The Saturday Morning Blogger – Handwritten letters

James Barrington

When my mother died eleven years ago, one of the treasures we found among her belongings was a box of hand-written diaries in the form of lined notebooks. She had spent undoubtedly countless hours recording commonplace events of life and personal musings on what some of them meant.

For the past several years I have been sending monthly notes to my grandsons who live 2,000 miles away. I don’t have the opportunity to interact with them on a regular basis. I don’t know if they appreciate (or can even decipher) my handwritten notes, but I am trying to leave them a legacy of their grandfather that they may find useful at some point in the future. Maybe that use will be as kindling for a campfire, but maybe they can find more productive uses.

My brother found some handwritten notes from our fraternal grandmother among his share of the papers we salvaged from our mother’s belongings. Perhaps she was the source of my sometimes opinionated ways – although I found that her opinions and mine don’t often agree. That’s OK. We loved each other, anyway. It just goes to show that people don’t have to agree on everything to be able to get along.

My older grandson in the Northeast sent a list of interview questions for an English assignment in his high school freshman class. The questions seemed simple enough until I thought about the liberal philosophy of the Northeast. Here are the questions as he sent them:

1. Do you have a self law that you go by?
2. What is it?
3. Why do you go by it?
4. Has law ever made you do something you didn’t want to do or/and Has law ever prevented you from doing something you have wanted to?
5. What have you had to do?
6. Is there any law that you disagree with? What is it, why do you disagree with it?

4.Do you think it is good or bad that different places have different laws? Why?

5.Do you feel the law is too strict? Why?

When I replied to him, I mentioned that I want to talk to him about this when I see him this summer. There are layers of possibilities involved in those questions – particularly in 21^st Century American society.

The written word has a permanency to it that transcends generations.

The Saturday Morning Blogger – Flying like Superman

James Barrington

Flying has always been fascinating to me. Oh, flying in an airplane was appealing, but flying (like Superman) was always so much more interesting. There are probably a million different ways that psychoanalysts would diagnose me with all kinds of social and mental abnormalities, but whatever their opinion of me, I’ve just thought the idea of defying gravity was a fun way to travel. It has been the subject of some of my short fiction daydreaming and always leads into the superhero mode.

In part, it ties back to my refusal to believe that there is an absolute physical speed limit of the speed of light. After all, for years scientists of great renown believed that the speed of sound was an absolute limit beyond which no physical object could pass. I suspect most were pretty red-faced when Chuck Yeager proved them wrong.

As a child I was thrilled with pictures of people wearing flying jet packs and predictions that average commuters would be flying to work in the far distant year of 1975. Hum… that didn’t work out, but the idea still floats around, including flying cars and other dreams of faster local transportation with less congestion. I wonder what will happen when the first flying car accidents result in crashes into home and fatalities on the ground. If we would all just fly “like Superman” we wouldn’t have to worry about those concerns.

Defying gravity, with or without wings, has long been an aspiration of humanity, but the reality of it continues to elude us. We walk and birds fly. Superman’s ability to fly seems to be destined to remain in the realm of comic books.