7174. BELOW THE WATER LINE pt. 9

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 9)

The funny thing is  -  a few years later  -  all this was

forgotten. People got bored. Space flight, even these 

early, most preliminary Alan Shepard and John Glenn

and Gus Grissom, and even Yuri Gagarin, the very first,

the Russian guy, became more of a ho-hum affair. All those

crazy fears were somehow put aside. In 11 years or so, we 

had men on the moon. I say 'we', because  -  true to form  -  

that's how the propaganda of the day went. It was always

us versus them, unceasingly  -  Eisenhower, Kennedy,

Johnson  -  all the usual nitwits of those years managed to

bifurcate the world into the two absolutes. It never made any 

sense to me to claim a patrimony for 'American' to be representing

'humanity' in space. How ridiculous was that  -  the dumb small

speck of prideful Humankind, reaching out into the cosmos, to

right away start claiming and bragging 'rights' for one sick

little dot of place instead of another equally sick little dot of

place. As if any of that mattered in the amazing scheme of things

consciousness was here claiming.  Standing on the sidewalk, looking

up, here in Avenel, NJ, USA, World, Earth, blah, blah, who cared

what name was on the baseball flinging into space, Rawlings or 

Spaulding, what mattered that? My sixth grade teacher, Mr. Joe

Zaccardi, erstwhile pre-eminent grade-school teacher of all time, by

reputation, he too would just always foul things up with his weird 

nationalism and juicy fervor. We'd have to listen on the transistor 

radio, sixth-grade kids all huddled around, in the 'portables', which 

were in no way portable at all, those astronaut guys getting shot into 

space for their twenty-minute sub-orbital, and later orbital, flights, 

and he'd all the while be proclaiming some Americanism or another 

to which we'd have to listen  -  our 'better' nature, how 'Commie' kids 

were trained to 'turn in' their parents, squeal to the secret police, if 

they heard anything said at home that was 'unpatriotic' or somehow 

anti-Soviet. (We, by contrast, I always thought, would just send them

out shopping, hopefully to come home with something for us). All we

did, by contrast, here, he'd claim, was live in peace, watch TV, and

follow the baseball scores. That's the concept the space capsule we

were following represented. American right and goodness. Meanwhile,

outside, where I really wanted to be  -  forget all this ridiculous 

gibberish  -  the American ground was being torn up, Avenel was

turning its own forces to the nervous anticipation of even more new

growth. Thank God for America and the portables (where the 'overflow'

of all those newly-arrived grade-school kids was put, for 'learnin'). My

favorite woods in the whole world was gone, getting torn up and ripped

for Doreen Drive and Mark Place  -  the newest flock of square housing

to be dropped into place. From my perspective the world little needed

space flight, at age ten it simply needed space. In its way, it was pretty

marvelous to see all those people come out to the Inman Avenue side-

walks to stare up and watch  -  all those disparate folk, only a few years

ago from other places  -  Brooklyn, Elizabeth, Englewood, and
Irvington, now together as one in their own square box, outside looking
up, in a place too that once, until only recently, had been a serene,
solid forest, a swampy woods, a green space where only nature lived  -
as unspoiled as the moon (uh-oh, watch out, Luna), convincing
themselves to watch and comment upon some ideological nightmare
which had been drummed into their heads already as a competition
from which only one winner would emerge  -  and in had better be,
and by staring up and watching they'd help guarantee it to be  -  the
land of Dodge and Chevy and Ford and IBM and General Dynamics
and Security Steel as well  -  new-home America,
there we were, and here we are!