Go Condition

You are old, Uncle Lars, I say to myself.

I am a child dreaming I am an old man. I am Mr. Magoo. I can’t see my own time but I can see backwards sixty years to the past. I see JFK and Khrushchev, John Glenn and Castro, on YouTube. I study the timeline for 1962 in Wikipedia and listen to Dexter Gordon’s Go and Jackie Maclean’s Bluesnik. I want to go back there to 1962,*not a child, but a young man,

knowing what I know now, so I can be smarter than everyone else, and tell them they are afraid of the wrong things and not be afraid of anything, even though I know everything that will happen in the next six decades. I don’t know, I don’t know. We are still afraid of the wrong things.

(Cue Telstar by the Tornadoes)

the word was beamed to me from outer space

it looks like this — OFF ON OFF ON OFF ON OFF ON —

the word was beamed to me from TV

— there is a man of extraterrestrial origin who assumes a secret identity every day when he goes to work for the planet — for truth and justice, whether they are the American Way or not

there was a man sent from Earth, to orbit the Earth in a capsule.

A man in a capsule.

The astronaut’s condition is Go, says the TV.

When I was three years old my mother took me on my first airplane ride and I watched West Palm Beach shrink so all the houses and cars looked like toys. We went to New York, where Papa, my mother’s father, was dying.

I stood next to the hospital bed. 

“All of my bones are broken,” he said.

Sputnik was launched the same day Papa died, on October 4, 1957, The family gathered in the backyard of my other Grandpa’s house. We were looking for Sputnik, which we were told would be visible as it passed overhead. I saw a minuscule blinking light within the celestial array. 

I see it, I said. 

What does it look like, Chip? they asked.

It looks like this, I said, blinking my eyes, repeating the extraterrestrial signal I had received.

That is adorable.

That is so cute.

Mom worked at Pratt & Whitney Aircraft, which built the engines for the rockets launched at Cape Canaveral. She started work as a file clerk back when P&W was still located in a former bakery on Old Dixie — now Barack Obama — Highway. The company built its new plant west of town, out on the Beeline Highway, in the Florida wilderness.

We watched the launch of the first American in orbit on TV. John Glenn was suited up after breakfast. Breakfast was two eggs and a filet.

 “As you can see Mr. Glenn is in good condition, a happy condition, a “go condition” is the way they describe the crew.”

Did he take “Go pills?”  That’s what those military pilots called amphetamine in World War II. I watch the astronaut board the rocket. 

“T minus 82 minutes.” 

T stands for Time, as D stands for Day in D Day. “John Glenn is in the cockpit of the Friendship 7 spacecraft. As of this time all systems in the Mercury Atlas 6 are in a Go condition.” After we saw it lift off on TV we went outside and saw the vapor trail in the sky. 

Go, man, go!

I watched all the space launches and their trails of vapor in the sky. Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Walter Schirra, Project Mercury in 1962. 

Jesus ascended into Heaven without Pratt and Whitney engines, Dad said from the pulpit.

 

Dad started several Southern Baptist churches in South Florida in the early sixties. I often accompanied him on the long drive down US 1 to Plantation, Hollywood, Fort Lauderdale, while he did whatever it is he did to create a congregation that would raise funds to build a church.

We lived in Lake Park first, where Dad preached at a mission started by First Baptist of Palm Beach. Then we moved up A1A to Jupiter, and had tent meetings until we built a church there. That was the first church construction site I hung out in. A bulldozer was clearing away the palmettos and slash pines and uncovered a 25 caliber rifle that my sister now has.

I liked Jupiter. I turned 5 there. I started elementary the same year as Ruby Bridges. Do you know who that was? Norman Rockwell painted her? But I went to first and second grade at the still segregated Jupiter Elementary, and then we moved because Dad started another church, this one right on A!A, near a new housing development, a cluster of concrete shelters called “Cabana Colony”. We moved to another new concrete cluster named Palm Beach Gardens in a house next to the railroad track for the Florida East Coast Railroad.

Mr. Brown would sing, ”I found my million dollar baby at the five and ten cent store” while he worked. I watched him build the church. This was the second church construction site I hung out in. He sang to himself as he measured the pieces of wood that became the steps to the baptistry and it was amazing to see it all fit together. I watched them lay the concrete blocks and create spaces that weren’t there before.

I knew every hiding place in the church.

There was a stack of pamphlets from The Department of Defense that had plans for building fallout shelters in the space next to the baptistry where you change out of your wet clothes after the ritual. 

I was very cold

I was shaking

Everyone could see I was shaking and they think I’m shaking because I’m scared, but I’m shaking because I’m cold.

The baptistry is made of steel plates welded together and painted with Rust-o-leum.

Dad had me lean back and he lowered me into the water.

Buried with Christ.

Raised to walk

in union of life

with him

 

That was on October 4, eight years to the day after Papa died and Sputnik was launched. Later that month, JFK gave a press conference and announced that Russia had installed strategic nuclear missiles in Cuba. Troops were sent to the Florida Keys. I watched the trains carrying troops and military vehicles and weapons out my bedroom window. 

Dad preached about the End Times. Nuclear war would be global cremation, he preached from the pulpit.

It was my decision to be baptized. When the new church opened we had a weeklong revival with a visiting preacher. Every service ended with an altar call and one night I felt I was supposed to go to the altar. My parents weren’t telling me this, I felt the call inside my chest, but I chickened out and decided to wait one more day and hope Christ wouldn’t return in the meantime and send me to Hell. No one told me to get baptized then and no one told me not to. 

Maybe Sputnik had transmitted a message to me, or Papa did, with satellite love,  Go to the altar, Chip, said some extraterrestrial intelligence. I’m still trying to interpret this message.

I know my father didn’t like it that I read comic books with more interest than the Bible, and I watched the old Superman TV episodes after school. I hated it when JFK gave a press conference and they pre-empted Superman. It was unfair to kids. Why don’t they pre-empt Huntley-Brinkley?

You are old Uncle Lars, the young man says,

and your stories have no point,

yet you tell them over and over and over and,

are you finished with that joint?