I had a trial-retirement day. Took PTO, because I have use it or lose it - a phrase I hate for its banality and accuracy, and because it’s always deployed with a know-it-all tone - so I did not have to go to the office.
I went to the office.
But only to work out. That’s where my gym is, and I wanted to do everything. The run, all the clanking, the new painful-but-successful set of bicep curls with the 30 lbs. I couldn’t do that when I was in my 20s. Maybe now and then, but daily? Forget about it. Maybe I didn’t try enough. Maybe, back then, I wasn’t juicing. (Kidding.) So I just drove downtown, got my stuff from my cubicle, worked out, and went home. It felt odd. Empty.
Hey, though, if you retire, you could have a new gym! There’s one close to home. Or, Southdale! Big palatial Lifetime there. Has an herbal bar or something. But here’s the thing: I would remove one place from my usual routines, and then go more often to the other usual area. This sounds so incredibly boring.
The mood of the entire day was dissatisfaction with everything. Irritation! Plane noise! Carpal-tunnel pain! Boring breakfast! Predictable Lunch! The drive to the office, the same old walk from parking! Gah! And then . . . at the end of the third rep of the 30s, THAT SONG.
Apple Music assembles playlists of things it thinks you’d like, and things it knows you like. It will dig into your library and toss out something that had been unheard for years, and the memories pour of the bottle the notes have tipped over. It was from the Icelandic Air playlist, of all things. When we took Icelandic Air I was impressed by their music channel, and noted the songs for later. The song brought back the emotion of being on the plane, going home, my camera full of pictures of all of us doing things and being in places, all those marvelous adventures. There was so much happiness in knowing it had happened. To be honest, happiness in knowing I could now sort and archive and write about it, too.
It’s been a long time. And it’s also ridiculous to miss all that because we literally took a family trip abroad three and a half months ago. But perhaps you know what I mean: you go a long time without thinking about the time your child was young, and then, oh, you think about it. You realize you think about it less - you simply must - and while that’s probably good, it gives you a little jolt of manic panic, as if the memories and moments drifted out of sight and you have to go gather them up, or they’ll be lost. And they will! Eventually. Unless you write it down and sort and name the photos and edit the video. It’s your only hope to keep it from turning into fog that dissipates in the great dark forest.=
Occasionally I come across the folders where I keep my Mom and Dad’s pictures, and look at them. The process of resurrection here is remarkable, when you think about it - lightwaves bounced off your Dad and entered a glass disc and fell upon a piece of paper, which was turned into a small square with bits of light and dark. The light bounces off that, into your eyes, gets translated to electricity, and sent off to the relevant bits of smart meat in your skull, which reconstruct an entire personality, adds the sound of a voice and the smell of a gasoline.
It is magic. Just the way a few notes of a long-forgotten song make you think of being up at 30,000 feet in the air, above the clouds, heading home, your family beside you reading books, ready for a meal in the sky. And that wasn’t even as good as it got.
And then, when you think of it all like this, your irritation with the day is turned to gratitude, and you call up the song again, and make your peace with it.
Our weekly recap of a Wikipedia peregrination. Expect no conclusion or revelations, but if you've been with us since this started last year, you know . . . sometimes we learn interesting things.
So! How do we get from here - a "Flying Disk" someone spotted in the sky -
. . . to there?
1947. Saucer hysteria is underway.
This piece ends in an odd way:
What? What does he tell himself? We don’t know. It’s never said. The article ended there.
The same page has some editorial observations:
The editorial page noted that there have been sightings before - notably, the Edison Light question of 1933.
And this:
Well, the War of the Worlds story was only 8 years old. But let’s see what Alley Oop had to say.
That doesn’t seem relevant. None of the strips for the week seem relevant.
The next day’s paper: Kenneth Arnold hits the front page:
BIO:
Kenneth Albert Arnold (March 29, 1915 – January 16, 1984) was an American aviator, businessman, and politician.
He is best known for making what is generally considered the first widely reported modern unidentified flying object sighting in the United States, after claiming to have seen nine unusual objects flying in tandem near Mount Rainier, Washington on June 24, 1947. After his alleged sighting, Arnold investigated reports of UFOs, writing and speaking about the topic for years to come.
In 1962, Arnold won the Republican Party's nomination for Lieutenant Governor of Idaho, losing in the general election.
From a dense and rambling blogpost I couldn’t quite get through, an explanation for Arnold’s sightings:
In The Mammoth Book of UFOs (2001), author Lynn Picknett dedicated several pages to my article and this was Lynn's summation:
In the intervening half century or so, there have been many attempts to explain Kenneth Arnold's watershed saucer sighting, but perhaps British UFOlogist James Easton has come closer than most to discovering the true nature of what Arnold saw all those years ago. In a tour de force of research, he has set out the stages of his detective work, revealing the possibility that the "screwy formation... of nine flying disks" were, in fact, a flock of white pelicans flashing in the sunlight.
Annnnnd the next day, it’s Roswell.
But here’s what I find interesting, because I never knew such a thing existed. A 1947 ad for a home entertainment machine.
A wire recording feature? That’s right: you could set it to record your favorite programs. A VCR for radio, in 1947.
Or recording the family, singing.
And that's how we got from here to there.
Take me Home, Mountain Home
As I’ve said, I clip these and put them away and get back to them a year later. Usually there’s no idea why I went there, although it’s sometimes apparent - a bank, a restaurant, a motel. In this case it took me a while to retrace my steps, and figure out what I was going.
So:
An earlier view . . .
And then voila, the current day.
If it’s a playground, it looks like it does double duty as a municipal incinerator.
Some things are just inscrutable. I guess I screenshotted this, then thought . . .
Did it used to look different, with a suggestion of a door, or an accent, or was someone entombed in the building as punishment?
An old sign from the optimistic jet / space age era of signage:
The rest of the building, with an overscaled bit of “landscaping” to bring the folks back downtown.
A fine old two-story early 20th century commercial building is trapped behind the hee-haw Buckaroo revival, and there’s no way it’s getting out.
The logo is venerable, a hundred years old - or at least it’s borrowing gravitas from the old typefaces of that era.
The building is not something from which anyone will borrow ideas. Ever.
There you go! Something nice and BIG - three stories always looks twice as big as two. And patriotic, too.
The present view: landscaped! Made all the difference, I’m sure.
Side view.
The flags are nice, but they suggest that no one’s actually using any of those offices.
Probably because they aren’t.
Rode hard and flayed alive:
Now. Better.
And that, my friends, is all I could get out of Mountain Home.
Take me Home, Mountain Home
