What would you do if you could go back in time for, say, one day? When would you go, and perhaps just as importantly, where?
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For today’s educational adventure I learned how to make a portal. Next time I’ll choose an image with a puddle for the reflection, but the effect is still pretty magic.
So, we have a target place, a target time, and a portal. Who wants to go first?
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Fiction-related aside: Time travel usually isn’t my genre (weird for someone with a history degree once upon a time, but there it is), but this series about historians tasked with maintaining the time stream is fun:
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“History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells, ‘Can’t you remember anything I told you?’ and lets fly with a club.”
Thinking about my grandfather yesterday got me thinking about our trip to Sweden. Here’s one of the best souvenirs I brought back, an adjustable driving distance calculator. The sheet inside slides to show distances from a given starting location. I like maps, and this one is particularly well done.
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For fun, here’s one of the first known distance maps, the Tabula Peutingeriana, with measures for (where else?) the center of all things at that time, the Roman Empire. Although at 22 feet long, it’s not exactly portable!
Conradi Millieri derivative work: Thecinic, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Today would have been my grandfather’s eleventy-first birthday.
Paul Johnson loved golf, travel, photography, his Swedish heritage, fishing, the beach in Florida, women, and a good game of bridge, not necessarily in that order. He and my grandmother married in secret for the usual reasons, then again two years later when he was able to support them both. (She wore a light blue dress, again, for the usual reasons.)
One terrific part of life is that you can choose how you want to look back. When I think of my grandfather, I don’t dwell on the Parkinson’s and how it took so much from him before it finally took his life. I think of his smile as he watched a rocket launch at Cape Canaveral, the heart-felt yet hilarious haircuts he used to give my long-suffering brother, and the way he remembered to call me Princess even after he’d forgotten my name.
He saved sand dollars from the beach, enjoyed hot dogs with sauerkraut and introduced us to tomatoes with sugar, always kept a bag of butterscotch for the grandkiddos, tolerated both hijinks and shenanigans with good cheer, and had the best laugh, right from the belly.
He was a wonderful grandfather.
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Photo by T. Johnson. Location: Pine Grove Mills, PA. Date: Summer 1974. Probably.
I had a plan for the day. It was a good plan. It was shiny and perfect and now it is gone. In its place I have a Post-it that looks like a Rorschach test, a list of things I did not intend to do (but did, so that’s nice:) and a handbasket of good intentions.
Let’s hear it for tomorrow!
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“The belief that tomorrow is a different place from today is certainly a unique hallmark of our species.”
In memory of the pretty tree in full bloom around the corner, which our neighbor just cut down.
Also, it’s Tuesday.
(This is the part where I like to bring it back to a cheerful ending. Right. Hmm.)
Ah yes! I’m making excellent progress on the bird front, lots of goldfinches, robins, cardinals, chickadees, juncos and sparrows. Nature finds a way, even if it sometimes needs a little help:)
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“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”
I have this funny thing I do where I associate certain visuals with a functional emotion.
(By associate I mean I pull it out of the old memory bank when I run into a situation that makes me feel a certain way. And by functional I mean that this visual helps me shift to a more useful mindset.)
You know that feeling you get when you’re lying in bed worrying about that weird pain just above your right eyebrow? Or imagining fingernails on a chalkboard or what it would feel like if a sentient Matrix probed your belly button?
That feeling? I counter it with a shimmering green shield surrounding my body like a superhero suit. Sure, no one else can see it, but it works.
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Or when it’s Monday morning and my mind is chock full of random crap, to do lists, things I should have said, things I shouldn’t have said, questions that need to be asked and answered, etc. etc. etc. ad freaking nauseam.
I do a superhero landing complete with dramatic cloud of mental chaff blasting away from the point of impact.
Just the act of imagining either of these things helps defuse the mental pile-on.
Of course it’s not real. Despite decades of absorbing scifi via bio-ocular interface, I cannot actually will a force field into being. But my worries are all in my head. Why can’t the solutions be there too?
I used to love waking up to Saturday morning cartoons at my grandparents’ (no TV at our house, I may have mentioned), but now that I’m an adult I’ve moved beyond such childish things. Right?
This morning Mr. Man turned on the TV and quickly found a station playing Spy, Paul, Battleship and True Lies. Cheers all around!
It’s time for more free fiction! The Locus SF Foundation has announced the top finalists in each award category. Many of the shorts and novelettes are free to read online.
Check out the full roster from Locus, with standard font links for open access work and bold for purchasing links. Here’s the abbreviated list of free material:
Seriously though, I couldn’t be an astronaut, how do they scratch their noses? I think I’ll design a pivoting arm with a micro joy stick on the outside of the helmet. Unless they already have those? Photo by Adam Miller on Unsplash
I mean, I’m mostly nice (with just the right amount of geeky snark), I make a pretty terrific brownie, and try to be a good partner, daughter, friend, neighbor, and co-worker, but I haven’t started a food distribution center to feed first responders this past year, or learned a new language or solved the medical problem that’s stumping a family member’s doctors or crossed off everything on my to-do list or single-handedly saved Ontario’s bees. At some level, I feel I should have done all of those things and more, but no.
I’m not Melinda Gates, Mother Theresa, Jane Goodall, José Andrés, Greta Thunberg, Jonas Salk, David Suzuki, world-changingly great.
Sorry, supportive parental units. You tried.
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And please don’t take offense, but you probably aren’t either. I bet you are kind and thoughtful and a good hugger with excellent taste in music and a winning smile who looks out for pets and children, but you aren’t, say, Malala. By definition, most people aren’t.
So I’m not extra special super amazing. You’re probably not extra special super amazing. And that’s ok.
Because together, we are magic.
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What makes a society great?
I submit to you that we regular folks have far more impact on society than we’re given credit for. The median is the best indicator of a curve’s central anchor, not the outliers.
Yes, innovation like the automobile, vaccines, or the personal computer can upend the ways we live and work, but those events happen within a context.
That context is the one we build every day, with every action, big or small. Have I sent out Mothers’ Day cards, let myself off the hook for not sending those cards sooner,* waved at the neighbor, picked up that annoying plastic bag stuck in the cedar, fed the birds, voted, donated to a nonprofit doing good work, planted for pollinators, baked for our mechanic, followed traffic laws, ignored rabid commentary designed to monetize my attention at the expense of democracy, and generally done my best to help steer the ship to a better place?
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What we do matters. Maybe I’m not extra special super amazing, but that’s ok. I don’t have to be. I can still be part of something great.
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