From an Ailing Alien

It’s been just over a week since I awoke in a parallel universe. Apparently at some point, while I was sleeping, I dematerialized and then rematerialized on a new planet. The physical makeup of my alien world seems almost identical to my home planet, almost…

So how did I detect, discern, or perceive this change?

Well, first of all this planet is warmer. Here it is mid-November and it’s 71 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s been about that warm all month. It wouldn’t be that way back home. No, it would be much, much cooler.

Then there is that foul odor when I step outside. At first I thought it was the hog farm, which like the one on my home planet, is about 3-4 miles due east. But then, I smelled that same manure-like odor when I was in the large metropolitan area 120 miles away, and then again, on another day when I drove west and out-of-state - no hog farms in those two places.

And there is the problem with gravity. Although I am the same height and weight, I feel heavier, you know weighted down, as if the gravitational force is greater on this planet, and it seems to render me physically weaker. In fact just yesterday, as I was giving a thorough cleaning to the bedroom, I lifted the king-size mattress in order to prop it against a wall, so that I could then remove and launder the bed skirt, lift out the box springs and vacuum under the large bed area. This is something I could easily manage in the former world, but here on Planet Two, as I’ve come to call this place, I found  myself struggling and battling to lift the mattress, until at some point I lost control and became wedged between the mattress and box springs, unable to extract myself. I called out to my Planet Two-assigned husband, who by the way seems identical in every way to Beloved Husband from my previous world.

Assigned Husband was in the attached garage, attempting to strip rusted bolts from an aging snowblower. Being just barely within my voice range, he eventually heard my pleas for assistance, opened the door and called out, “Are you talking to me? I’ll be done out here in a minute or two” and promptly closed the door between us.

And it seems as if my sense of humor seems to have abated. I laughed about the situation, but it was a hollow sound. I tell you it scares me.

Finally, it was the palpable, physical illness that began upon wakening last Wednesday morning. It must be some sort of indigestion, I thought as the first wave of nausea hit. I reassured myself, this will pass, but it continued, in frequent enough waves to disrupt my appetite, thus further weakening me. It’s sort of reminds me of the Kryptonite that challenged Superman. Perhaps it’s related to that foul odor in the atmosphere. Or perhaps it’s radioactivity from computer and cell phone contact, or maybe it’s a toxin related to wireless internet and television exposure. I turn all off, but the waves of discomfort continue.

I make a quick trip to the city to check on my closest relatives, my Planet Two-assigned immediate family. They, too are feeling very queasy, but they are concerned about me, and thus try to reassure me that perhaps it’s just a common “bug” we all share and "we should give it time before we really react," you know, like call the physician.

I run into an acquaintance, or someone who looks exactly like someone I knew on my home planet. He asks, “So, what do you think about the election?” But, I’m wary of the beings on this new planet and choose to make only a general comment, “It'll surely be interesting.” I’m not ready to reveal to Planet Two beings that, alas, I am an alien.

The very next evening I talk, at length with someone claiming to be my long-time trusted friend, and finally I confess my situation with her. “Oh my gosh!” she says, “I thought I was the only one.” She also has been transported to Planet Two. And by now, I’ve confirmed that Planet Two-Assigned Husband and Beloved Husband are indeed one in the same. He’s made the transport with me. Well, at least I’m not alone. I make a note to check with my Planet Two family. I'll just bet they, too, have made the trip.

I toil diligently in the garden the following day, as it is one of the few places that makes any sense to me, where somehow the atmosphere is not as toxic.

Beloved Husband encourages me to take a long drive with him, “It’ll do us good.” We drive to an out-of-state town on a large muddy river. Outside the car, again I smell the foul odor of "crap." But, being in need of supplies to prep for our family’s upcoming Thanksgiving dinner, as we pass a large grocery store I say, “Let’s stop here."

The clerk in the checkout lane we choose has a very pale, light skin tone, as if she’d stood in that very lane, day after day, without any exposure to Planet Two’s sunlight. She is near to my age. Her hair is dyed a fiery ginger-red and it reminds me of the star actress from my home planet’s 1950s sitcom, I Love Lucy. The clerk’s rouge and lipstick are a bit garish for my tastes, however she does possess the prettiest baby-blue eyes I’ve ever seen, on either planet.

A young man is in line ahead of us and has placed two or three items on the counter. I don’t recall exactly, but I know one of them is a package of birthday candles. His complexion is almost the polar opposite of the clerk’s, his skin being very dark - over-exposure to Planet Two’s sunlight, I’m guessing. His hair is jet-black and finely braided into tight rows of plaits that fall just past his collar.

She looks directly at him, smiles and greets him in a bright lilt as she rings up his purchases. In his hand he has a twenty dollar bill, at the ready. She announces that the total is ten dollars and 50 cents. He says quietly, “Uh, wait a sec, I think I have exact change.” “Take all the time you want, Sweetheart,” she replies agreeably as he fishes smaller bills and coins from his pants pocket. They conclude their transaction with her sincere wish for him to have a nice day and him beaming back at her and thanking her for her patience.

She immediately turns to me, looks me in the eye, smiles a genuine, baby-blue eye-crinkling grin, and lilts, “And how are you doing today, Sweetheart?” At the end of our transaction she wishes me well and winks at me. It was that wink, it was then I that I knew…

My illness seems to be abating and I think I’m adjusting to the atmosphere. And I’ve been exercising regularly to regain some of the strength I’ve lost due to the new gravitational surge. Oh, and my sense of humor seems to be improving, but still has a way to go. But most of all I’m getting much better at spotting the other people who, like me and that ginger-redheaded checkout clerk at the muddy river town in the Heartland and the young man buying birthday candles and Beloved Husband and my longtime best friend, who, everyone of us, one day awoke to a near-venomous world they didn’t recognize.

And now I know that we’ll all bide our time, and we’ll support each other and slowly, but surely, we will once again strengthen and grow healthy.

“If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.” ― William James

found online - hope artist doesn't mind me borrowing it

superman & lucy

I Haven't Got a Prayer

Dream, September 2016: I am strolling through the woods, when I happen upon a man who is fiddling with equipment, equipment that looks like it might be used to take scientific measurements of some kind. He has headphones over his ears and he is bent over, fine tuning one of the dials. I can’t help but pass near him as he has placed his equipment adjacent to the path I am following. He looks up and smiles, then quickly motions with his hand for me to approach. 

I take a better look at him as I cautiously near. He isn’t very tall for an adult man, about my height which is 5 foot 4 inches, and he's a bit on the lean side. He is wearing a pressed tan collared shirt, neatly tucked into army green slacks, giving him the look of a forest ranger or such. He closes his eyes for a moment as he presses the headset to his ears, and his face beams a beatific smile. I pause and watch him in his rapture. After a time he seems to remember my presence and even more earnestly motions for me to come closer. 

I take a hesitant step or two, he takes off the headset, carefully puts it away and turns off the equipment. He pulls out a notepad and jots something, then he begins to excitedly explain that he’s been recording the sounds of birds and small animals at ultrasonic and infrasonic frequencies and that while playing back and deciphering the sounds he’s discovered that insects have been meaningfully adding sounds to his animal recordings. So he takes some more recordings, and finds that the trees and plants are adding sound as well. Then he tells me that his findings indicate that if one were to filter out some of the “noise” that doesn’t belong, the remainder is actually all in harmony, "musically in harmony."  

“Do you realize what this means!?” he asks and before I can even fathom a response, he excitedly continues, “The whole universe is a symphonic composition! If we can temporarily highlight the anti-noise and, you know, filter out the noise, what remains is all a heavenly symphony!”

***

Beloved Husband and I were golfing with a couple. At some point the four of us were on the green. All four balls seemed about 10 feet from the pin in four different directions. The usual banter in this situation begins with “Well we’ve got it surrounded.” Golf etiquette dictates that the player farthest from the cup will putt first, but we were all about the same distance away. The other woman in our foursome asked if I was ready to putt. “No,” I smiled, “I need to pray over this a bit more.” It’s an expression I lifted from a favorite Jesuit professor. When grading papers he claimed, "The A’s and the failures are easy to discern. It's the pile in the middle that I have to pray over.” She countered, “Tsk tsk now, God isn’t to be bothered with prayers for golf.” 

She couldn’t, surely not after watching me golf all summer, think that I was serious? That in the midst of a round of casual golf, I would suddenly be praying for heavenly intervention? Or perhaps, she was implying that she had such a relationship with God that she knew for certain which human maladies, conditions, disorders, desires, wishes, requests were prayer-worthy? Is such a list available for sharing, you know, for those of us less informed?  

***

Raised and schooled a Roman Catholic in the mid-50s to late-60s, I was taught that one should never even think about listening to or attending a service in any religion other than Catholicism, because to think about such a sin would be as sinful as actually doing it. If you allowed the thought to even flit briefly across your mind, well you might as well…

In the mid-1980s I attended a talk at a Episcopalian, or maybe a Presbyterian church in Glenview, Illinois. At the behest of a friend, I came to hear a prominent rabbi in  Conservative Judaism give a talk. At the time Rabbi Harold Kushner had written a book entitled, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” 

Having lost a young son to a rare genetic disorder, Rabbi Kushner had dared to question the G*d about whom he’d been taught, (and I paraphrase here as it was 30 years ago) “How could an all-powerful, benevolent, all-knowing God allow such to happen to an innocent child?” He went through the attribute list and he decided that God could be all-knowing and he could be benevolent, but he couldn’t be all-powerful, because an “all-powerful” God would not allow such suffering. 

Smack! His words hit me. I, too, had wondered the same thing. Maybe, perhaps, possibly, suggested Rabbi Kushner, there were parameters, formulae, criterion or matter with which even God’s power was limited.

Which brings to mind a recent article about CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats). It is a fascinating subject chock-full of moral consequences, but complicated and I won’t get into it here, but you may google it on your own. Basically CRISPR is a tool to speed up gene editing, mostly for the purpose of making “advances” in eliminating disease. However, often something else immediately “pops up” to take its place. So like, if you remove or block the DNA that causes Sickle Cell Anemia you now have made the person vulnerable to some other, possibly worse, malady or weakness.

Anyway, Rabbi Kushner feels that God is with us during suffering, but not able to prevent it.

(Nota Bene: This next portion contains my thought solely, not Rabbi Kushner’s) Maybe, perhaps, possibly God had set our universe in motion, and being a benevolent and all-knowing God, knew that it would be imperfect. Maybe, perhaps, possibly God’s gift is simply the gift of life. Be it one second or be it one hundred-plus years. It is up to us to make the best of it, while God delights with us in our joys and comforts us in our sorrows.

***

Beloved Husband and I visited an out-of-state friend in late October. She works for an American multi-national conglomerate. She travels the world, and her job title actually includes the word “global.” She has been on business trips to numerous countries. Someone gave her a large world map that allows her to “scratch-off” the many portions of the world she’s visited. She asked us to scratch off the portion that related to us meeting her for the first time. We gratefully obliged. As I scratched it off a tiny portion of the all-gold map it revealed a brighter, different color for the corresponding city metropolis in the midwest of the U.S.A. Looking at the large map I commented that the U.S. represented such a small portion of the world. We stood there silently, looking at the map and thinking… 

***

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.— Neil Armstrong, Gemini 8 and Apollo 11 astronaut

Oddly enough the overriding sensation I got looking at the earth was, my god that little thing is so fragile out there.— Mike Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut

This planet is not terra firma. It is a delicate flower and it must be cared for. It's lonely. It's small. It's isolated, and there is no resupply. And we are mistreating it. Clearly, the highest loyalty we should have is not to our own country or our own religion or our hometown or even to ourselves. It should be to, number two, the family of man, and number one, the planet at large. This is our home, and this is all we've got.— Scott Carpenter, Mecury 7 astronaut

I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of 100,000 miles their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a unified facade that would cry out for unified understanding, for homogeneous treatment. The earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or Communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied.— Michael Collins, Gemini 10 & Apollo 11 astronaut

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch’.  -Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut

***

God(s)/Creator(s), 

Please comfort me. I am disappointed, but I will hope for the optimal success of our new President-Elect in January of 2017. May he benevolently use his intelligence and the talents inherent in his genetic composition for the good of all, not only in our country but in the whole of our tiny pea of a planet, we call Earth. If he does well for the greater good, I will applaud his effort.

I will do my best to continue to avoid adding unnecessary “noise” and may, one day, the beauty of the universe’s heavenly symphony be heard by all...

photo courtesy of NASA

On a visit to Chicago I passed an elementary school that had painted both a
U.S. and a world map on its blacktop play lot  :)

They Moved Like Angels with Fluid Motion

When Li’l Rae was 'bout 4-5 years, her mother abandoned her in rural Wisconsin, just up and left her… poor little child. 

Well, okay maybe it didn’t really go down exactly that way, but it’s sure how it seemed to Li’l Rae at the time. Closer to the truth was that Li’l Rae and her mother had been visiting relatives in rural Wisconsin, and when it came time to return to the city, Li’l Rae’s mother brokered herself a deal with her older brother, Li’l Rae’s uncle. He would keep the child for an additional week. “This will give me a little break,” reasoned Li’l Rae’s mother, “Plus, the country air will be good for her.” 

“Hutch" is what they called Li’l Rae’s uncle, his real name being Malcom. Hutch had two sons, Alastair and Bartholomew. The boys were older than Li’l Rae, Alastair being 11 and Bartholomew almost 13. Folks said that ol’ Hutch never quite got over the loss of his wife, who died when the boys were young. Anyway, it must’ve been true, because Hutch never remarried.

Back then Li’l Rae thought that of all her numerous cousins, Alastair and Bartholomew were clearly the best looking, their faces being as fine as the handsomest boys she’d ever seen on television. Their mother must have been beautiful, Li'l Rae thought, yet nowhere in the home was a photograph of the now-dead woman. 

“That Al and Bart sure are good athletes," people would say, as they shook their heads, "just like their old man.” Now, the boys were good at swimming, running, football and basketball, but baseball was the sport at which the boys really excelled. And sure enough, Uncle Hutch had been a minor league baseball player. At some point he got the call to go to the big league. He declined. Hutch, being a man of few words, never gave an explanation. But you know how townsfolk are, they had many an opinion. Some said it was because of his young wife, maybe she didn’t want him to go, or maybe he didn’t want to leave her. 

When Li’l Rae’s mother left her at Uncle Hutch’s house, she didn't trouble herself to leave any dolls or toys for Li’l Rae’s amusement, just a satchel with clean clothes and pajamas. And her cousins didn’t seem to own any toys, or puzzles or books for that matter; just some sports equipment, kept in a small utility room near the back door. In fact, to Li’l Rae the house seemed empty and cheerless, as if no one had laughed or smiled in it for a long time.

The boys were out the door soon after breakfast and Li'l Rae often didn’t see them again until dinner. So she would sit in a chair looking out of the big window in the dining room. From there she could see the large empty baseball lot next door. She sat and wondered why her cousins never played at the ball field right next door and instead rode their bikes all the way to the Catholic school’s field way over on the other side of town. The groomed lot outside looked like a regular ball field, with bleachers and everything, but there it sat empty, unused and kind of forlorn, just like the house.

The cousins were kind to Li’l Rae and she wished that they would be around more often, like they were after dinner, after helping their father to clean the kitchen, when sometimes one or the other would spend a few minutes showing her how to catch a ball, or somehow complementing her when she, once again, missed hitting the huge oak tree with one of their slingshots. As she sat deep in thought, Li’l Rae didn’t hear Uncle Hutch enter the room, so she flinched when she heard his sudden  bark from behind, “You'd best go outside and get some fresh air now.” 

Alone outside, she sat on the bottom row of the bleachers, swinging feet that barely reached the ground. She picked up a stick and drew some lines in the dry, dusty dirt. When she looked back at the house, she wasn’t sure if that dark shadow from upstairs was Uncle Hutch watching her, so she quickly dropped the stick. 

Li'l Rae was usually an obedient child, but one lonely afternoon, knowing it was wrong to snoop or to take without permission, she opened a drawer in the kitchen. She’d seen Uncle Hutch put a spiral notepad in the drawer the night before. It won’t be so bad, she reasoned, if I just take a page from the notebook and then maybe borrow that pencil on the kitchen counter. I can draw and practice my letters and numbers. That will be fun. And I’ll put the pencil right back where I found it. And I’ll just take one single sheet of paper, that’s all. The notepad looked pretty full and I don’t think anyone will notice one missing sheet. She carefully picked up the spiral notepad and slowly lifted back the cover to find an empty sheet… Her heart seemed to stop as she heard Uncle Hutch’s booming voice behind her, “What are you doing?” How does he enter the room so quietly, she thought. I never even heard a sound. Her face was burning with shame, as she felt the blood pulse in her cheeks. Her head hung down, afraid to look up at her uncle, she handed over the notepad. He said not another word, just stood there silently looming over the small girl, like a giant right out of a fairy tale. She could feel his eyes follow her as she walked into the dining room and sat on a chair to once again stare out the window at the ever-empty ball field. 

Yes, Alastair and Bartholomew were good athletes and they were the handsomest boys Li’l Rae had ever seen, and they were unfailingly nice to Li’l Rae, and they always smiled whenever they saw her, big genuine smiles. And after dinner, when the kitchen was cleaned, and when one or the other would spend a few minutes in the evening teaching her to hit a pitch, or such, she couldn’t help but notice, really no one on earth who heard them speak, could help but notice, the way they talked, “P-p-pp-put the b-b-ba-b-bat up m-mm-m-mmm-more.” 

Even at her young age, no one had to explain to Li’l Rae the whys of stuttering. She knew exactly why both of the boys stuttered.