Ron and Susan are stuck by the side of the road waiting for AAA to arrive. Ron takes a trip down memory lane trying to entertain her.
(Written for my dad’s retirement from IBM, after 40 years)
“You are not your dad; you cannot read a map and drive at the same time!” Susan was cold and not feeling particularly generous.
“Of course I can do it, I watched him do it a hundred times as a kid,” Ron replied.
“I see, so that is how we ended up in a ditch on the side of a road, hours from any help.”
“I was just reaching for the water bottle,” Ron said defensively, “a person has to drink two liters of water a day.”
“I see, but you don’t have to drink while you are driving and reading a map; oh, I forgot, you were also tuning the radio.”
“Good music is food for the soul,” Ron said.
“I say this with love, but truly, you are an idiot,” Susan said.
“The important thing is that you love me,” Ron replied
“You have become very adept at looking only at the bright side; you take what they teach at that startup too seriously. The main point is that you are a fool,” Susan clarified.
They were sitting on the side of a narrow mountain road, winding its way through the Sierra Nevadas. It was quiet, there was no traffic, and the night was falling. They had a few hours to wait before the AAA would come to pick them up. The kids were already sleeping in the car, “thank god for small favors,” Susan thought.
“My Dad is retiring after decades of working for a computing corporation,” Ron said. “Do you want to hear some stories of how it was for the kids?”
“Well, that’s the least you could do while we freeze out here waiting to be rescued,” Susan replied.
“I was about ten; it was about thirty years ago …” Ron said.
Dad had to pick something up from work, the evening was falling, and the corridors were lit with fluorescent lights. I was drifting aimlessly, looking at the paintings hanging from the walls, of strange-looking long-faced people. They were elegant and beautiful, in a strange alien way; I wasn’t sure how you could work with those faces staring at you. It was the weekend, and the place was deserted. I was crossing a corridor junction when a smell reached my nostrils; it was, hmm, milk chocolate. I followed my nose and ended up at the heart of the building, with aluminum dispensing machines lining the walls. There were small white labels: coffee, powdered milk, instant chocolate, and soup. “There has to be a cup here somewhere,” I thought. There was a tower of white plastic styrofoam cups on the opposite wall; I took one, poured myself a generous helping of instant chocolate, added powdered milk, hot water, and stirred. Sitting down and drinking the thick brew, I felt this was as good as it gets. I could make myself any kind of drink I wanted, with as much chocolate as I liked, this was the top of the world! In the years to come, I would come to visit this kitchen once or twice a year.
“This sounds like a nice cup of hot brew; I wish we had some here,” Susan said. “Tell me another memory.”
“Do we have any water here?” Ron asked.
“I always pack a dozen water bottles in the trunk,“ Susan said. After quenching his thirst and listening to the night sounds, Ron started talking.
“When I was nine, Dad went on a one-year sabbatical to the company research center in California. It was the 80s, they bought a big car, attached a tent trailer, and took us, kids, on travels across the western United States.”
It was nighttime, and I was dreaming about wild horses. They started as dust clouds on the horizon, getting closer. There were all colors: red, black, white, splotches of gray, Indian horses. They were running, manes streaming in the wind, hooves briefly touching the ground. Gradually, the ground started vibrating, and the sounds grew stronger. I could hear the neighing, and the Earth itself started shaking, the sound was now ear-splitting, and I jumped in bed, finding myself in the tent trailer. I ran outside and found myself in the desert; a long train was passing close to us. It was blowing its horn; there were no horses in sight. I stayed outside counting the train cars and looking at the stars. I got tired after counting to 250 and went back to sleep. No one else awoke, and no one mentioned it at breakfast. In later years I wondered if it was all a dream.
“I don’t think anything that exciting is going to happen here; I wish it did,” Susan said. “If someone stopped here, we could get a newspaper or some snacks.” Ron took another gulp of water and listened to the night sounds. There were some crickets in the bush nearby, and something was rooting through the undergrowth nearby, a hedgehog, or maybe a porcupine. You could see the moonshine through a break in the thick canopy overhead. Dawn wasn’t that far away.
“The first academic paper I wrote, the idea occurred to me on the bus ride to my Dad’s apartment,” Ron picked up the thread.
Dad was on his third assignment, this time to the company headquarters near New York City. I was studying in upstate New York and took a Greyhound bus to visit. It was a long six
hour ride. Outside the window, there were rolling hills, expansive deciduous forests, and leaves in the glorious colors of the New England fall. It was fitting scenery for thinking about trees, an idea I got from reading a paper about encrypting TV broadcasts. I was thinking about building trees faster, not the physical tree kind that you can lean on, pick fruit from, and sit in their shade, but rather, the abstract trees used by computer programs that perform encryption. Usually, you need to build the tree from the roots up, stage by stage. But these were virtual trees; they could be built a lot faster! I had worked out one of the cases by the time I got off the bus. The next day we drove to New York to see the US navy aircraft carrier moored on the Hudson. “This is going to be fun,” I thought. It took about an hour to get to New York City, after which we needed to find parking. “Hey dad, look, three-hour parking for 40 dollars!” “Son, I am not paying 40$; that is outrageous”. We looped around the city blocks, looking for available street parking. “Hey, dad, that looks like an empty spot!” but it turned out to be taken up by a small car that we couldn’t see from a distance. After half an hour, I gave up, but Dad didn’t. He had the sure sense that things will develop for the better, parking will open up, and it will be just ours. I guess you have to be an optimist at heart to find parking; it is a necessity. An hour passed, “dad are we going home? Can we pay?”. An hour and a quarter. After an hour and a half, he found an empty slot, truly unbelievable luck. I learned something that day about optimism; it took me another twenty years to internalize that lesson. On the bus ride back, looking at the New England forests, I figured out the nucleus of my paper.
“I remember that story; you told it to me a few years ago. In that version, you didn’t find parking. You are revising history as you are going, aren’t you?” Susan laughed. “I didn’t remember telling you about that, but still, the moral stands. Do not lose hope, even if all the parking slots are full!” There was a sound from around the bend, and a white AAA truck was slowly making its way towards us, and Susan was finally smiling.
They were sitting in the back of the truck, watching the trees go by, the road unwinding. The Sierras’ pine trees were turning into oaks as they slowly descended into the central valley. The warm passenger cabin, and the gentle swaying of the car, lulled the kids
to sleep. Susan was happy; they were going home. “We have time for one last story before I fall asleep myself,” she said.
“Let me think,” Ron said. They passed a one-lane bridge over a stream gushing down from the mountains, the water cold and blue, a deer gazing at them from the other side. No other vehicle passed them. A few groundhogs crossed the road and then a raccoon. They passed a tall stand of redwoods, the early morning light barely passing the thick canopy. “This takes me back years ago,” Ron started.
I had to write a master’s thesis, and it was half done. This sounds good, if you are a glass-half-full kind of individual, except that no progress had been made in the last six months. I talked to Dad, and he agreed to help me on the weekends when he wasn’t busy at his regular job. This was the beginning of a new routine for me. I would bring a diskette home with my manuscript on the weekend, and we would print and work on it together. “Xedit? Are you kidding? Nobody uses xedit; everyone uses emacs,” I said. “We have an IBM windows PC, and xedit is the editor that I have used for the last ten years,” Dad replied. I held my head in my hands; this is old school, really. I obviously should not have asked for help, but then, nobody else was going to get me out of this muck. “But all the cool programmers use emacs,” I said with exasperation. Every weekend I would print the entire manuscript, hand it over for proofreading, and fix the comments, in xedit, of course. The reading was in-depth, nothing skipped, nothing missed. “You can’t write ‘eclipse’; it is too literary a word, you can use ‘hide’ instead.”
“But Dad, it is a beautiful word; when the moon hides the sun, it is called an eclipse of the sun.”
“That may be, but use simpler words, as much as possible,” Dad said.
I changed it to ‘hide.’ Over the week, I thought better of it and switched back to ‘eclipse.’ Sure enough, Dad found it. Again. Same comment, “Eclipse? Hide is simpler, use that instead”. It was a difficult journey; accepting criticism is not an easy thing. Nonetheless, after three months, the thesis was complete. My advisor signed it soon afterward, and I was done. This was a job well done, truly; mostly on Dad’s part.
“Is this a real story or an embroidery?” Susan asked. “This is as real as it gets. As real as getting kicked by a donkey, as real as getting stung by a bee, as real as …”
“I understand; it is a true story; things really happened this way,” Susan said.
THE END
