The Northward Contrail

Ix-nay on the olex-Ray

For the last five years, hubby and I have gone down to Daytona for the 24-hour sports car race.  We had hoped this would have been our sixth year, and if it had come to pass, we'd be shoving off after I finish work today.

But this year we'll be watching it from home.  There's a few reasons for this.  One is more obvious than all the others: with a full-time gig for him yet to materialize, we've had to really economize, and this year's race was one of the casualties.  That's the main reason we're not going: it's not a good idea to invest in a hotel room, tickets, gas money, food and so forth when times are this lean for us.  (For the record, we're not in any kind of danger, but until things get better we're being more judicious than before about how we spend what's left over after bills and groceries.)

There have been some other annoyances that have dinged our enjoyment of the event, too.  Perhaps the foremost has been that the race now starts in mid-afternoon, which means it ends mid-afternoon.  Not good if home is a half-day away and you have to be at work bright and early.  Back when it started and ended at noon or 1 pm, it worked fine.  Now it means killing a lot of time in the stands on Saturday afternoon and leaving the track on Sunday with two hours of race still left to run.  (It meant we both missed a really thrilling finish last year, and that's something I'm still miffed with the race organizers about having to miss.)

We'll be watching it on television this year, and though we'll miss being there, we still plan to make the most of it.  When we're in Daytona for the race, we stay for the start of the race, watch for a couple hours, then go get something to eat at one of our favorite haunts.  Then it's over to the Barnes and Noble across from the track for dessert and browsing, and then back for a few hours of the night stage.  So this weekend, I'll find a way to mimic the experience in more familiar surroundings.  I haven't decided if it'll be pizza or Tex-Mex, but it'll be fun nonetheless. 

I'll miss the fun that comes with walking down the front stretch as the cars come tearing past, but it's a sacrifice that has to be made.  Besides, by watching it on television, I'll be interested to see how much we miss seeing when we're up in the stands.

No downlink

For spaceflight enthusiasts, this is a tough time of year.  The three big accidents in American spaceflight history -- Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia -- all happened either at the end of January or the start of February.  (To add to the eerie nature, Columbia's final crew paid an on-orbit tribute to those astronauts a few days before they themselves joined their fallen comrades.) 

The Apollo fire happened a few years before I was born, so that was already the stuff of yesteryear when I became aware of the space program and got interested in space and aviation.  I remember the run-up to STS-1 fairly well and remained interested until Shuttle flights became more or less routine.  I lost interest and went on to other things.  Then, one cold January day, I was at school and the rumors started to fly around the lunchroom.  We didn't have televisions in all our classrooms (and we could only get piped-in instructional television over the closed circuit system, anyway), so we weren't able to see anything.  In my next class, the teacher said there had been an accident with the Space Shuttle, the one the teacher was going up on.  Then, at the end of the day, the assistant principal confirmed it during the end-of-day announcements. 

My brother picked me up from school and we listened to the news coverage during the drive home, and then spent the rest of the day watching the coverage on television.  We must have seen the replay of the explosion a dozen times or more.  We watched President Reagan give his famous speech, as it happened.  And after the coverage ended, life kind of went on.  There were special reports later in the evening, of course, but it was surreal to have been watching all this coverage of this horrific thing, only to be sitting there hours later watching Moonlighting.  I remember having trouble trying to reconcile that.  

And that's where my life changed, though I didn't know it.  Challenger had the perverse effect of rekindling my interest in spaceflight and aviation.  In some way, every turn my life has taken since was because of that awful thing.  The trajectory of my life -- and it's a wonderful life -- but that trajectory changed because of this terrible occurrence. 

I've never been sure how to feel about that.  I know about how big things have tiny starts, the whole "a butterfly flaps its wings" thing, and I know the world turns and things happen, but it's still weird.  And I wish this trajectory, which has brought me a wonderful life with great joy and discovery, hadn't been instigated by the deaths of seven space travelers.

Abandon in peace

Forty-three years ago tonight, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were killed in the fire aboard the Apollo 1 spacecraft at Cape Canaveral's Pad 34.  There's not much left of Launch Complex 34 these days, and what's left has been abandoned. 

This is how 34 looked two years ago.  It's hallowed ground, and its eerie silence speaks volumes.  Now, as nature reclaims it, the floral tributes come on their own.  Rest in peace, 34.

It's delicate, but potent

Nostalgia.  It's delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, "nostalgia" literally means "the pain from an old wound." It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship. It's a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel.  It's called the Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved. -- Don Draper

I write a great deal on here about nostalgia.  I guess you'd expect that from someone who's, at heart, a historian.  Sometimes nostalgia is welcome.  Other times, it's as welcome as neuralgia.  But, despite your best efforts, it'll still come up and whack you in the knee and leave you in the floor in tears.  And, often, when you least need it.  It doesn't have to be anything that big, either: just a word someone says, or a whiff of some kind of food you haven't had in years, or hearing a song. 

This happened to me last Thursday.  Hubby and I were watching The Office, as we normally do, and last week's was a clip show. Near the end, there was a montage of clips chronicling the romance between Jim and Pam, backed by the song "Sing" by Travis (which was played during a Season Two episode, before Jim and Pam became a couple, as they listened to it together on an iPod in a quietly sweet little scene).  It's a slow, sweet song, the kind of song you fall in love to when you're in your twenties.  It haunted me the first time I saw that episode, and it was the backing track during the whole two- or three-minute montage during the clip show as you followed all those years of the relationship, all the ups and downs, on through the wedding, as Pam and Jim go from a couple of smitten twentysomethings to a married couple with a baby on the way.

I know how silly it is for those kinds of things to make me get misty-eyed.  But, though I'm hard-boiled cynical, I can still be a marshmallow inside, and it made me think of the last decade and all the things hubby and I have been through together -- how our relationship grew from something kind of goofy into something strong and really special, how (like Pam) I went from being shy and somewhat inhibited and not terribly self-confident into someone who's grown up a little more and become a little more assertive (or, in my case, at least a little less inhibited and good at least at acting self-confident at the right times), and all the moments we've shared together, the little everyday moments that, when we look back, we didn't realize when they happened just how special they were.  But we shared them as we built the life we have together.  Then one day, you get the pictures out, or tell the stories, and you realize just how big those little moments were.  It's like your very own three-minute montage set to music, as you realize all those "ordinary" moments added up to an awful lot that was, and is, special.

The next morning, as "Sing" still echoed in my head, I couldn't help thinking of Don Draper's pitch for the Kodak Carousel.  The pictures in your head are like those slides in the projector, and your mind is a time machine.  It does, indeed, take you back to a place you ache to go again.  And it makes you wish that, at certain moments, you'd have appreciated them more than you did when they happened.  On the other hand, you wonder if they'd mean as much now if you had.  Maybe when you're in the moment, you're too close to appreciate it...and perhaps, like certain spirits, it has to age a bit. 

But, at the same time, you must keep in mind the folly of nostalgia...its sepia tones are very good at making you forget all the rotten things that went along with the times you remember.  It's the Horace Ford syndrome, and part of why, the older I get, the more I sort of hate nostalgia.  Yes, I think back to those special moments, and how I'd love to re-live some of those feelings from back then.  But the more I think about it, some of them took place in some really rotten circumstances.  I wouldn't, for instance, want to go back and live where we lived then, or deal with some of the background stresses and uncertainties.  Certainly not when what I live in now is pretty darn good.

Nostalgia.  It's delicate, but potent.  And dangerous.  It's fun to take the memories out every once in a while, but do it too much and you miss the wonder around you now.  That's a lesson I really need to remember more than I sometimes do.

It's bound to happen someday

Okay, when it comes to certain things in which I'm interested, I can get slightly obsessed.  (Don't parse the grammar in that sentence, please.  I beg you.)  I'll be the first to admit it.  Those who know me also know this.  For instance, my friend with whom I met up in Seattle last year has heard me go on and on about "Queenie," the VC-137B at the Museum of Flight.  It's almost become a running joke.  I just hope that, someday, this doesn't happen during one of our conversations: