Retirement is sort of crazy. No people concealed behind curtains to blame. The Writer’s Section, a component of Socotra LLC’s Production Department, reporting to the Editorial Board, supervised by Legal, Compliance and HR at the morning meeting, contributes hard-hitting but mildly ironic items for mass consumption. You know, take the weekend items of interest and twist it around to reflect the Fall of the West as it impacts country life.
Nothing like that this morning. It is a Monday, after all, and the section had been busy making a phone call. Not unusual as an “issue” previously handled on a routine basis by an aging cadre, but this phone call happened to be with a concerned reader out in Australia. The aging process manifests itself in curious ways. One of them, at least viewed from The Farm, is the diminution of the vast globe to the little part that can be seen from the back deck. From there, it is still possible to see the back gate that would, theoretically, provide access to the lunging ring girdled by the green leafy belt overhanging the neat rail fence. This season, the branches droop down, and nearly cover access to the green circle that lies across the little concrete bridge where the creeks join.
But that is a distant thing, way out there, and accessible by a walk more challenging downslope than the one west from the front porch to the gravel drive and all the way to the farm lane where the mailbox may be drooping with actual “mail.” So, given the impressive distance entailed by relatively little things, the one involving a phone call is completely understandable. That is because one speaker is located here in the fertile green Piedmont and the other in Sydney, Australia.
The reason for the call was suitably mysterious. Apparently there were questions about things that happened nearly a half century ago. Think that one through. It is like a query about the nature of a breakfast in some other century. “Eggs, I think,” might have been the start. “And probably some kind of toast. Not sure about that, but I am sure there were gallons of coffee. We drank that stuff all day.”
So, it could have been handled with a short email. But there might have been controversy over use of margarine, a semi-oily substitute for real butter. Given the uncertainty, an actual call seemed appropriate, but that led to a variety of issues. Like, “Talk to you Sunday” posed more questions than one would think in just four words. The first of which, having sent them, was “whose Sunday?”
The Section was lethargic on a Sunday morning. Ours, that is, since that pesky dateline thing slices down between the poles. We agreed on Sunday, but it turns out that immutable factor in our swirling globe is mutable indeed. Not to mention the nature of day and night. It took another three email exchanges to clarify the understanding that “Sunday evening” in one place was a Monday morning somewhere else, both locations lit by a rising or setting solar orb. In the writer’s world, Sunday was surrendering, while the questioner’s was confronted by a Monday already underway.
It worked, after a fashion, with all the miles between. The questions? Another conundrum of years bridged by events. The issue at hand was why an American nuclear-powered cruiser would have steamed (simple terms but complex, since it was atomic interaction that boiled the water, not roaring clumps of coal) to the seas close aboard the old Soviet Union. The point and purpose of such a remarkable effort performed by hundreds of people was the subject of question. Breakfast inquiry then would have been easy.
The Section was off balance, since the call required multiple levels of time travel. In one, it was dealing with Monday’s equities in morning from a place of Sunday nearing rest. The other, somewhat larger, was remembering what a thirty-year-old might have thought about things long forgotten by a seventy-year-dotard. Some of them were momentous, or were at the time, before they became immersed in a tepid sea of forgetfulness. The answer, of course, was to rely on someone else’s memories. Some of the Section rummaged around in the neatly collated recollections of Jerry, who writes for one of the fairly deep tanks of think. He now goes by a more formal and erudite name, but that was just one of them.
“Jerome” described the events of that day in a concise and professional manner. The account included things as common as breakfast then, like nearly verging on two excursions into nuclear exchange. The proximity of disaster then was closer than breakfast today. Those startling events were naturally part of something larger, which was the collapse of a global colossus. We make a point of remembering to use the term “Russians” these days, which implies entities as close as our neighbors. But the terms are now uncomfortable. Then, the figures in memory were “Soviets,” and we watched (then) with spinning thoughts as a massive and belligerent society collapsed.
So language had changed, though only a few times transposing “now” words with the ones pertaining to “then.” Jerry’s words, transposed, were intended to frame a series of current events with those not current or even alive. Which of course added to the general confusion. Living memory being what it is, watching the ancient decisions directing sleek machines designed to cruise beneath the waves to prospective launch points in the vast ocean seems a matter of routine. The purpose such direction was to position rockets designed to follow the rainbow of gravity to likely targets in the American homeland and obliterate them in sudden compelling overpressure and blinding heat and flame.
There were enormous forces in motion. Our own nation had determined a deployment of land-based atomic weapons to Europe would provide a tangible deterrent to the known hoard of armored vehicles positioned to head west through the Fulda Gap. The analogous response was for the Soviets- almost said Russians, though of course they were- to gather up the remaining reactor-hours in their fleet of submarines and move them across the vast Pacific. And keep them there, invisible, as a tangible threat of massive and horrifying destruction. It was not until a great bureaucracy collapsed that we knew the careful plans to do things like “demonstrate resolve,” or “challenge illicit claims of territorial seas” had defects that could have ended a world.
The other aspect of the phone call was that there was no phone, and no call. It was a Zoomy thing from a computer. It involved at least one and probably two low-earth orbit satellites, a mighty trans-oceanic cable and local distribution between a Piedmont Farm and a stationary automobile. In complexity, it probably was more complex than launching rockets, but generally more beneficial.
The call lasted the better part of an hour, right to the appropriate time for evening medications near this end of the Zoom, and whatever Australians consume for breakfast. Oh, the reason for the call? Some of that old stuff is happening again. As far as we know, here in the country, it does not involve the potential for nuclear holocaust. But as someone who may have been Samuel Clemens might have observed, “it doesn’t repeat. But it does rhyme.”
The Writer’s section is working on a Limerick that captures it, whether it rhymes or not:
There was a young lady named Bright
who traveled much faster than light.
She set out one day
in a relative way,
and came back the previous night.
It being the morning after the night before and arriving at someone else’s tomorrow, we are going with it.
Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com