I was born in Maryland and spent my first thirty years living there, first in the Appalachian Mountains, then on the Eastern Shore, and later in suburban Washington. After a year in South Carolina, I moved to Georgia in 1977. I soon met another park ranger who worked in Florida. She was a wonderful woman who became my best friend. then my wife, and soon the mother of our three children. I spent over eleven years working in the historic city of Savannah, Georgia, and on the moss-draped sea islands nearby before moving to Atlanta.. In 2007, I retired from the National Park Service and a career dedicated to preserving and interpreting resources and themes in the cultural and natural history of the United States. It was a most rewarding experience. Today, I enjoy living in the rolling hills and woods of the Appalachian Piedmont east of Atlanta.
Today, December 2, marks the 100th anniversary of my mother's birth. She was the fourth of seven children born to a farm couple whose deep lineage in the western Virginia mountains has been lost to history. She and my dad met at a community dance in 1931 and married in the fall of 1933. By that time she had worked in a silk mill and as an etcher in a glass factory, and would later work through World War II as a quality control specialist in a synthetic fabric plant.
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With my birth she became a full time mother and homemaker, but still found time to enjoy her church family, reading, gardening, nature, frequent visits with her large family, and vacations on Pattersons Creek in Burlington, West Virginia. She was taken from this world far too early in 1976 after a long illness. There's no question that I miss her and I'm sorry she did not live to enjoy her daughter-in-law and three grandchildren. Still, I feel her goodness has been with us helping to shape our family over these near forty years. Wouldn't have it any other way. She was a great mom, full of love, compassion, a wonderful sense of humor, and dedication to family and friends.
In September 1977, NASA launched Voyager I, a cosmic traveler designed to explore the outer planets in our solar system, then accelerate beyond into space. Voyager has just now reached the edge of our system and entered what astronomers call a "cosmic purgatory" where the Sun's energy "wind" falls back on itself. So what is in store for this craft now that it is 11 billion miles from the Sun? For the next eight years, its instrument package will relay information on space itself.
After those years pass, Voyager will fall silent, but its journey will continue until ending in one of perhaps three likely scenarios. First, the craft could be a "cosmic mariner" for all time. Second, it could be destroyed either by any one of billions of objects in the universe or by an alien culture viewing it as a threat. Third, it could be discovered, recovered, and studied by a culture that viewed it more as a curiosity. They would not be disappointed.
Voyager I carries the Golden Record. It is "a twelve-inch gold plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on earth." We can only imagine their reactions to the sound of thunder, surf, wild dogs, a F-111 flyby, a human heartbeat, or to a diversity of music. Here is the final selection from the Golden Record:
Seems quite fitting for our traveler - Voyager, drifting in emptiness, will not pass close to another planetary system for 40,000 years.
Note: Most of the audio selections from the Golden Record are available on YouTube. It's an interesting listen. For an explanation of the diagram, go here.
Here's another postcard Katherine sent to my great uncle, Charles. It's postmarked October 30, 1910, Camden, New Jersey. Seems sending several postcards to the same recipient on the same day was a popular activity. The message:
Dear Friend: Because I have not written do not think I have forgotten you. I am alive and enjoying life. Have just finished breakfast at 4:30 a.m. Kate
OTR wonders if she had breakfast after a night on the town or just got an early start to her day.
The recent move on the part of the State Department to replace Mom and Pop with Parent One and Parent Two on passport applications didn't sit well with lots of folks. There's plenty in print about it, but the best of the lot is Michael A. Walsh's commentary in today's New York Post. Here's a sample
Leaving aside the wretched barbarism of the phrase "gender neutral" -- what State really means, of course, is "sex neutral" -- the move is another salvo in the ongoing sapper war against American and western cultural norms. Even as recently as a decade ago, it would have seemed absurd to think that words like "mother" and "father" would become politically incorrect, but such is the world we now inhabit.Leaving aside the wretched barbarism of the phrase "gender neutral" -- what State really means, of course, is "sex neutral" -- the move is another salvo in the ongoing sapper war against American and western cultural norms. Even as recently as a decade ago, it would have seemed absurd to think that words like "mother" and "father" would become politically incorrect, but such is the world we now inhabit.
For more than two centuries, dating back to Rousseau, the left has been waging an unrelenting war on the wellsprings of Western civilization, as if it were some deliberate, malign conspiracy against an oppressed minority instead of the bulwark against savagery that picked up the pieces of Greco-Roman culture and transformed them into the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. No society is perfect, but where would you rather be? Dubuque or Darfur? San Francisco or Riyadh
