and white TV as Neil Armstrong set his foot on the moon.

*****

If you are old enough to remember those days, or younger and want more information, I recommend Jay Barbree. For fifty years, he was the voice of the space program for NBC news. In 1995 he received an award from NASA for being the only reporter to cover every manned spaceflight in US history. More importantly, he was the reporter the astronauts trusted.

Barbree has written Neil Armstrong (2014) and Live from Cape Canaveral (2007). His prose is only workmanlike, but his first hand knowledge is unparalleled.

Barbree’s personal friendship with Armstrong gives his biography an authenticity and intimacy that could not be provided by any other writer, and the same is true of Live from Cape Canaveral. Chapter nine of that book, ”I’ve got a fire in the cockpit!”, is required reading for anyone whose heart broke the day of the Apollo One fire, and a sharp reminder that we later lost two space shuttles because of lessons not learned.