Now, and Then, Voyager

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

If the photo above is not of the actual car that my family owned in 1979, it is the same model Chevy Malibu station wagon that my memory has chosen to remember as the actual car that my parents drove to cart my sister and ten-year-old me around that summer and every other summer, before 1979 and after.

(My memory is not what it used to be: It is better!)

Our family road trips over about two decades included vacations in Vermont (to see family), weekends on Cape Cod and in Pennsylvania Dutch country and along the Connecticut shore. We were not a wealthy family, so our family vacations were always road trips to a destination that we could reach in one day or less of driving. My father was the only driver, so this was more than fair. The long(ish) car ride was simultaneously unendurable and somehow, maybe sometimes, the only part of the trip that was worth remembering.
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Today in History: June 24

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Whatever it was that pilot Kenneth Arnold saw out the window of his CallAir A-2 two-seat plane near Mt. Rainier in Washington on this date in 1947, he did not keep his mystification private. He told the staff and management at the Yakima airport what he thought he saw upon landing.

Word got out. He was interviewed about what he saw by a reporter for the East Oregonian newspaper the next day. By June 26, it was a national story, and he was starting to regret telling anyone, but he also felt that what he saw was too important to be kept secret.
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Awesome. Just Awesome.

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

One can not, or ought not, nickname oneself. This is not a hard-and-fast social rule, but it is similar to the unspoken rule about not declaring oneself humble. The person who volunteers that he or she is humble often is not at all humble. An exception comes when the humble person is speaking self-deprecatingly.

Every once in a while, I have desired a cool nickname, a moniker that precedes me wherever I roam. “Lefty” is a great nickname—Steve Carlton and Phil Mickelson both carry that name with distinction, but I am right-handed. No one goes by the name “Righty.” “Write-y”? No. No one needs a nickname that is a pun, a rhyme no less, and would always need a follow-up explanation: “‘Cause he calls himself a writer, get it?”

“No. No, I don’t.”
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