A Question for Your Consideration

Sometimes, our personal destiny gets caught up with Life’s amusing interplay, which might lead to a perplexing story similar to mine, which happened about 46 years ago, right here in Albuquerque.

Does anyone, out there, relate to the following tale of woe and humor?

My Story

A time of professional success marked our days in Albuquerque, New Mexico, back in the late spring of 1973, or was it 1974? My wife, Beryl, her three kids, Bob, Cathy and Ricky shared with me  our new, large ranch-style home, which came complete with a liver-shaped, in-ground swimming pool and our trusted dog, Jager. All family members had put in some sweat equity in making this Northeast Heights track home a “piece de resistance” worthy of the NY Times’ rotogravure page on a Sunday morning.

Family unity was measured by the number of “crepes du Quebec”, which were needed to satisfy our hardy crew of breakfast eaters. Being a minor chef in a home where my wife produced a plethora of delicious meals represented for me a modest culinary satisfaction outside my world of Sandia Labs projects.

Maxwell’s equations, plasma physics, high-voltage technology complete with blasts of potentially deadly levels of x-ray and gamma-ray radiation greeted me on a daily basis in Area 5 laboratories, which were located way out on the open mesa, not far from the Monsanto Mountains in Albuquerque.

The overriding dangers of the job gave it a special appeal to me as a mere humanoid interested in Nature’s secrets. With a bit of special knowledge and care, a person could survive in this hostile, experimental environment where everyone was required to wear a personalized, thermo-luminescent radiation badge designed to measure “total rad dose” absorbed since the start of the month. These badges were read at the end of the month to determine if that badge holder had exceeded his/her allowed dose.

This was a Buck Rogers kind of place that any interested earthling might wish to visit, at least once, in a lifetime. At the time of this story, I had already managed to log in about five years of radiation exposure without any noticeable damage to face, limb or neo-cortex.

A Time for Reflection

There comes a time in any long-term dedicated program to weigh the pros and cons, i.e., to evaluate the goals, hopes and aspirations that set this effort into play. In a firm or a company setting, we might see it stated in so many words like the enterprise’s MISSION STATEMENT.

For a person like myself with professional aspirations, going back to elementary school,  these goals might amount to less lofty peaks, but still remain the underlying theme of an early lifetime.

As a near-mendicant son of a Franco-Quebec wage-slave (a mill-rat), who had been employed for long years in the textile mill sweatshops of Lowell, Massachusetts like thousands of other destitute, illiterate  immigrants – Greeks, Irish, Polish, Lithuanian, Russian-Jewish, Portuguese, etc. – my secret hope, while growing up, was to avoid, at all costs, the crushing burden of poverty, ignorance, poor technical training, regional superstitions, angst, despair and a numbing hopelessness that I called Lowell, at that time.

Certainly, other Lowellians in my age group might have been enamored by local charms like the Pawtucket Falls, The Lowell Sun Building (10 stories tall), Jack Kerouac’s stories or  the submarine races watched by young, passionate lovers parked by the Merrimack River.

Such amenities might suffice for that individual following a privileged path leading to a successful career in medicine, advanced engineering, science or law, but very few people, within my circle of acquaintances or anywhere in the city, enjoyed such an advantage.

At the time, the United States was in a long-term, political and technological contest with Russia and her satellite states – USSR – over the direction of international development. Yes, Stalin had died in 1953, but the growing threat of international Communism with its suppressive government take-overs was made evident to us through theater news-reels, Time and Look magazines and our own Lowell Sun. With nuclear weapons possibly riding in earth orbit around the planet, doom and gloom reigned as headlines.

It was difficult to feel at ease knowing that 20,000 to, maybe, 20,000,000 tons of TNT equivalent could suddenly come raining down on your party for friends and relatives planned at Hampton or Salisbury Beach on the coast only 35 miles away from your nice, comfortable home or tenement somewhere in Lowell.

After Sputnik (1957) and the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), there was no more time in my mind for sunshine patriots that Thomas Paine had derided in his poetry back in 1776. For me, it was a “do or die” world where everyone needed to prepare his/her personal shelter/bunker, figuratively at least, since the US government was not able to provide this safety margin for most of its citizens.

A Timely Visit from Beryl’s PSU Friend & Our Neighbor

Judy and Wiley had been our next door neighbors in an attractive apartment building that lodged so many, fledgling, PSU graduates to the academic stock of central Pennsylvania and, possibly, the entire American continent. Often, Judy and my wife, Beryl, would take a casual stroll around the grassy lawn and deciduous trees that had been so carefully planted by management to soothe the tired noggins of the studious inhabitants. Brain work can be quite draining as many graduate students in any department will testify.

Often, the two women would drag Judy’s laughing but learning-disabled daughter, Leana, in her special wooden wagon across the lawn’s many hillocks and occasional walkways. Many times, after returning home from my university digs, a physics teaching laboratory, I would find these three ladies returning from their afternoon walk. Being only six at the time – I am a poor judge of age, though – Leana would then be ready for a little nap to restore her body to its usual resilience.

Apparently, Judy and my wife had recently been on the phone – women are so much better at maintaining an emotional connection than people of the other persuasion – exchanging sympathies over Leana’s death by peritonitis, a few months before. This was, at least, a minor tragedy for me, also, although I did not know the little one even enough to chat with her a little when she was still with us.

The announcement that Judy would be our house guest for a week or so soon was one that I found pleasant, yet, quite sad under the circumstances. The day of our guest’s appearance soon arrived. My wife had picked her up at the Albuquerque International Airport. Having three cars at our disposal at the time was definitely an advantage.

Old Memories – Really Bad Feelings

While sitting in the family room and watching a little television, I could easily capture the essence of Judy’s traumatic, last days and hours with her dying daughter. Before any medical assistance could be brought to bear to possibly relieve Leana’s terrible abdominal pain, it seems that her appendix burst sending poisons through her fragile frame. She died soon after. Then, Judy had placed her dead daughter’s body on the kitchen table so that she could bathe her a final time. All quite tragic!

Although I don’t recall the specifics, which Judy explained to my wife carefully and poignantly, I do recall suddenly feeling a deep need to hold and grieve with my visiting Penn State neighbor from years before.

For me, she, then, became a hurting and beautiful woman. Her physical beauty had never been a problem for me in the past. Suddenly, she was someone that I might want as “my woman”.

This very primitive response is one that I had never sensed before. After all, I, then, was a successful, cool, emotionally-restrained scientist/engineer performing important pulsed-power experiments for the national defense on a 24/7 basis. Emotions and hurting memories were items to be kept under lock and key.

Normal work hours were not part of my schedule. My personal mission, which I had adopted years before, placed me in a category similar to a Strategic Air Command (SAC) B-52 bomber pilot ready to deliver a major punch to the gut of our Soviet foes at a moment’s notice.

Suddenly, I was at a major and unexpected turning point in my marriage, in my professional career and in my whole view of life and its meaning.

Now, I felt viscerally connected to my first-grade friend and playmate, Jacqueline, the one, who had suddenly been snatched from me on the night of March 12th, 1946 when her mother tried to exterminate her own life, but rather succeeded at snuffing out the lives of her two children, Jacqui and her brother, Francois, by filling their apartment home with freely available coal gas (carbon monoxide, methane and sulfur monoxide) which was used at that time for home heating.