Achy Breaky Coffee

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

One of my talents is breaking things. (I have others; they just have not yet been revealed to me.) I am not a physically strong individual. I just use what strength I possess ineptly.

Now, I know that anyone can break anything with enough gumption and/or strength. Give a man a big enough lever, and he can move the world, said Archimedes. Teach a man to swim and he can fish for a bicycle, said no one.

At best, this talent is an inadvertent one; at worst, it portends possible certain probable doom for the planet.
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Today in History, February 23

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The first interstate airmail-delivery-by-rocket-powered-airplane-flight took place 80 years ago today from Greenwood Lake, NY, into New Jersey. Two unmanned, single-wing planes were launched straight up into the air and crashed soon after and not many yards away. Five years ago, a writer for NorthJersey.com described the experiment as “quite possibly the most spectacularly unsuccessful delivery in the history of post.”

The United States was lagging in rocket development, and other countries were investing time and effort in sussing out what needs in society rockets could meet. Austria had flung mail from one city to another by rocket in 1931 and rumors of efforts in other countries followed.

An article in Popular Mechanics (the photo above is the cover) described the Greenwood Lake experiment as being “as significant as that first historic flight of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk.”
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‘We must be still and still moving …’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich


     Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
 
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.—T.S. Eliot, the conclusion of “East Coker”

Just a few weeks ago, he and I were talking about his daughter, my girlfriend. I do not remember every syllable of the conversation, and I wish I did remember each syllable right now, but I declared, “All I know is that it took me an awful long time to find The One for me, and I’m lucky I waited for someone so …”

“Passionate.” He finished the sentence. He chose that word. “She’s full of life,” he added. It was a happy surprise to hear Jen’s father say it himself. He was smiling.
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