The Only 2 Shuttles I watched Live - The Challenger and the Columbia

I was 14 when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. I was 14 when I was faced with the fact that even the most powerful technology created by some of the smartest people on the planet, could fail. That to trust technology, like the Challenger, was to trust 100s, likely 1000s of people, ones we will never meet, to not break our hearts. I was also traumatized. I watched as that rocket and it's shuttle shot off. I watched with the breathlessness of a 14-year-old as those pieces jettisoned in different directions ahead of white plumes of thick smoke, vaporizing the 7 crew members on board. I wasn't watching out of an avid interest in space. I was glued to the television because, like millions of school children in the US, I was actively taken along on the journey of teacher Christa McAuliffe as she prepared for her launch into space. The dawn of civilian space travel was upon us, and it was female. And I, as a Billie Jean fan, knew women like her mattered to my future. But she wasn't the only crew member. Years later I still feel deep shame that I cannot remember anybody else. I always end up Googling them: Francis Scobee, Michael Smith, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, and Gregory Jarvis.

I still can't watch footage of the Challenger. Nor could I, after that day, watch any other shuttle launches or re-entries. The instantaneous explosion of that day left no room for rational process, it hit me at the molecular level. I was turned inside out at the magnitude of the spectacle, even as I hadn't drawn any rational conclusions about what I was actually seeing. I still remember my confusion as I watched the shuttle blow apart, realizing now that my very wondering at what was happening, was itself a sign of death. Had the shuttle launched into space like an arrow, with the rocket body falling away, this would have been "normal". There would have been no attempt to understand because that would have been as it should be. Instead I remember thinking something wasn't right, but somehow my imagination failed me. I know that might seem strange. I mean it was an explosion so how much imagination does it take to understand an explosion? The damn shuttle was in bits. Billions of pieces chaotically rearranging the blue sky. But my brain couldn't put together the crew, (that mere hours, an hour, earlier had been waving on the tarmac) with nothingness. The person I had watched for months get ready for this moment, was no more. In seconds, 7 people had gone from vividly present to silenced. They marked that invisible line between life and death with a spectacular failure of human hubris. And human grit. NASA ground control checked in, reporters tried to come up with something to say, and the looks on the faces of the family members watching the launch, live at Kennedy Center, all are lodged, in no particular order, in my memory. But the sick feeling of realizing what those plumes meant, especially as I watched the horror on family member's faces, is something that has always been easy for me to recall. So, from 1986 forward I gave any Challenger memorials wide birth, and I avoided any other launches. That is, until 2003.

I was at a Communication Studies conference in Albuquerque, NM in February of 2003. I was feeling accomplished in both attending the conference and presenting my first paper. It felt like the dawn of a new era in my life. A sense of power and purpose and adventure attended my flight from Sacramento, my rental of a convertible Ford Mustang, and my presentation on the 1st wave feminist icon Inez Mulholland. Prior to leaving for my trip I had heard that I would be able to view the re-entry of the space shuttle Columbia quite clearly in the morning hours of the desert skies of New Mexico. The weather was going to be perfect. It seemed the right time to face my fears. I was in a cheap motel, my favorite kind, and in a place I had never been. The weekend brimmed with new beginnings for me as I immersed myself in this graduate school experience. Yes, I was with a man I should have broken up with a year earlier. He was a dangling modifier of sorts, awkwardly adding details to my life, but he was always good for an adventure, which is why he was there with me at all, and so we enthusiastically set the alarm in order to be up in time for the re-entry the following morning. I went to bed with nervous anticipation, both because of the conference and the Columbia viewing.

The desert morning was chilly and fresh so I dressed in the warmest clothes I had. Wrapping myself in the blazer I had brought for the conference, I aimed to hold on to the snugness I had attained in bed. Not just the warmth, but the safety too. I was nervous again. Anxious really. We waited.  Cups of coffee in hand, made in the motel room, we stared up at the wide and empty morning sky.  And then it appeared. The shuttle. Not the shuttle. Or not the shuttle as I had hoped, but the streaks. Those awful streaks, long and vicious. The plumes of white. So many of them. This time there was no confusion. I understood these marks against that vast blue. I knew how to read them. I felt so sick. I felt responsible. I had broken the covenant with myself. With the universe. I shouldn't have watched. And if my promise to the gods of human adventures hadn't been enough, my apprehension should have told me. Later I found out the crew had been doomed from take off, a tile or something had been broken off and had left the body of the shuttle vulnerable upon re-entry. I wept. It was so final. Like the Challenger. So goddamn final.

I have now and again tried to make sense of how these two shuttle explosions have affected me. Which is usually when confronted with the "break up footage". I know that when I unexpectedly stumble on pictures of the Challenger or the Columbia, I feel that ache, a tightness across my torso, a sudden weight in my stomach, even as my heart rises up and floats against my rib cage. The media anniversaries, especially ubiquitous concerning the Challenger, are events I actively avoid. I don't need them to be reminded. I cannot forget the tracing those shattered vehicles left, and how sharp and clear death is even when it baffles, when it exceeds the imagination. And the sky is always stunning to me in its vastness. I remember one clear day after a tennis practice at Sacramento City College, laying on the concrete looking up into the expanse, the blue was so sure of itself that not a cloud bothered it. It was as direct an experience of space one could get without leaving. An overwhelming infinity that pressed me against the ground even as my center fluttered from my vision shooting so high above me. I could barely stand after. I didn't need to look at that famous picture of Earth from space to know just how alone the universe might feel if we thought about it too much. To come back from space, at least in my mind, would be to find a center of certainty. A globe rich with color and life. Our blue home. That is something I also took away from those re-entries. I love my planet. I think this love, like other emotions we re-visit, are etched into who we are by what we go through. They are the visible marks of the ghosts that still haunt.

Challenger Crew:

Columbia Crew:

Trail Riding as Creative Art

While riding my 14.3 Morgan gelding (Mozart) today, I alternated between trotting and loping along on a beautiful stretch of trail and I kept finding myself on the verge of tears. Not big fat types of tears or anything, but feeling choked up all the same. And it dawned on me, that riding is kind of an art form, even if you are not in one of the disciplines. Riding is how I express myself, and I get to do it with my beautiful rescue horse with whom I have built a relationship based a kind of mutual assurance. We expressed that today. We jumped over small obstacles, and zig-zagged through a little shady Sycamore grove, and changed paces based on terrain (stones, sand, gullies, etc) and signals. He trusted me to stay seated and remain present, and I was trusting him to find his way and to carry us through even as I was alert to the beauty I was immersed in. The smell of the creek bed, the spring of his little body, the blue sky, insect swarms, and the sound of his hooves on the hard packed ground were my inspiration. You see, once you get to the point where you feel secure in the saddle, where you and the horse are moving as a balanced whole, you can start improvising and taking on whatever comes up. You blend your talents. I felt as much as I saw. I was untethered because he gave me height and wings.

I was riding with emotion. With creativity. I find myself swept up with joy mostly, but also there are elements of fear, exaltation, tranquility, and loneliness. Yes, even loneliness. But on Mozart I embrace where I am because things transpire much more quickly. I am who I am as I ride. When I cross the creek and look down for footing, when I look up across the grassy soft hills so I can get a sense of the space, when I briefly close my eyes to hear his hooves and the Black Phoebe. I am responding with what is around me. I am in communication with the dirt, the birds, the horse, myself, and whatever or whoever crosses my path. I remember once happening on a coyote crouching under a Toyon bush, her golden eyes met mine and she scampered off. I held my breath in that moment, and exhaled as I saw her disappear. She took part of me with her. Mozart didn't miss a beat. He glanced at her too, likely smelled her before he saw her, and continued trotting along. My heart rate, my breath, my skin, my brain, everything responds to these never ending series of moments that make up a trail ride. And they filter down into my emotional center. My core. My breath. Because it is my breath that keeps me centered and present. It is my best friend in finding a quiet seat and a quiet mind. 

Mozart and I, two different species, working together requires my physical and emotional lightness, and his trust. We create this experience together that, like theater, is there, but then gone. The creativity is in the doing of it, in the responding to what is around us, and in finding where to go in an instant. I've never thought about this before. There isn't art just in a dressage arena, or in a jumping competition, there is art happening out trail rides, the lowliest of the horse arts. It is an art with therapeutic value. Therapy through creation, through a mindfulness required for presence, centeredness, sensitivity, responsiveness, and emotional availability.

I was talking about this mindfulness as a zone for creativity, presence, and centered self-awareness with a friend of mine, Laurel Friedman. Laurel has started teaching Yoga as a practice for healing trauma. Yoga, like riding, is based in the idea of centeredness, breathing, and open presence to the moment. Facilitating this openness and presence is the breath because it takes us to our center and it also connects us to the world around us. I've taken a few Yoga classes with Laurel, and I am not a Yoga aficionado, but the connection to riding is unmistakable. Balance, mobility, stability, and flexibility are all aspects of Yoga achieved through deliberate movement and breathing and awareness. By drawing on a vibrant connection to our core created through this kind of movement I think we tap into our most creative selves. Creativity might not always result in an art gallery opening, or a book, or any kind of art that we perceive to be "art", but it typically widens our capacity for feelings and what seems possible. When I put up my saddle after riding, and relinquish Mozart to his own motivations, I walk away released, for the time being, from what "should be", and instead I am made acutely aware of the rich possibilities of right now.

Unhappy Walnuts

It was inspiration by way of nostalgia. I wanted to bake my mother's Bűndnernusstorte for Christmas dinner because other than the little individual pieces I could afford to buy on intermittent trips to Switzerland, I had not had this pie any where near my person (nor the smell of it baking) since 2008, the year Muetti ("Mom" in German) died. And I miss her every holiday season, well l miss her every day actually, but I especially miss her on the holidays where she would produce even more magic in the house than usual. There was the ever present braided bread Zűpfa, but I make that, the Christmas cookies that, given the large amounts produced, seem overwhelming to me, and then Bűndnernusstorte. Ah Bűndnernusstorte. It is a round one inch thick torte with a delicious thick crust, that is filled with walnuts and carmel gooey goodness. The thing is, I had only ever made it once with my mother because, well, 1) I was spoiled and usually just ate the goodies, 2) I was a tomboy and nobody was going to catch me dead in a kitchen, not even for Bűndnernusstorte, and 3) I was scared of creating the carmel-walnut center. On point 3 my mother was of no help. She explicitly warned me to stay away when she was creating it. And the one time when, as a young adult I made it with her, (I realized I better make it with her or I would never, ever know what I was doing once she had passed on), when it came to creating that deep brown, walnut and melted sugar center, I really watched in awe as she worked quickly to not let it harden to an unusable mass, and also not get any of the stuff on her skin. And again she reiterated how careful one must be to not ruin the center and also not hurt oneself. My fate was sealed. My cousins also didn't help matters because none of them made the cake either, rolling their eyes in my request to make one together saying, "Why? We can just buy one at the store. That tort is way too hard to make!". Good for them. Switzerland is the land of Bűndnernusstorte.  

This was the year I decided to stare my inadequacy and fear straight in the face. 2019 Christmas dinner would, by God, have a Bűndnernusstorte. My step daughter had moved in with us and she works in a kitchen plating desserts. So who else to help with that touchy, difficult walnut gooey center? It was a perfect converging of talents, knowledge, and context for me to taste my childhood. To combine the ingredients just as my grandmother had done, after all it was her recipe, and as my mother had done, so many times. To be suggested back to that kitchen at 1112 34th Ave in Sacramento, as the smell filled my home in San Diego. To be brought back to the sight of that torte waiting on the counter as we ate. To feel it's weight in my hand as I brought it to the table, like my mother had. Like my father had. Like my sister had. Like I had. We loved that torte. With Christmas dinner shopping list in hand, my husband and I headed off to the store to gather up our various supplies and in my mind, most critically, the walnuts needed for the Bűndnernusstorte.

"How much are those walnuts?" David asked in shock.

"Well, around $11 a bag." I said as calmly and as non-affected as I could. They were pricey after all. But damnit I needed them for the torte and so I was going to push him into the emotional space of sensing he was being the unreasonable partner if it killed me.  "We are making Christmas dinner, which is always expensive. It was like this last year when I bought the groceries. And everything is always more expensive at this store and you know it is. If we had gone to the other store this wouldn't be an issue." (It would have been an issue, but he didn't need to know that).

"I am NOT spending $22 for 2 bags of walnuts and then god know how much on the rest of the ingredients! That is like making a $40 cake for Christ's sake!"

"It is not a cake, it is a torte." I always tend to bring things back to specific instances of vocabulary failure when I feel like meaning is beginning to spin out of control. I don't know why I do this because it is not helpful. Of which his response was evidence.

"I don't fucking care what it is! Don't talk to me like I am some kind of idiot! What I do know is that $40 is too goddamn much for a cake!!!"

"OK. I just wanted to make my mom's torte, that's all" I said, trying to keep my voice low because people were starting to stare.

"Oh, wait. Is this some kind of sentimental thing? You miss your mom and so you want to make this cake?"

Now I was embarrassed, so I mumbled "Never mind, I will put the ingredients back and I will come get them later when I have my wallet." I felt like an idiot not just because of his tone or his volume, but because he highlighted my Achilles heel, my nostalgia. My tendency toward the sentimental.  I walked away with the golden ingredients to return them to their rightful place on the shelf.

"Don't you fucking walk away from me! Get back here now!! I want to talk about this!!! Barbara, I will leave this cart right here if you don't get back here." 

"You don't need to get them. I will get them later. Let's go." I said all of this without meeting his gaze, furious with his voice which carried our private exchange 3 aisles over by the cold cereals. 

With that David shoved the cart down an aisle and stalked out of the store. I followed him briefly to only, upon exiting the store, turn sharply to the left, down the side of the building, and out back to the labyrinth of the neighborhood. I would, I had decided, walk home. There was no way I was going to get into the car with that monster. Husband or not. 

I walked home, and he went, as is his wont, to his sailboat. It was a very quiet evening. The phone didn't ring and sleep was at a distance. Finally at 3:00 am I fumbled for my phone and called him. He answered in a single ring. "Hi". "Hi", he said back. "So what happened?" I asked. We talked it over. It turned out his questions about the walnuts initially had just been to verify their price, because he had been surprised. But then my response had pushed him to just dig in. He explained that his asking me about the reason for wanting to make the cake was a way to find an out of the conversation so he could just return to getting the walnuts. He was trying to create a door for us to walk through, but what I had experienced was a public humiliation. We apologized. We agreed to try to be better at talking things through in a way that was respectful.

So we made the torte. Mom's recipe called for it to be baked at 325 degrees, so we did, but I had forgotten an important bit of information, which was that the oven in my childhood home ran hot. SO, the torte baked for too long at a heat that was too low, which meant the crust was too dense and tough. Lesson learned for next time. The gooey walnut center? It was heaven. Perfect in every way. Just as I remembered. The only thing that has changed is that this torte is no longer just the Bűndnernusstorte. It is now also the Fighting Torte, or the Fighting Walnut Torte, as David told our Christmas guests. We all laughed as he and I recalled the story. 

It's funny how we fight over the smallest things because there are bigger things attached. My heart is attached to that damn Bűndnernusstorte because it comes with so much of me that I have to search for now. So much that I have to just rely on memory for. But with things like the Bűndnernusstorte that memory comes to life. I don't have to rely on just the immaterial memory because now I have the actual thing in front of me. I can experience my memory in a much more first hand kind of way. That is what materiality does. It brings the past into the present, but it also reconstructs that past so that those memories are more vivid. It is like adding color back into a faded photograph so that the details sharpen. And now David and I will likely always recount the unhappy Christmas walnut saga of 2019. And it will make us smile.

Emeryville Mudflats

I remember these sculptures and always anticipated them as we would head into Frisco (and yes the old timers born in San Francisco, like my dad, called it Frisco, and I am reclaiming it). I loved the whimsy even as my already environmentalist soul was worried about the trash. It is possible that at some point my dad made mention of the trash associated with the art, though I don't remember that specifically. And when I noticed it was gone I assumed it was for the sake of the animals that call the mudflats home, which I totally support. But that doesn't mean I am not grateful to the artists who made our drive fanciful or that I don't still stare wistfully out of the window to that muddy expanse when passing by, populating it with the sculptures of my youth.




Remembering the Emeryville Mudflats

What my horse has taught me

Building slowly, block of information by block of information, sometimes going back, but always considering what the horse needs to know, needs to feel before moving forward. Want a relationship? Do ground work. Want to ride? Make sure there are back muscles that can easily support you. Make sure that they know what you mean on the ground before you ever get on their backs. Set them up for success and you will win their trust. And with that trust so much more is possible.

Dog inspired thought

So grateful for quiet dogs. The only problem is when one of them decides to bark (usually Chucho...haven't heard Mags bark in over a year, unless it is in her sleep), it is only one or 2 barks at top volume, out of nowhere, and then silence. Reminds me of when I used to scream "Swing batter!!" at the top of my lungs from short stop, right as the pitch approached the batter. I now have a sense of how alarming this probably was. And I feel badly. Damn dog.

Maggie May and Chucho el Roto

Memory Tree

I am culturally Christian, to be specific, culturally Lutheran. To be even more specific, cultural ELCA. But that's enough of geeking out on the religious specifics. I'm an atheist now, or I am until I can think of something that suits me better. That being said, I do love celebrating Christmas. This is probably because I am culturally Christian (let's keep this simple), but maybe because it is the way in which there are specific sensory experiences that are part of my Christmas nostalgia. I especially love the act of getting a tree, putting it up and decorating it. All while drinking spiked egg nog and listening to Elvis Presley's Christmas album, Bing Crosby's White Christmas, and anything by Amy Grant. There is something intoxicating about the mix of music, nog, pine needles, white lights, and ornaments that take me back to before my own life.

When Tori, my husband's daughter saw my tree and carefully inspected the ornaments, asking about one's that caught her attention. She loved the electrical relay that my brother had, when he was less financially robust, turned into a Christmas ornament and given to me (in fact a number of us in the family received this gift). After a few explanations and musings over the ornaments, she said, "You don't have a Christmas tree, you have a Memory tree".

Sitting here in the glow of the trees little white lights, I have to agree. It is a memory tree. These ornaments are a conversation with the past. For example, I have 2 of some ornaments. Why? Because when my mother died I received some of her ornaments, ornaments that she had bought in threes...one for my sister, one for me, and one for her. I think she liked the idea that we each had the same of something on our trees. Also, when she bought things she really liked, like a cookbook, she couldn't help getting 2 more so that my sister and I could both have one. Looking at any of my two identical ornaments reminds me of this quality of my mother's. It is a memory of her, of her character, of our bond. Or I look at the 1960s plastic ornament of the angel (or it once looked like an angel, now not so much), and I am reminded of the Pennybakers and their endless supply of mixed cocktails and salted peanuts on the coffee table. Their fantastic and terrifying fights. Maryanne was German and her husband, John, was American, they met during WWII and he brought her home as his wartime bride. They were as different as night and day, but the one thing they loved equally were poolside parties with lots of alcohol, or coming over to our house for our various gatherings and imbibing on the good whiskey my mother always kept for when my uncle would come over. Maryanne was a cheerful person, whereas John sulked and brooded, a condition that worsened with the amount of liquor applied. Maryanne would just become impatient and unhinged with him. There is also the ornament that I picked up at a market in South Dakota. It is a dream catcher. The only one I have gratefully, because I am often embarrassed by the roadside kitsch us tourists partake in when on reservations though in the meanwhile not offering any real understanding or attention to what Native people have endured and are enduring. But I like this dream catcher because it was made by an elderly woman who pressed it into my reluctant hands, and I paid her directly, in cash. Somehow it seemed to make things better. My prized ornament, or one of them, is the one I made in Kindergarten for my mom. It has various dried pasta and beads not so skillfully glued to a piece of cardboard with my name scrawled on the back. I remember the pride with which I gave it to my mother, and the joy at seeing it carefully hung in the tree.

But it isn't just the tree with ornaments, it is the smell. The smell of the pine in the house, and the act of putting it up. These physical aspects of making Christmas happen help to conjure other trees, other tree trimmings, the people who were part of the Christmas story in our home. The tree becomes the heart of the home. A place where people gather to talk or, as in the case with my sister and I when we were children, to dream about what lay in those packages, especially those wrapped in the magic brown paper and tied with twine from Switzerland. The way the Christmas tree lights spill across the coffee table in the otherwise dark living room where I sit now reminds me of the way the multi-colored lighted star of my childhood tree refracted on the ceiling. I would lay on the carpet and stare up at the ceiling mesmerized by the design captured there.

My Memory Tree this year is as beautiful as any other. And today is the winter solstice in which Earth is tilting away from the sun, at least for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere. Tilting away from the sun, but ultimately moving us towards Spring. This shortest day of the year I sit here huddled with my Memory Tree in front of the Christmases of times gone by. My Yule log is these memories. They warm me. The remind me of who I am. They help me feel connected even as my Christmases have become smaller and smaller.