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Slip Slidin’ Away.

Author: October 30, 2024 6 Comments

The only time in my life I’ve ever eaten anything from White Castle is when a truck handing out free samples showed up near where I work a few years ago. Even when I was a kid I thought small square sliders only came from Krystal, which, having been founded in the south, was more common around here even if White Castle had been around longer.

I’m not saying I contributed to the demise of the White Castle on the corner of White Bridge Road and Charlotte Avenue here in Nashville—I’m just saying I didn’t help it survive. I’m a little sorry to see it go, though, because whenever I passed it I always remembered that one of the first times I saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show I’d never heard of or been to White Castle. So someone had to explain this audience participation bit to me:

AUDIENCE: WHAT’S WHITE AND SELLS HAMBURGERS?
BRAD MAJORS: Didn’t we pass a castle just up the road?

And seeing Rocky Horror in Nashville, or even in the Franklin Theater which is about twenty miles to the south, a lot of the audience’s line was a very local “SELLS HAMBURGERS ON WHITE BRIDGE ROAD?” Because there just weren’t that many White Castles in the area.

I was still young—especially compared to what I am now—and somewhat naïve but at least I understood what followed:

However it’s soon followed by one of the funniest audience participation lines:

JANET WEISS: I’m coming with you!
AUDIENCE: FOR A CHANGE!
JANET WEISS: Besides, darling, the owner of that castle might be a beautiful woman—
AUDIENCE: HE IS!

It’s a little strange to me that it’s now easier to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show than it is to find a White Castle. Or even a Krystal. But it’s definitely the healthier option.

Adventures In Busing., American Graffiti., Hail & Farewell.

Dance, Magic Dance.

Author: October 29, 2024 2 Comments

What’s the difference between a maze and a labyrinth? I never thought about it, aside from both being worth a lot in Scrabble even if only one is a potential starting word, until I found The Labyrinth Locator. And I was even more surprised to find that there were four near me—one so near me I could walk to it, and through it, on my lunch break.

Anyway the difference between a labyrinth and a maze is that a maze has multiple paths that may or may not lead to the center while a labyrinth has a single continuous path that leads to the center, which may come as a surprise to Jennifer Connelly, but that’s another story. Labyrinths are also often for quiet reflection and contemplation while mazes, like the corn ones that are popular this time of year or the one at Leeds Castle are for inducing panic if you can’t find your way out.

The infamous hedge maze of The Shining seems like the idea is to get to the center and then to find your way out, all while avoiding Jack Nicholson. Funny enough Stephen King’s original novel doesn’t have a hedge maze in it and The Stanley Hotel that inspired him didn’t either until 2015 when they started planting one but they’ve had a problem with the local elk eating it.

It also turns out the original labyrinth of Greek myth, the one built to hold the Minotaur, wasn’t a labyrinth but a maze which was supposedly so complicated no one could ever find their way out but all the sacrificial victims sent in would eventually find their way to the center. There were a lot of things about that myth that confused me. Was there a plan if the Minotaur did ever find its way out? And why did the bull-headed monster eat people? According to another myth King Nebuchadnezzar went through a phase of thinking he was a cow and ate grass. It seems to me like King Minos could have solved his problem by regularly throwing a few bales of hay into the labyrinth.

The labyrinth pictured here is the one at the Scarritt Bennett Center. I walked all through it, finding my way to the center and, as you can tell, it gave me a lot to contemplate.

Adventures In Busing., American Graffiti., Submitted For Your Approval.

Lesson In The Dark.

Author: October 28, 2024 2 Comments

 

Source: Visit Lincolnshire

Big Dave was a cab driver who ferried students back and forth between Harlaxton Manor, where I was going to school, and the nearby town of Grantham. He was called Big Dave partly because there was another cab driver for the same company also named Dave, and partly because Big Dave took up most of the front seat of his cab. He was a funny guy, always with a story to tell if we were willing to listen which, being college students, we weren’t always. One night there were four of us crammed into the back of his cab, all laughing because we’d had a fun night at one or more of Grantham’s pubs, which is why the details are hazy. Somehow we got onto the subject of The Loch Ness Monster.

“Come on,” I said. “There’s just no way a large creature could survive in Loch Ness.” I’d had, and still have, a fascination with The Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, UFOs, and even ghosts and read deeply on the subjects. I wanted to believe but all that reading had just shown me how thin the evidence was.

“You really don’t think so?” asked my friend James.

“It’s all rotten logs popping to the surface or schools of fish or people thinking they see something because they want to see somethng.” A few pints of Theakston’s Old Peculier had made me even more glib than usual, and I didn’t even notice the cab slowing down until Big Dave pulled over and stopped.

We were somewhere around halfway between Grantham and Harlaxton, the rolling hills of Lincolnshire on either side of the road, green in the daylight but a soft, muted gray under a sliver of moon.

Big Dave got out of the cab and climbed over the fence between the road and the hills and disappeared into a clump of trees.

“Is he just going to leave us here?” asked Liz. “What’s he doing?”

Regina said, “Well, I haven’t got a license and I’m not walking in the dark.” So she got out too and climbed over the fence. “Hey Big Dave! Are you gonna leave us here?”

James, Liz, and I looked at each other, shrugged, and followed.

During the day there were cows and sheep that roamed these fields but in the darkness all we could see was hills and stray wisps and mist. We started to walk toward the trees where Big Dave had gone but stopped when we heard his voice.

“You think there’s nothing in this world but what you can see, do yeh?” His voice was low and seemed to come from all around. “Nothing strange in it? Remember the time I was bitten by the only poisonous snake in Britain? Don’t yeh think it’s a miracle I survived?”

The only poisonous snake in Britain isn’t that poisonous but he’d had to drive to two different hospitals.

“How about the time I saw a will o’the wisp?”

What he’d seen was a young woman in a dark campsite using a penlight to look for a bracelet she’d dropped.

“And the werewolf.”

That was a naked man who’d locked himself out of his house just as Big Dave happened to be driving by.

“Maybe there’s logical explanations for all that but did yeh ever stop to think there just might be something…”

And he let out a loud scream. We all jumped and I’m pretty sure I let out a sound that could have broken glass as I felt something touch my shoulder. Big Dave had managed to sneak up right behind us in the dark.

Chuckling he climbed back over the fence and said, “Come on, kids, let’s get you lot home.”

We were all quiet and Big Dave didn’t say anything the rest of the ride until we turned onto the driveway. From the road to Harlaxton Manor it’s exactly one mile. As we were driving down it Big Dave said, “So none of you really believed I’d go off and leave yeh there, did yeh?”

We all laughed a big uncomfortably and said, no, of course we never thought that.

He pulled around to the front door, stopped the cab, and turned around to look at us.

“Then ask yerselves why yeh followed me out there into the field.”

And we could hear him laughing almost the whole mile as the cab drove away.

Adventures In Busing.

Under The Moonlight.

Author: October 26, 2024 2 Comments

Werewolves come in many forms, as anyone who’s read Sabine Baring-Gould’s Book Of Were-Wolves or, for that matter, encountered one—or maybe is one—knows. Some are genuinely frightening. Some are more afraid of you than you are of them. That was the inspiration for this poem.

Werewolf

He, my best friend and I, were just bouncing
A fuzzy gray ball that had lost most
Of its bounce back and forth. The dog,
The big sheepdog who lived next door,
Was in its own yard, just on the periphery.
It was always there like the broken sink
In the vacant lot we went to sometimes
To look down at our houses. And then
It jumped at him, knocked him down, that
Engine in its throat humming loud enough
To be heard over him screaming. I ran.
I couldn’t tell where he was under the dog.
I’d been told not to run, that was wrong,
But what was I supposed to do? His mother
Was already coming out right at me
And I got behind her. The dog was gone.
And then he was gone.
The big blue car came
Out from behind the house and he went in,
Still screaming, a towel pressed to his face
With a stain starting to come through.

I heard enough from what his mother told mine
To see what happened, why the dog was gone.
Two men from the pound came and stood
On his porch and stared at themselves
In the man’s wraparound sunglasses. I’d seen him
Through the slits in the fence that kept his back
Yard from the neighborhood, so I could see him
In his white t-shirt, V-neck, telling them they
Were welcome to take the dog if they were willing
To come in and get it. And they said they’d be back.

That was the summer of the drought. Toward school’s
End I watched the corn come up emerald then turn gold
In a field just past the road my street disappeared into.
A year later the field itself was replaced by turnkey
Condominiums, every other one painted yellow.

That was the summer my quarter-Cherokee grandmother
Pulled down from the overhead crawlspace an old book
Of tribal stories and I learned that in the beginning
The wolf and the man used to sit together by the fire,
Until the dog came down from the hills and drove
The wolf away. Now the wolf lives alone in the hills.

I had to pee. My dog and I were out
Together in the summer night, following each
Other and finding our way in the dark by smell and sound.
If I went back inside I’d lose my night vision
So I dropped my shorts by a tree and let go, the stream
Reflecting the pieces of streetlamp that came through
The trees. I couldn’t see the mark I left but I knew
It was there. My territory. I was zipping back up
When I heard my dog barking in the street. I ran,
And there she was with the man who lived two doors up
Pinned against his car. She went after him like a stranger.
Dammit! You’d better get this dog away from me
Or I swear I’ll do somethin’! I’ll kill it! I swear!”
He swore and leaned at me while I grabbed my dog
And put my face in her ruff and pulled her back to me.
It was time to go in. The next day I was in my front yard
When he came home. He came over and didn’t look
At me, just said, Son, I wanna apologize about last night.
I’m sorry. I just wasn’t myself. You understand. He raised
His fist and something gold flew from it, sparkling
And I caught a butterscotch medallion. I understood.
I knew more than he realized, had known since the first
Week of summer when I was coming up the back steps
To water the bean plants I’d brought home from school
In a paper cup where they’d sprout and die. I heard
My father talking, telling someone who’d dropped by
Something so serious I knew I shouldn’t be listening.

He’d been drinking all day.
Maybe around sunset he decided he
Wanted fried chicken for supper and sent
His wife out to get it. We hadn’t been here
That long and didn’t know any of this
Was going on. She was gone too long to suit
Him or something, I really don’t know, but while
She was gone he decided he was going to kill
Her when she got back. She
Got away somehow and came down to our
House. We let her in and he stood there on
The porch and yelled and swore. The kids were
Gone that night, away at camp. I called
The cops and it took eight of them to get him
Into one of their cars. She stayed with us
That night and told us, It’s over, he
Won’t do this to me ever again. We
Didn’t know it had happened before.
We saw them next week at the pool
Holding hands. She smiled, but he wouldn’t
Look at us. I thought, Never again.
They’re lucky it wasn’t worse than it ended
Up being with all those guns he has in there.”

This was news to me. I thought all attics
Were the same, webby with years of old clothes
And moth dust and naked bulbs over rivers
Of cotton candy insulation. Now I saw the inside
Of the three-cornered roof with blue-steel bars
Marching along the walls like corrugated wallpaper
Or bare columns propping the whole structure.

On the dead-end street late in summer
The world was hot and thick all night. Not even the moon
Frozen outside my window could cool it. In drought
Wind in the leaves sounds like footsteps.
You wake up believing someone else is in the house
And the phone is in the other room or dead.
There at the yard’s edge the jingle of metal
On metal means tags for rabies, or just
House keys, someone else coming home. Across
The street is the opal of a doorbell
Or a cigarette of someone blindfolded.
The movement I see in the window is my hands
Washing the dishes, the reflection imposed on
The brown stubble of the yard. If I went out
Water on my hands would freeze and break.
I keep all the doors locked from inside.

American Graffiti.

Unhaunted.

Author: October 25, 2024 2 Comments

House By The Railroad by Edward Hopper, 1925. Source: Wikipedia

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind—and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

—William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Any time I go into an old house I can feel the weight of years of lived memories. It’s not ghosts—I’m skeptical about their existence. When I was young I really believed in ghosts and really wanted to meet one, though I also didn’t want to meet one because that would be terrifying. Aside from Casper The Friendly Ghost most of the ghosts I’d read about or seen on TV or in the movies were terrifying, or at least as terrifying as semi-translucent wisps can be. And anyway most of them turned out to be Old Man Jenkins who would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids, but that’s another story.

To get back to what I was saying old houses always seem to have a certain character from years of being lived in. No matter how much people scrub, clean, vacuum, sweep, mop, and renovate it’s inevitable that an old house will have discolored spots, crumbling bricks, ivied walls. These aren’t flaws. They’re part of what make a house a home.

My family moved when I was four, just old enough to remember the old house without having ever really had a chance to build up any memories that made me sad to leave. Moving was exciting. The new house was bigger, with a bigger yard and more places to explore. It was a relatively new neighborhood too and there was a house across the street that was still under construction that I explored. I know you’re never supposed to go into a house while it’s still being built but in my defense I was only four years old and it was the middle of summer and the construction crew disappeared for long periods of time so what was I supposed to do?

It was intriguing to wander along the bare plywood floors and among walls that were only partially covered, the wooden bones of the framework visible, like seeing the interior of a body. In one of those coincidences almost too strange to be true some other kid had left a toy skeleton sitting up on a crossbeam. I was very imaginative—that is, I was really easily scared, especially terrified of skulls, but somehow that toy skeleton just seemed like it was hanging out, as interested in checking out the new house as I was. Maybe the memory has been colored by the intervening years but it seems like I felt a house under construction was as unhaunted as it’s possible for any place to be. Nothing had happened there yet so there was no chance for anything, good or evil, to have left its trace.

The people who live next door to my wife and I have just told us they’re planning to move soon. I’m sorry to see them go—they’re nice people, older, but the guy and I have bonded over Doctor Who and we’ve traded books and jokes over the fence. Their house is very much like ours: rectangular, single floor, more than half a century old now but still sturdy. They also have a tool shed at the very back of their yard. It’s rusting and they’ve wrapped a bright green tarp around one corner, held on with bright yellow pieces of tape so it looks like the shed’s being consumed by a giant caterpillar from a childhood nightmare, which we’ve laughed about.

Unfortunately we know the house’s fate once it’s unoccupied. It’s the same thing that’s happened to every house on our block, every house in our neighborhood, that’s been sold over the last decade or so: it’ll be knocked down, scraped away, and a newer, bigger, probably multilevel beast will take its place. The new house will, like all the other new ones, be painted white. This makes them a blank slate for the new owners but also, in places where they’re between older houses of reddish and brown brick and dark roofs, a ghostly quality. But they’re not ghosts.

Not yet, anyway.

Hail & Farewell., Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

Strangers On A Train.

Author: October 21, 2024 2 Comments

Source: Amazon UK

The combination of Halloween and the recent passing of Donald Sutherland reminded me of one of my favorite horror films, Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors, and, in a roundabout way, that reminded me of Dame Maggie Smith who also passed away recently.

Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors is about six strangers in a train car, played by Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Max Adrian, Peter Madden, Roy Castle, and Donald Sutherland. Cushing, the eponymous Dr. Terror, produces as pack of Tarot cards and tells each man’s future. This provides a frame for a series of stories dealing with werewolves, witches, monstrous plants, and even a disembodied hand. Sutherland, who gets a vampire story, was the last survivor of the main cast; they’re now all reunited which is, if you’ve seen the film, darkly fitting.

It’s a fun watch, especially if you like Hammer films–Amicus Productions was kind of a rival–and because it’s an anthology you can jump in and watch the stories in any order; only the opening and closing are connected, and it always makes me think about at least part of what gives trains their romance. The number of stories about trains is seemingly endless, ranging from Murder On The Orient Express to Silver Streak and I think Hitchcock even made a film about an encounter on a train. From the very beginning trains offered a mobility no one had ever experienced before and also brought together a whole spectrum of people. That’s why one of my favorite parts of living in Britain was taking trains regularly.

On one trip I sat next to a man a few years older than me and across from a woman who, well, looked like the sort of character Dame Maggie Smith would grow into. She had a nice dress and a large hat, also a pair of owl-like glasses, and even walked with a cane. But unlike the Dowager Countess this woman was friendly; she didn’t say anything about my scuffed shoes and jeans, but chatted nicely with both of us. The man next to me told us he was from southern India. She said she’d been there and had always wanted to go back because she loved it so much. Then she turned to me and said she’d never met an American before but was “gratified” I was so polite and charming.

Source: The Guardian

When we got to Waterloo Station we all got out. The Indian man let her hold his arm and I carried her very large suitcase. While we were doing that she yelled out, “Oh porter! I say, porter!”

A guy in a railroad worker’s uniform came over and she said, “My dear porter, these lovely young gentlemen have been kind enough to assist  me with the stairs and my valise. Would you please hail a hansom cab for me?”

I was trying so hard not to fall apart laughing, feeling like I was suddenly in an E.M. Forster novel. It got even funnier when the railroad worker asked if we were together and the Indian said, “Oh no, we’re just strangers on a train.”

“No criss-crosses, though” I said and we smiled at each other.

I know this has taken a lot of turns, from horror to Edwardian manners to, well, a joke about a murder mystery, but that’s what’s great about trains. The lines and destinations are fixed but inside you never know what can happen.

Adventures In Busing., Hail & Farewell.

Hop To It.

Author: October 19, 2024 4 Comments

Source: Letterboxd

When I ask people what their favorite Poe story is the same ones come up over and over: The Tell-Tale Heart and The Cask Of Amontillado seem to top the list, and The Fall Of The House Of Usher, The Black Cat, and The Masque Of The Red Death are always popular. Usually they’re ones most of us read in school, the ones that were our first introductions to Poe. I also remember The Murders In The Rue Morgue being talked about a lot, though it would be a long time before I read it, and in fifth grade watching a strange, and very loose, adaptation of The Gold Bug with a young Anthony Michael Hall.

One Poe story that never seems to come up is Hop-Frog. It’s one I think deserves a lot more attention. In eleventh grade I wrote a term paper on Poe and read a biography that kept referring to A Descent Into The Maelstrom as Poe’s most autobiographical story. Oh no, I thought, if you have to single out one Poe story as “autobiographical” then it’s Hop-Frog. Even his most sympathetic biographers describe Poe as a touchy guy who took criticism personally, but people also liked him because he was funny. The image of Poe as the gloomy goth misses the fact that he wrote satire and humor pieces too. In Hop-Frog the title character is an abused servant, a jester, who—spoiler alert–finally gets revenge on the royalty, and, I think, is as clever and funny as it is brutal. Hop-Frog has dwarfism and maybe that’s why we didn’t read the story in school, but he’s also the hero. Ultimately he succeeds over those who think they’re better than he is, and I think that would have been a good message for a lot of us.   

Two things came up recently that reminded me of Hop-Frog. The first is the new AppleTV series Time Bandits, based on Terry Gilliam’s 1981 film. The original cast five little people, and I understand the new series didn’t want to go that route for fear of seeming exploitative, but the casting got some well-deserved criticism for that. The original film wasn’t in any way making fun of its characters for their stature. The five “bandits” in the original are complicated characters who, it’s been pointed out, resemble the Monty Python gang in their personalities, with filthy, mute Vermin representing Gilliam himself.

The other thing is PBS just released a documentary called Judy-Lynn del Rey: The Galaxy Gal. As an aspiring writer and science fiction fan I read a lot of Del Rey books growing up without knowing, or even thinking, that Del Rey was a person, and I wish I had. Judy-Lynn del Rey was a little person but, obviously, that’s only part of who she was. She was a smart, passionate publisher and editor who helped make Del Rey a publishing powerhouse. Among other things she spotted the potential in the novelization of a little forthcoming science fiction film called Star Wars.

And finally there was an adaptation of Hop-Frog, also on PBS, titled Fool’s Fire. It was directed by Julie Taymor before her groundbreaking stage adaptation of The Lion King. The two stars are two little people, Michael J. Anderson, probably best known for being a dream character in Twin Peaks, and Mireille Mossé, a French actress with a few credits, as the woman Hop-Frog rescues. The rest of the cast is puppets. This made sure that, as Taymor said, “These two little people, so often used in the theatre and cinema as special effects themselves, were deeply and painfully real.”

And of course Hop-Frog is the hero.

American Graffiti.

Can We Talk?

Author: October 18, 2024 4 Comments

I believe life exists on planets other than Earth, and even life that’s intelligent in ways we could recognize and even communicate with. I don’t think that’s a controversial idea but this week I did get into a conversation with someone who said that if intelligent life forms are out there surely we would have found some evidence by now. After asking them not to call me Shirley I think I made a pretty good case for why we haven’t found evidence yet. For starters we haven’t really been looking for that long. Telescopes in the modern sense have only been around about five hundred years, and that’s just the ones you use to see Saturn’s rings or what your neighbors are doing. Even the most powerful telescopes are extremely limited. The first planet outside our solar system wasn’t found until 1992, and even though a lot have been found since then we haven’t gotten any up-close view of any of them. A few years earlier, in 1990, Carl Sagan convinced NASA to use the Galileo probe, on its way to Jupiter, to see if there was any evidence of life on Earth. The answer was, “Maybe.”

We don’t even know how many planets could potentially have life because we’ve got a sample size of one out of an unknown number. And there’s the question of why intelligent aliens, if they’re out there, haven’t visited us yet. Maybe they have—I’m not sure about that—but if they haven’t it’s probably because, as Douglas Adams said, “Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.” Here’s my own perspective on that: you may think a one-hundred thousand mile warranty on your car is a sweet deal but that would barely get you one percent of the way to the Sun, and that’s the closest star to us. Even if super-intelligent aliens have somehow discovered a way to travel between stars, even if they’ve found a way to travel beyond the speed of light there’s so much space out there the odds of aliens even passing through our neighborhood are, literally, astronomically low.

So what about communication? Why haven’t we heard from anybody? That’s where I think things get really interesting because, yes, we can beam radio waves out into space, but we’ve been doing that for less than a hundred and fifty years. There are a lot of stars within that distance but anybody out there listening would have to have something that could pick up those signals, interpret them, and send a message back. If they’re at the farthest point it would take just as long for their message to get back to us and we’d have to be still be listening, and have some way to filter the message out of all the galaxy’s background noise. Now imagine aliens on other planets having the same issue with their signals.

That’s assuming they even communicate the same way we do, which makes it even more complicated. We can’t even communicate with our closest genetic relatives on this planet. In stories about animals it’s funny to me when different species all speak the same language—when birds can talk to rabbits, skunks can talk to raccoons, and so on. It’s a nice ideal but, let’s face it, I’ve watched enough real backyard wildlife to know that even squirrels and foxes have vastly different priorities. And what if creatures on other planets don’t even communicate through sound? In the sequels to Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama humans meet, among other things, spider-like aliens that “speak” with bioluminescent rainbow patterns. In an episode of Star Trek: Voyager the crew encounters a spacefaring giant centipede that communicates through chemical emissions. And speaking of that there’s the alien Kurt Vonnegut imagined who came to Earth to tell us how to prevent war and cure cancer in its native language of tap dancing and farting which, now that I think about it, isn’t that strange—I had an uncle who communicated by farting, but that’s another story.

And this doesn’t even get into one of my favorite science fiction tropes which is that alien species are so often monolithic, speaking the same language, even having the same culture, across an entire planet. Every time that comes up in a science fiction story I want to ask the writer, “And how long have you lived on Earth?” Admittedly it’s plausible that there are advanced alien species that are like that—it’s a big universe and there are a lot of possibilities.

And speaking of monoliths, or rather monologues, no, I didn’t spout all this out at the other person—I’d have to have been babbling away longer than Hamlet. These are all just thoughts I had and that I felt the need to share with the universe.

Keep Looking Up, Nature Talks., Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

All These Worlds…

Author: October 14, 2024 4 Comments

Source: NASA

Even the most dystopian science fiction is hopeful since it imagines a future where people are still around. And when something that sounds like science fiction becomes science fact, no matter what else is going on, it gives me a little hope. The Europa Clipper mission has launched on a six-year trip to study one of Jupiter’s moons that may be a home to life elsewhere in our solar system. Europa’s an intriguing little world that’s only a quarter the size of Earth but may hold twice as much water in an ocean hidden by an icy skin. The launch was delayed by hurricane Milton which is oddly fitting: Europa orbits Jupiter, whose storms are so enormous—that famous great red spot could hold three Earths—that studying them can teach us a lot about storms here on Earth. So there are good reasons to go more than four hundred million miles for a closer look at our biggest neighbor.

In Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010 Europa becomes the one place in our solar system that’s off-limits to humanity even as the rest of it opens up to us, and the 2013 film Europa Report imagines people making the trip to study the frozen world for possible life. It’s an interesting premise but it doesn’t seem plausible; Jupiter itself generates an intense amount of radiation, twice as much as it gets from the sun. Any life on Europa will have adapted, but it’s more than our fragile little bodies could tolerate. We can learn a lot from Jupiter and its moons, which currently number ninety-five and counting, but I don’t think it will ever be a place we can get close to.

The Europa Clipper reminded me of another science fiction story, Contact, and Jodie Foster saying, “They should have sent a poet.” Engraved on the spacecraft is a poem by Poet Laureate Ada Limon. That also gives me hope.

You can listen to her read her poem here.

In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa

Arching under the night sky inky

with black expansiveness, we point

to the planets we know, we

 

pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,

we read the sky as if it is an unerring book

of the universe, expert and evident.

 

Still, there are mysteries below our sky:

the whale song, the songbird singing

its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.

 

We are creatures of constant awe,

curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,

at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.

 

And it is not darkness that unites us,

not the cold distance of space, but

the offering of water, each drop of rain,

 

each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.

O second moon, we, too, are made

of water, of vast and beckoning seas.

 

We, too, are made of wonders, of great

and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,

of a need to call out through the dark.

 

The Weekly Essay

You’ve Got A Friend In Them.

Author: October 12, 2024 7 Comments

It’s that time of year when the Monster Cereals come out. They’ve really been out since September, but I like to hold off until a little closer to Halloween. Maybe I should start earlier too, though—I’m getting older and, since my wife doesn’t like them, finishing off five or six boxes of family-sized sugary cereal by myself isn’t as easy as it used to be, and is a reminder of the passing of time.

I’d really like to say a sincere word of gratitude to the people behind making the Monster Cereals—not just the cereals themselves but also the packaging. I’ve worked in enough businesses to know that nothing happens quickly, especially with established brands. The Monster Cereals are seasonal, not really promoted, and, I suspect, not even that profitable anymore. Their target demographic is a dwindling subset of Gen Xers who grew up eating them—or, in my case, not eating them but wishing I could—and yet there’s care and thought put into making each year’s release just a little bit different.

Carmella Creeper, introduced in 2023, and the first new Monster Cereal in thirty-six years, has made a welcome comeback for this year, and I’m glad. It was about time they brought a woman into the mix and while the “caramel apple” flavored cereal doesn’t taste like either caramel or apples it does have a distinctive tangy flavor that I like. She’s also gotten her own retro-style box, confirming her place as one of the gang.

 

The other big change is the return of the Monster Mash, introduced in 2021 for the 50th anniversary of the first Monster Cereals. It’s not, as the box would suggest, a mix of all four flavors but rather a combination of green Carmella pieces and gray pieces—gray being such an appetizing color for food. The box is also missing my personal favorite Frute Brute (I like werewolves) and Yummy Mummy. The latter’s name has taken on a meaning of its own, and I’m sure Tony The Tiger can sympathize, but that’s another story.

The biggest change has been that the this year’s Monster Cereals have gotten “pets” with their own back-of-the-box stories and a new batch of marshmallows. Not even monsters live forever. There will be a year when it’s just not worth it to bring them out. In the meantime it’s nice that they’ve got friends.

American Graffiti.