An old science fiction story becomes historical artifact

When I was a school girl in the 1950s, I remember having teachers telling me that petroleum was decayed dinosars preserved in the earth for millions of years. I mused in an earlier blog,"do I remember this correctly? Could this possibly be true?"

I heard from a number of contemporaries who said yes, that's what they were told , too. And we thought we were so advanced!(Wonder what silly myths we still believe today?)

Recently, my granddaughters and I were going to the used book store, and my oldest ran to her room for some books to trade. One was a juvenile science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein. The pages were VERY yellow.

"Oh, give me that!" I exclaimed. "I read everything he ever wrote and it will be fun to reread it now."

She sighed in relief. "Daddy gave me this and he really wants me to read it. But grandma," she turned a pained face to me. "I just couldn't get into it."

Well, rest easy, child. I almost couldn't get into it myself.

It was written in 1952. This family, living in Luna City buys an old spaceship and takes off for Mars, where there are several settlements. And live Martians.

Now, you youngsters, you don't know about the early 1950s and how the population romanticized Mars. People were still seeing UFOs--I saw one myself in 1947, and it's one of very few events the Air Force still lists as "unexplained."

When we looked at Mars, it seemed crisscrossed by regular, symmetrical canals. Connect UFOs with the canals, and you got some hopeful science fiction buffs who were itching to see what was there. An alien race? Oh, boy!

When better telescopes and better science came along in the mid-50s, we were told the marks were normal erosion, no sign of water--or air to speak of--and it was a big, ol' dusty planet, Well. We felt were bummed, majorly.

("Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury was written in 1950 and is still a lyrically written manuscript that might hold up.)

So I'm trying to read this book, and Heinlein was forward-thinking for his day. Everytime they went anywhere, though, they all whipped out their slide rules to calculate the orbit. Scary. The idea of computers, or artificial intelligence, was too far away for his mind to grasp. The grandmother in the story is a well-trained pilot who can't get a license because women can't have them. The mother is a physician, but she fixes ALL the meals, and of course, the author has them actually cooking in space. A passenger ship comes down with "neo measles" for anyone who hadn't had the measles earlier (Measles vaccinations also were beyond his imagination.)

There's quite a lot he does get right, but overall, it's kind of "Father Knows Best Goes to Mars." And a lot of you have never heard of the tv sitcom, "Father Knows Best."At least I lived through those years and had a referant. My granddaughter had none, and her eyes crossed.

Who knew a Robert Heinlein novel could become an nistorical artifact?

Actually, now I think about it, I hadn't planned on being a historical repository myself.

But I am.

We're Still A Contender

Those residents who were disappointed when Texas couldn't reach more than 43 triple-digit consecutive days have another record I hope we won't reach.

Average number of 100-degree or more days is usually 16 so far. We're closing in on 60 days. In 1980, the summer that would not die, we had 69.

Dare I hope it's another 30 years before the next one? I'll probably be dead by then.

You know, there are some things in life you just won't miss.

"The Help" is a reminder we have to keep working together

A friend and I went to see "The Help" last night. Critics are probably right. It's a predictable movie, no surprises, and the ending may be just a little too happy to be realistic.

Not to worry. It still focuses on a time at least two generations know nothing about but those of us over 60 remember. The theater was full. Movie managers, no fools they, had hiked the price up from $7 last weekend to $13 this weekend. There was a disclaimer in the credits that the women in the Junior League of Jackson, Miss., in no way resemble the characters in this movie. That made my friend and me chuckle.

I used to say I never went to a segregated school, but I found out a month ago my elementary was, until I reached third grade. We didn't have many blacks. But the hispanic kids were kept separate, too. That makes me blink.
In the Southwest, the bigotry is more subtle. I remember an hispanic friend in high school I wanted to go with to a certain restaurant.

"Charlotte," she said patiently, "I can't go eat there."
"Why not?" I asked angrily.
She just shook her head. And she wouldn't go.
And she was right. They wouldn't have served her, even with the blonda chica whose father was a town leader. THEN who knows where it would go?

When I was 16, we went to Florida by car. Mother, a history teacher, and Dad planned the trip so that we stopped at the state capitol in every state and photographed it.
In one of those buildings, I saw for the first time a water fountain labled "colored water". My impulse was to go integrate that water fountain, but Mother said no, and I didn't.

I remember thinking, "I couldn't live here. I'm glad I didn't grow up here."
It was a shadow of the grue I felt years later in Dallas when hooded Ku Klux Klan members approached cars in the intersection for donations. They had the right. And I rolled up my window and locked the door. I had never seen live Klansman in regalia, either, you see. I was in my 40s.

For me, this little movie made me remember a time I never want to see this country go back to. For those younger, really unaware, maybe in some it will awaken the same determination. There is much more to do.

Only a few things in life are worth saying, Never Again.

This just happens to be one of them.

Living With Gracie--Chapter 1

When I was a new mom for the first time, I had taken a Red Cross course on how to hold a baby and how to wash the child without drowning him or dropping him on his head.

My son was a C-section baby. We discovered after about 36 hours of labor that the reason he wouldn't come out was that he had one foot on each sciatic nerve. This left his feet a little hinky and I was instructed to do some exercises with him every time I changed his diaper--cloth diaper with diaper pins, no less--and I did so competently.

Let me emphasize:I had never been around babies or other people caring for them. Nada.

My mother-in-law, a nurse and the oldest daughter of nine children, came by almost every day to give me support and help me learn how to mother this child I really loved very much.

She came by one day when I was changing his diaper and asked in astonishment, "Why aren't you talking to that baby?"

I was genuinely puzzled.

"Why?" I asked. "He can't answer."

I had read a number of books, but they discussed the practical. Not one of them told me about talking to your child. I learned a lot that day, and I started talking to my baby. And while it was a while before he could answer in words, he started answering me. A good time was had by all.

Sorry, son, but training Gracie reminds me of that old story.

Of course I talk to her, but apparently not enough. I've read enough to learn that if I don't get Gracie's manners under control, she is in danger of turning into an incorrigible brat. And one tool suggested was talking to her.

My youngest granddaughter has accustomed her to the leash by taking her out and running with her. Gracie loves it. She will follow me now without fighting the leash, but she does find my pace boring, and my refusal to let her run off to jump up on the UPS man mean.

So again I am talking to her all the time. A trainer I found on the internet suggested talking to her while she eats, and I did that this morning. She liked it. He recommended two feedings; I keep some kibble in her bowl at all times. She isn't greedy. She nibbles. When she is really hungry, she sits on her haunches and polishes it off.

Somehow, she has discovered human food on her own. I have not fed her, nor have the grandkids. Last Friday, however, I scraped two chicken drumstick bones into the trash and went outside. When I returned in a few minutes, she had overturned the trash and was finishing the last few bites of the second chicken bone. Note to self: her teeth are really getting strong. So. More changes in how I do things.

She loves her puppy toothpaste so much it is hard to get the brush out of her mouth.

Obedience classes won't start until September. I would like to teach her to sit, heel, stay down, not chew up my phonebook or poop on my woven Indian rug. Oh, and not bite. I leave her chew rope to the kids. I'm too slow. After my fourth half-inch bleeding cut from her faster reflexes and razor teeth, I've decided that isn't prudent.

I've learned a herder dog means very active. Want ads today advertised a year and a half Corgi male, crate trained. free to a good home. The owner said he simply didn't have the time the dog required.

I hear that. An intelligent dog means one that needs stimulation. Whew! We're working on her ear-splitting "YAP!"

"Inside voice," I tell her in a soft tone. "Inside voice."

I swear she gets it.

Right now, she's sprawled by my feet as I type. I love that her feet always stretch behind her. When she sleeps on her back, the hind legs stretch out and the front legs fold altogether like a child's. AWWWW. Her bed is in my bedroom, and she has begun to use it instead of the cool hardwood floor. She usually wants to be in whatever room I am in.

I think we're bonding.

Add 3 more inches to that skirt and I'll buy it

As goes Texas, so goes the country--so far as textbooks are concerned.

The state is so big, publishers pretty much sell other, smaller states the textbooks that our beknighted Board of Education select. (Briefly this year, Creationism arose again but thankfully was quashed.)

Anyway, Texas has hundreds of thousands of middle school and high school teenage girls.

You would think the clothing industry would like to sell these girls dresses. And they do sell a fair amount to middle class and richer kids who can afford to have dresses for parties and fun that they can't wear to school.

Because I doubt a single district in the state will let a girl wear a skirt three inches or more above the knees to school. Sundresses? Yeah. with a Tshirt underneath. No I said Tshirt. NOT camisole.

So the girls head for the trusty jeans again. No problems there and all their friends wear them, anyway.

But if makes me scratch my head. Obviously, the stores want to sell clothes. So why don't they make and sell clothes the girls can wear to school?

There's a lot of conservative school districts out there. A huge untapped market.
Oh, well, I've never been in retail.

It just seems silly to me.

Rain? It's Rain? OMG!

It rained today. I don't know when it started, but probably a soaking rain for one and a half hours, at least. Maybe an inch?

Don't think it was supposed to be here.

Hope the farmer I saw haying yesterday afternoon got it in. In a good year, we get three cuttings. An okay year? Two. This is likely to be a one-cutting year.

Gracie, my three-month-old puppy, was amazed. She had never seen water fall out of the sky. Scared her, at first. Then she ran out in the yard, found all her favorite sticks and flimsy plastic garden pots she is demolishing, and brought them all up under the dry overhang on my deck. Then she finally ran around in the rain.

Good girl.

When I stepped outside and saw the wet, heard it on the metal overhang on my deck, I was astonished. What a lovely surprise.

Grandkids and mom are going to the lake cabin for the weekend--it won't have rained down there, likely. They will swim and maybe catch their supper.

It is going to be a might humid later. I'll nap, then research how to outsmart Welsh Corgi pups. Because so far this week, it is Gracie about 5, me about 1.

I can do better than that.

A Record Not Broken, and Souls Refreshed

My morning paper tells me the sweet smell of rain is called petrichor. When rain falls on the earth, it causes a chemical reaction, mixing with the oils from plants and trees.

It causes that wonderful smell that makes us say, "Ahhh! It smells like rain."

It didn't rain yesterday, just the veriest sprinkle, but we had clouds and thunder--and that wonderful smell. Best of all, the temperature dropped in the approaching gusts of wind from 97 to 77 or lower.

At 1 in the afternoon, my granddaughters were running around and shrieking in the first midday fun outdoors they have enjoyed without a pool attached in months.

"Grandma," my oldest shouted at me in glee, "We're geeks!"

Some areas did get rain. Most did not. We got enough to say we got sprinkles on our faces.

The record is broken. At day 40 in consecutive triple-digit days, we didn't reach 100.Did. Not.

Today? Oh, probably another triple-digit. And on through the next week.

In the paper, the reporter wrote that business workers and shoppers congregated on the sidewalks to enjoy the cool break and see if it would rain. The break was too important. So my grandchildren and I weren't the only geeks.

We were humans enjoying pure physical relief this world can give us. Only a couple of hours of it, but we are refreshed.

The rain will come. It will come. We smelled it.

The rain will come.