The Year of Forgiveness

 

Content warning: Discussion of suicidal ideation

There’s a two-wolves-fighting meme for trans people like me, who didn’t show much gender nonconformity as young children. “There were no signs!” Shouts the first wolf, eroding baby trans’s confidence in themself.

“Well,” says the second wolf, “I have a story for you.” She then describes events shrugged off as nothing special at the time that now seem ludicrously out of sorts with the cis experience of life. The two wolves are well at work in my own head.

When I was in middle school I started having these dreams. It was the first time in my life that I had dreams on a consistent theme night after night. The details would change, but the substance each time was that my parents would sit me down around the time I turned 18 (in that distant future year of 2007) and explain that there was some kind of rare genetic abnormality in my body. By rights I should be female, but my body expressed as male, they would tell me. Because of this condition, they’d continue, there was a treatment that would allow me to become female again, if I wanted to. I’d nod and accept it. I see now the transfeminine part of my core gasping for breath here.

I’d wake up, and I’d know it wasn’t normal to have these thoughts. I was embarrassed by them, felt I couldn't forgive myself for having them. I couldn’t dismiss it all by saying “Well, dreams are weird, I guess,” because it triggered something in me. Some deep pang of longing and envy and a nauseated sense that something in my life wasn’t right. It was easy enough to write off those feelings though. I was getting a handle on what sexual attraction felt like during this time. I was told that people my age lacked impulse control, common sense, and good decision-making ability. I daydreamed in class, supposing that the other kids were thinking about leather or rape fantasies or whatever, while my embarrassing fetish was wondering what life in a girl’s body would be like and getting giddy and hot at the idea. Unsure what to do, my mind began putting together coping mechanisms to keep this secret longing under control.

The coping mechanisms compounded over time. I built an understanding of myself, one layer of oblivious denial at a time, as someone interested in but separate from whatever this funny gender stuff was. I latched on to any details I could find about how I was different from the small number of trans people in my life, all of whom were conveniently far enough from reach that I knew virtually nothing about them. My scouring of the internet for transformation stories and erotica, my equating of self-hate of my body with attraction to women, the unshakable sense of self-loathing and disgust at myself, well it’s not like any of that was gender dysphoria, right? The first wolf’s argument convinced me for many years.

Where does 2021 come into this? Looking back, the first few months of the year feel like the cruelest hour of a long dark night. Several times since 2016 I’ve felt like I’d had it with life, and this time it felt like I really meant it. I quit my job, walking away from a childhood dream I worked for over a decade to achieve because I just felt numb toward it. I was snapping at my kids too much. I felt like I’d given life my best shot and had failed. I’m a rational person. The way I responded to this self-assessment was rational.

Between March and July of 2021 I can clearly identify at least three times where I seriously and coolly considered suicide. Numb, numb, numb. That was how I felt toward it at the time. “It’s not like I was going to do, anything,” I’d think the day after. Suicide was something other people did. I was too duty-bound to my family and too chickenshit to do it, I thought. I have a better understanding now of how wide the range of things I can do is. These memories terrify me, because I was tickling the tail of a dragon that could’ve killed me.

I have lived nearly my whole life in the absence of love, compassion, and forgiveness for myself. These things I offer as readily as I can to everyone in my life. Not just the people I love. I extend a lot even to people who I kinda hate. But I was never capable of extending them to myself. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. I couldn’t. Contemplating forgiveness of myself felt like trying to contemplate a square circle. My mind would divide by zero, and I’d give up.

There is a specific day when this changed: August 5, 2021. That was the day it clicked. I’d been unconsciously building defense and denial and coping mechanisms to block myself from realizing who I am for 20 years. I’d leaned on them, and they felt sturdy. That was the day they broke, and I fell through, and saw myself as a trans woman for the first time.

The memory’s not that old, but details get corrupted so quickly. I don’t know exactly how long I stood looking at myself in the mirror, in that nice blue dress, before I realized how my thinking had changed. It was more than a few seconds and less than 15 minutes when I realized “Oh. This is what it feels like to not hate yourself. This is what it feels like to be happy with who you are.” I smiled, and I liked the person I saw smiling in the mirror for the first time.

It’s awkward enough that I’m telling you about this. You are not seeing man-in-a-dress pictures of me until I’m much more secure in my transition (and if you’re interested in stats, I took six selfies that day). I’m still a baby trans and need some time to deal with all this. But this is what happened. It was big. It was important. It changed the trajectory of my life. And I want to share some of that with you, even if we’ll never really grok each other.

I don’t mean to make this all about me. I spent way too much time talking about myself in the family Christmas letter this year. The start of my gender transition is a huge, important story, one of the critical chapters of my life, but it’s only one thing that happened this year. There are other big things. The goodness of Sarah starting her first job as a full practicing neurologist. The new beginnings of Isaac starting kindergarten and Mira starting preschool. Writing flowing from me, not yet useful and publishable (and not necessarily good), but flowing nonetheless.

Then there are the small things. The lovely flashes of flavor that life is made of. Snow in Seattle on my birthday. Discovering Formula 1 while watching the wildest race in years with my brother and parents. Eating barbeque with Sarah and looking longingly across Elliot Bay, knowing we’d be moving soon. Finding that our new house was one that we can make a home and love. Walking house to house on a warm Halloween evening (me in a marvelous pink dress), the children giddy in their costumes. Mira shouting with delight, gazing at the mouse we caught after a month and a half of trying. My writing instructor raving about a piece I wrote. Snow again, blanketing the beautiful Willamette countryside as we journeyed home from Christmas. It’s enough to take the edge off the bad times. I don’t even mind so much that December was full of the pain of torn muscles and sprained tendons in my arm.

In all of it, I have labored to be the best spouse and the best parent I could be. I grew up thinking I’d be a husband and father. That’s not the case anymore. I don’t quite know how to be a wife and a mother, but I’m working on it, every day. And when I falter, I find that I can forgive myself and move on. I’m slowly getting out of a terrible jail, liberated not just to feel myself but to be the best version of myself.

And, in a lovely way, this extends backwards, too. The second wolf snuggles up to the first wolf as he pants in rage and fatigue. “It’s okay,” she says. “I know why you did this. You had to. It was wrong. We know that now. But you had to. And it’s okay.”

I can’t isolate any one thing and say, “This is why I’m transitioning.” It’s all related in a complex way that only my intuition really seems to understand. But this is the most salient single bit I can show you. By going through this process, by easing my body into softness and letting go of masculinity so I can carry myself through the world as a woman, I find it in me to forgive, and to love. If there was nothing else in it, that would be enough.

2021 has been a year that I’ve cherished. I hope you have a good 2022.

Decoder Ring

 

Image credit

This is a complex and important subject, so I want to speak as plainly and clearly as I can. I'll start by giving you some basic information.

My name is Claire Atkinson. My pronouns are she/her. This isn’t legally set in stone yet. The name and gender recorded for me at birth are still on all my official documentation, but I assume you have more mental flexibility and working memory than my insurance company, and I request that you honor what I’m asking for here. It will take time for this to become second nature, and old habits are hard to change, I know. I’ll give any mistakes and forces of habit the benefit of the doubt.

If you know me, you know what this information also means about me. I’m transgender. More specifically, I’m a binary trans woman. That means that I’m physically and socially transitioning from male to female. I began taking my first tentative steps toward socially transitioning in August, and I began medically transitioning to female with hormone replacement therapy (HRT) on September 30.

You may be under the impression that trans people know their entire lives that their gender identity is incongruent with their gender assigned at birth. Transfeminine people, the narrative goes, are from youngest childhood feminine, sensitive people who wanted to wear dresses and play with dolls. This is a particular narrative that our culture likes to tell about trans women. For some it’s true. But it doesn’t describe what a significant portion of trans people go through. I’ve been fairly sensitive my whole life, but otherwise my childhood doesn’t really fit this template. I never seriously considered that I might not be a cisgender (not trans) boy or man until earlier this year. This is part of why it took me so long to recognize that I’m trans.

This summer the last of my denial mechanisms that had stopped me from understanding my gender identity for so long finally broke down. I learned more about transgender stories and experiences, and I began to realize how much I had in common with the experiences reflected in these stories. I learned enough to know that I needed to explore this path further, and the further I went the more correct I felt in seeing myself as a woman and as trans. I want to be open now about who I am, what I’m doing, and why I’m doing it, so that cisgender people can better understand the variety of trans experiences, and so that there’s another trans voice talking about how this experience of life can work. I wouldn’t have been able to reach where I am now without hearing trans voices telling trans stories. I want to do my part.

The typical medical explanation of transition is that trans people experience gender dysphoria, which then manifests as depression, anxiety, depersonalization, derealization, and a nebula of other mental trauma. The purpose of transition is to alleviate dysphoria. This explanation isn’t wrong, but I’m uncomfortable with how negatively it’s framed. It paints transition as a least-bad option, an escape of last resort, rather than as something elegant and beautiful.

Right now, I see myself and what I’m doing, and it feels just that. Elegant. Beautiful. I feel comfortable, relaxed, joyous in my body for the first time in my adult life. This last week I’ve been nursing a sprained rotator cuff. It’s made me realize that the way I feel about existing in my body now, dealing with near-constant muscle pain, is still better than how I felt existing in my fully masculine body pre-transition on a normal day.

I realize now how much self-hate, how much self-loathing, how much depression and anxiety I was carrying, centered around the ugly itch of living in the wrong flesh. There’s a saying common in trans discourse that fish don’t know they’re swimming in water. Likewise many trans people, myself included, don’t know how dysphoric we are until we’re drowning. All my life I was taught that my masculinity, my maleness, my manhood were some of my most precious gifts. And anyway they were impossible characteristics to change. Being told over and over that I should want this, and (like it or not) had to have it,, was drowning.

But now that I’m transitioning, I don’t feel this process to be a claptrap fix on something broken. I feel the longing that’s been there, at least since the beginning of puberty for me, to become soft, become feminine, to be beautiful and female. And I feel the way every day estrogen is working my body into this, into the right way for me to be. I know, from the philosophy and ideas I appreciate, but much more so from the example of the wonderful women in my life, that femininity, femaleness, womanhood are gifts just as precious as their male counterparts. For me they are the right gifts. I felt able to survive, barely, as a man, but now I feel myself becoming a woman, and I can thrive and sing. I was 30 feet underwater before, sipping air through a broken regulator. Now I’m breathing free at the surface.

People like me have existed throughout the time and space of human experience. In history this is usually seen most clearly in the people who lived in third genders between masculine and feminine (for example the Hijra of south Asia). In the last hundred years the discovery of steroid sex hormones allowed the development of therapy that, over time, replaces many of the characteristics of the body developed during puberty with those of the opposite sex. I’m grateful that I live in a time when this therapy is readily available, because I’m experiencing how life-saving and life-affirming HRT is.

Already my skin has softened into a woman’s skin. My little breasts are growing. My face is growing rounder, becoming a woman’s face. These changes will continue for at least another two years, possibly several years more. As I’ve seen each change begin to surface on my body I’ve wanted to cry in delight. Sometimes I literally have. I imagined so often in my most private fantasies how wonderful it would be for my mind to exist in harmony with the body of a woman. Now I’m learning what it’s truly like. There’s a special sweetness in the answering of a prayer so private that I never dared utter it to anyone, even myself.

The process isn’t perfect. Sometimes it’s painful. Sometimes it’s hard work. I’ve had four sessions so far for laser hair removal of my beard, and I have at least that many ahead of me. Each zap of coherent light hurts like a hot needle. I’m working on retraining my voice so that I can recognize it to be a woman’s voice. It’s tough, and often emotionally draining. But I’m beginning to see the results, and I know this is what I need.

I’m not saying that relative quantities of testosterone and estrogen in the blood determine who's a man and who's a woman. But for me, this realignment is a huge chunk of what I needed to see myself as a woman. Womanhood as part of my identity is something I need to grow into, the same way cisgender girls grow into it in their teen years. I’m opening my arms to it, feeling a little more like a woman every day, and I give thanks for this wonderful body that’s taking me on this journey.

It's really beyond the scope of this post, but I'll take a moment to talk about how my wife and my children are doing in reaction to this. It's an adjustment, but we're adjusting. Life is getting better, I'm reasonably sure, for all of us. I was failing to be the husband and father I wanted to be, because these are not roles I was made to fill. I have a lot of learning ahead of me on how to be a wife and mother. But now I know these are things I was born to be. My wife and I are communicating better than we have ever before in our marriage, stating clearly what we need, and giving that grace to each other. My children are thriving with two parents who are both showing up with all that they are every day. I'm happy, and the connections in my family are such that we're all happier than we've been in a long time.

Please spare a thought for how tough this road is for many trans people. My journey so far has been much easier than it is for many. You should also know how precarious trans rights are at this time. There’s an ongoing push to prevent teens from accessing puberty blockers, which are reversible in their effects and can massively improve the lives of children who recognize they're trans while young enough to make use of this therapy. Discrimination against trans people is openly acceptable and applauded in many parts of this country and around the world. Trans people face unemployment and violence at a rate far higher than cis people. Spare a thought, and if you’re moved to do something to help, please do so.

If I can make one other small request, it’s that you listen to trans people tell their own stories. Until very recently cis people have controlled what discourse about trans people is allowable, and it’s silenced the voices of this community. It's created a fog of ignorance that’s blocked people like me from understanding who they are for decades, sometimes whole lifetimes. Read the writing of people like Amanda Roman, Cassie LaBelle, and Jocelyn Badgley if you want to understand more about what people like me go through. Watch the content that people like Abigail Thorn, Natalie Wynn, and Jami Higginbotham create. I don’t want to tell you what to think. I just want you to hear what I, and people like me, have to say.

In this excellent video Abigail Thorn of Philosophy Tube made pre-transition, she talks about what it’s like to discover that you’re queer. In this case, she’s talking about finding out that she’s bisexual, though I imagine she went through a similar process discovering that she’s trans:

 

So much here resonated with me and my experience, but one bit was missing. The missing piece was how much, after I realized that I’m trans, it felt like I understood who I was in a way I couldn't have imagined before. It’s as though when the idea of me was first conceived some late spring day in 1988, the forces that made me wrote the script of my life to be a puzzle. I was powerless to solve the puzzle until I whittled my way down to the bedrock of what makes me who I am. There, at the heart of the equation, was the decoder ring that made it all make sense. I realized that I’m trans, and realized that I’m me for the first time.

I will thank God for the rest of my life I’ve been blessed with this enlightenment.

Freewrite 1: Nothing Like a Sunset

 

Sunset. The Sun’s setting out my window. Earth is rotating. The transience of the sunset in the illusion. There’s an eternal circle painted around the Earth, and our part just happens to be passing through it.

The equinox was a week ago. The days are shorter than the nights now, but not really perceptibly so. The trees know, though. They’re giving up their chlorophyll. The green ebbs away, and the leaves blush red and gold.

Leaves, Sun, pine needles, birds, and above it all a clean blue and white sky. You can focus on these aspects and almost imagine nothing’s changed at all since the glaciers retreated all those turns of the Earth ago. Then you see the black of the pavement, the dirty scaly shapes of the roofs of the houses, the sprinkle-shiny reflections off the polished cars.

What do I feel looking at this scene? Is it ordinary or transcendent? My impulse is to call it both, simultaneously. Is that profound, or just another banality? I feel like I’m invoking something deep, drawing inward at the quantum nature of the dust that composes this universe, but maybe I’m just being wishy-washy, sitting on the fence, failing to make a commitment. The middle child again would rather sit out and mediate than take a stand on something.

Impulses. Simultaneity. Everything exists at once, like Warren Zevon said. Except not everything actually does exist. There’s the version of me, in this universe, born with this DNA, and the me now who’s descended from that zygote. There may be other versions. There may be infinite other versions, in an infinity of multiverse. But what to say of them? What if the answer to all the profound questions is so what?

Then I remember my child’s face, wet, specked with blood, his face touching oxygen for the first time. What was that? Was that profound or banal? It’s happened to a hundred billion other people over all these years. So if it happens a lot is it not profound? Then again my life, and the life of my wife, turned about this moment. Like a gravity turn, we went in one way, went out, accelerated another. Maybe every moment is like this, banal and profound all at once.

I hope some day I sound less like a freshman philosophy student. But I think I'm not that bad. I’m learning. It takes time, but I’m learning how to parse these moments in my life.

Closer to the Heart

I don’t remember everything that happened during my childhood, or even most of it. Nobody does after maturing and mutating into an adult. I think my memory is passable, though, and I vividly remember one of my favorite play activities as a child: Designing airplanes. I recall my dad sitting down with me when I was about five, and each of us sketched and colored a concept for an airplane that had never existed. One hit and I was hooked. After a few years, the bookshelves in my room were stuffed not just with books about airplanes, space, and nature, but with binderfuls of my colored pencil aeronautical dreams.

As I grew older my core interests evolved, but only a little. I watched every documentary and read every book about the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo eras I could find. By the time I was in high school I could tell you the crew and a synopsis for every American human spaceflight mission through the beginning of the Space Shuttle era (still can, by the way). I watched the scrappy upstarts vying for the X Prize with fascination, and I was introduced to the rocket equation and the idea of spaceflight on a reasonable budget by Robert Zubrin’s The Case for Mars. I felt I could leave my mark here, making space something more accessible for everyone, that it mattered, and that it was something I would enjoy doing.

This coming week will be my last one working at Blue Origin. Blue is the third place (after Virgin Orbit and ABL Space Systems) where I’ve worked in the space industry on the design of vehicles that move things into space. Before these gigs I designed test fixtures in the Boeing structures lab, an experience that gave me the onramp I needed to get into this business. I’m now walking away from the work that I’ve spent my educational and professional life angling toward. Some explanation is needed, or at least desirable.

What was it about engineering that so bewitched me? I loved (and continue to love) learning about the machines others make and how they work, but there’s another kind of magic in rolling your own. Thinking of the mission and the essentials that might get it done, how those requirements translate into metal and curves, nuts and bolts, leads to a buzz of creativity that’s difficult to crystallize into words. Genesis begins with a description of God’s creation of the universe, then states that humans are made in the image of God. If there’s truth in Genesis, maybe it’s this. In the creative process we fulfil ourselves and touch the face of God all at once.

Creativity exists in many forms. Why focus on machines? Trying to explain why I’ve focused here so far might be as fruitless as trying to explain why I score low on extraversion and high on openness when I take the Big Five personality test. It’s who I am. Seeing the way the parts of a machine, especially any mechanical system, fit together and function gives me a joy bordering on eros. I think many people feel some amount of this, some very little, and some feel it by the bucketful. Put me in the third category. Perhaps this is just my fundamental frequency.

It wasn’t passion alone that led me to this career path. Duty, or at least a perception of it, also played a role. I could imagine a future where space travel would be commonplace, where humans would be filling spaces and establishing life on worlds throughout the universe, and that did more than appeal to me. It seemed to me that if such a future is possible, making it happen is an imperative. I doubt I’ve ever had anything like a true religious experience, but this is the closest I’ve come with sober mind. I’ve come to realize that the evangelism of Earth’s biochemistry seems to be my natural religion.\

Obviously I have some work to do.

I still believe that gaining a toehold for life beyond Earth is something worth toiling for. The mistake I made growing up was assuming that it was that thing more worth toiling for than anything else, and therefore what I had to devote my entire life to. Whatever part of me believed that wasn’t in good communication with the rest of me, apparently. I quickly found other devotions. Relationships, for a start. Actual eros, which in its unaltered state leads directly to agape, the febrile devotion of parents to children. It’s difficult to take seriously the idea that any product made at work is “your baby” when you have one, or two, or three actual babies at home.

There’s a strange intersection between the work that people like me, motivated by passion and duty, are willing to do for organizations that largely exist to generate profit with the same totalitarian devotion. The private space companies, SpaceX the clear flagship among them, have made more progress toward a future where normal people get to space in the decade since the retirement of the Space Shuttle than NASA made in three decades of operating it. That’s great. What’s less great is the cost in human capital and human dignity. People line up, willing to give what’s needed to get the job done, and the companies are more than happy to extract.

On the upside, working on orbital launch vehicles has been thrilling, fulfilling, satisfying, exciting. What more could you ask for in a career? The downside is that I increasingly find my life out of balance, blurring together in the stress of it all like memories of a drunken night. That might be manageable if I could hold on to the creative flow that gives the work of the design engineer that upside, but I find this slipping my grasp, too. I’ve been good at my job. I’m valuable to my organization. The reward for that value is a push toward project and budget management, vendor haggling, and telling people what to draw. The workload goes up, and it’s less and less appetizing, and my children seem to need more from me every day.

Maybe it’s gauche for me to point to LauncherOne as an example of what I’ve done. I left the project 19 months before the first launch attempt. Is it reasonable to call any part of its ultimate success mine? That vehicle is not just mine, of course. Its design owes a debt to hundreds of people who cloned and grafted a little bit each of their elan into it. I’m one of those people, though, and seeing that rocket make its way all to orbit in January felt like closure of a sort to the dream. At this point, with the forward-looking difficulties I face, the prospect of doing this again and again for another few decades doesn’t excite me. It makes me want to puke.

As this year has progressed I’ve considered this in the context of my wife finishing her medical training. She initially looked only at post-fellowship jobs in the Seattle area, assuming that I’d stay at Blue. I urged her to be a bit more open-minded, and she found a wonderful position, an ideal one for her, in a small town in Oregon. That’s where we’ll be moving around a month after this writing. I’m presented, then, with an opportunity to figure out what comes next.

Consider again that creativity comes in many forms. As much as I appreciate and respect the nuances of engineering design, it’s the creative aspect of the craft that really makes me glow. The cookbook algebraic equations on heat transfer and structural load factors, not quite so much. Throughout my life I’ve appreciated literature, particularly at the intersection of science and technology that comes out in science fiction. I love the engagement of the imagination it brings, real-life telepathy, as Stephen King puts it. But I convinced myself, in my pseudo-puritanical fashion, that a focus on practical quantifiable engineering was a clearer fulfillment of my duty on Earth to create than is the writing that I enjoy.

Overcoming this implicit bias turned out to be easy. Should the world have good stories, good books, good writing? If the answer is affirmative, then refocusing my efforts, at least for the time being, on writing makes sense.

I’ve tried this on for size over the last couple of years, with increasing seriousness in the last few months. My writing output has been meager so far, but it hasn't been zero, in spite of everything else competing for attention. I expect my output to grow substantially after we cross the Columbia. I have no idea if this will be a successful transition. But it’s one I’m interested in trying, and one that I have an opportunity to try.

Passion, interest, opportunity, balance. I don’t know for sure if life will be beautiful at the intersection of those four, but it’s certainly worth a shot.

Empathy and Annunciation

 

All that we touch, all that we see, all that we hear will pass away in time. But every moment is eternal. Every breath is really breathed, and this reality shines on for all that is.

What was it like when you heard the annunciation? Was it like a clap of thunder, bolting, jolting you awake? Was it like an earthquake; did your feet tremble as the ground beneath them quivered? You knew then what you had to say, not because you were compelled, but because there was only gentleness and kindness and love within your heart. Pray for me, that I may be like you. I know my faults, and know not their scope, but I want always to bear fertile love, as you did, into this world of starlight made solid. As you did, let me bear love and truth and beauty. I pray this for all who ever lived, and all who live now, and all that ever will live in this place of light and time.

Reflections on the River

The oldest clearly-defined story that survives in the oral history of my family dates back over 200 years, to the time of the Napoleonic Wars in western Europe. The story goes that one of my ancestors saw the conquering French troops marching through his hometown in Alsace. Among the juggernaut of Napoleon’s soldiers, he saw one man set aside and flogged. He asked his mother, “Why are they whipping him?”

“Because,” she replied, “he wet the bed.”

The boy who saw that march and that whipping was my grandmother’s grandfather. His name was George Stich. He was born more than half a century before Germany in its modern form came to be, but he spoke German and I’m sure he would’ve considered himself a lifelong German but for two accidents of history and family. First, Alsace is one of the patches of Earth that has pinballed back and forth between nation states at a dizzying rate throughout history. Second, he left Europe permanently in his early adulthood to escape the Prussian draft.

He settled in the Midwest of America, helping first to carve the Ohio and Erie Canal as another immigrant laborer who spoke no English before making a more permanent home. In my youth this seemed like the old country, a place where regular people came from and old people lived. Certainly not a place for pioneers. History shows how much of human perception is relative. He had a son, Oscar, late in life who Anglicized the family name a bit, and that son had a daughter late in life, my grandmother, Doris Virginia Stitch. More than a century separates her grandfather’s birth and her birth on March 3, 1925.

I don’t know if my grandmother’s house had electricity on the day she was born. If it did, it hadn’t been connected to the grid for long. If it didn’t, it was a typical rural home in southern Illinois in that time. People in that part of the world farmed, though I don’t know exactly what. I’m ashamed of how little I know of the living memory of my family.

A quirk of the Stitch family house in those days was that it was on the direct path between the Goodyear-Zeppelin factory in Akron, Ohio, and the Navy’s main airship base in Moffett Field, California. For a few romantic years my grandma saw the Los Angeles, Akron, and Macon, airborne aircraft carriers that were some of the largest objects yet made by humans that fly, shuttling along that route between maintenance and deployments. In some ways, even the deep past can seem high-tech.

My grandmother’s youth spanned the Great Depression, and her adolescence and young adulthood took place in the shadow of World War II, the worst self-inflicted wound in human history. Having lived through one year of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s difficult to imagine the procession of misery that sprawled over that decade and a half. I suppose people got used to it after a while.

It’s during that time she made a leap of faith, hope, and love, and married my grandfather, an Army Air Force officer, where he served training new pilots in southern California. Compared to the Soviet Union, Germany, Japan, France, and Britain, America’s toll of blood and treasure in the war wasn’t so bad. Still, so many couples married young like my grandparents only to see their lives together truncated by fortune. Whether it was fortune or the will of something greater, my grandparents had many more decades of marriage and life together left after 1945.

For a while she moved around the country with my grandfather’s service. He served in Texas, Kansas, and Alaska, and further afield in Brazil, Germany, and Britain, before leaving the Air Force so they could settle back in Illinois. During those wild young years my uncles were born. In the later steady years my father, my mother, and my aunt were born.

After watching the birth of my three children I understand better, in my gut as well as my mind, how much can go wrong as we come into the world. My father didn’t breathe at first. He came out blue and needed to be resuscitated. I didn’t think much of that story, and the insanity my grandmother must have lived through in those terrible moments, until the same thing happened to my elder daughter.

Like many mothers in every era, my grandmother shouldered most of the burden of raising her four children. The histories that follow the great men (and some women) throughout the ages don’t give a full accounting of what’s important in the human story. So much of the work of the human project has been the work done, mostly by women, of shepherding the children’s learning and growth. It’s a sinful thing we do, ignoring this work and pretending that the leaders we’ve erected statues of are what matters most of all. Remember the caretakers.

By the time I was born my grandparents had retired to California. That was one of the only states west of where I lived, and therefore was cool as far as I was concerned. It didn’t hurt that Paso Robles was a beautiful town with a beach half an hour away. As a child I never associated them with the “old” part of the country. I always wished we could’ve spent more time in that house on the top of Cherry Street Hill.

I grew up, and when I was 26 my wife and I brought our first child to that house at the age of one month. It was a heavenly feeling, cuddling our little share of the river of life in that quiet place that brought me a sense of refuge as a child. The house I took my son to had broadband wireless internet, in addition to electricity. I felt young, since objectively I was, but also wise, as though my new little family might be able to absorb some of the accumulated wisdom of my grandmother’s decades of marriage and motherhood by osmosis in that place. I don’t know if that happened, but it was fun watching the deer and the scrub jays.

A few years ago she left that house, and my grandmother now lives not far from where my parents live. My parents still live in the house where I went through adolescence. Each trip there feels like a journey through time as much as space. The geography is a link to that past part of my life. Likewise my grandmother connects me to a world that no longer exists visibly, but is in the core of this world today. Her memory is a bridge between these times.

The debt of gratitude I owe my grandmother for the work she did raising my father, my uncles, and my aunt, the way she opened her house and life up to my brothers and me, and the way she led and cared for this part of my family with quiet heroism through the 20^th Century boggles my mind. I’m grateful for the way, in her, the past, the present, and the future are linked together. 

Happy birthday, Grandma.

Plenty

 

When I was very young (from about age five or six) my ambition was to design airplanes. This became such a key part of my identity that it still is an ambition of mine, really. I was inspired by the curmudgeonly iconoclasts like Burt Rutan, and fancied myself capable of designing an airplane different from what other engineers had done that would be not just as good an airplane as everyone else’s, but better. That’s what Rutan had done with the Long-EZ, right?

What I realize now is that Burt Rutan is a rare specimen whose formidable technical and managerial skill is matched by an equally daunting expertise at marketing and technical persuasion. The Long-EZ is an excellent and high-performance general aviation airplane largely because of the good aerodynamics and low weight that comes from designing with composites with true understanding of what the materials allow. The configuration, the striking element about that airplane that makes it a delight to look at and contemplate, gets in the way of fulfilling that role as much as it enables it. If you disagree, just ask Beech how their Starship sales are going.

 I know now that with enough time and resources I could indeed design and build at least as good an airplane as anyone else’s, but there’s a good chance it would wind up looking like everyone else’s in the process. There’s a reason why, if you go to an airport, you’ll see lots of airplanes that tend to look and fly the same way.

 My ambition evolved as I grew up. I still loved the romance, science, and aesthetics of aircraft, but space vehicles seemed a more wholesome enterprise, and a place where there surely was much more room for improvement. SpaceX and Blue Origin, the two giants of reusable launch vehicles today, were in their infancy at the time, and it took some measure of faith to believe that radical change in the economics of space travel was possible. Nonetheless I believed, and believed that this was something that would make humanity better, or at least more enduring and connected to the cosmos. I guess that seemed better by inspection.

Buoyed by my childhood dreams of matching wits with the great airplane designers, I fancied being something like the Donald Douglas or Kelly Johnson of spaceflight, or at least a next sort of Werner Von Braun. I was obsessed enough that my first email addressed featured one of those names, and it’s the most embarrassing one on the list.

 What I realize now is that Douglas and Johnson and Von Braun and all the others didn’t do what history credits them without hundreds or thousands of people laboring tirelessly (or more likely, very tiredly) in support. A canoe is a reasonable project for one man or woman, a nuclear submarine not so much. So it is for the homebuilt and the Starship (Beech or SpaceX, take your pick). It's true that each person who works on bringing a rocket or spacecraft to life is necessary to the finished product. It's also true that you could remove any one person out of the thousand and another capable engineer could fill their place like another raindrop from the storm. In the course of history I suspect few people have been truly indispensable.

 Today being a parent is one of the most essential parts of my identity. Every day of my life is structured around what I do for my children, and virtually every decision I make links back to my service and support for them. I fancied myself someone who had something to contribute to the next generation. I endeavored to do better by them than my parents did for me. I’ll spare you the details. I don’t think that’s happened.

 Around the world the total fertility rate is collapsing. Despite that, the world has seven billion, going on eight billion, people on its surface. Every day sees hundreds of thousands of new faces added to the litany of human experience. Look around. It’s hard not to think the world has enough people.

 I’m interested in people who become writers. Maybe I’ll be one some day (new ambitions are fun). There’s some quality these people needed to make the transition they made. Whether it was stubbornness, arrogance, or something in between, they looked at a library full of books and decided that even if the world has enough, there was still room for their stories.

 The passion to create seems to be one of the most fundamental aspects of the human experience. Maybe this isn’t everyone’s experience, but it’s part of mine, anyway. The discouragement comes when considering the mountain of creation that exists and the small work a single creature can do by comparison. Humility encourages the ego to shrink when it contemplates narcissism. Nonetheless,  we all seem called to carry on in a world that has plenty of airplanes, plenty of rockets, plenty of babies, and plenty of books. The plenty is there. So are you.

 The question, then, is there for the asking. What are you (yes, you) going to do about it?