Nows and Forevers

When I get to the Lincoln Memorial, and it has been 10 years this summer, I always find this space. It’s a pretty important spot, moment in time, and challenge.

Tracy Kidder was one of the best practitioners of what’s called narrative journalism, making words and people and meaning come alive.

I fell into “The Soul of a New Machine” as a teenager in the ’80s, partly because I liked the cover and partly because some of took place on the Route 128 corridor near my grandparents’ place. “House,” in 1985, helped me understand how to tell a story I had no background in. He was so good at that, in both books.

“Among Schoolchildren” in 1989 was immersive narrative journalism at its best, and I know that because one of my friends, a longtime teacher, knew both teaching and writing in her bones and was struck by that book, too.

Kidder more than a decade ago cowrote a good book on writing, “Good Prose,” which I come back to every once in a while, too. He wrote:

“For a story to have a chance to live, it is essential only that there be something important at stake, a problem that confronts the characters or confronts the reader in trying to understand them. The unfolding of the problem and its resolution are the real payoff. A car chase is not required.”

For a story to have a chance to live … that’s a really brilliant way of putting it. Stories can live.

I dimly remember the 1973-74 oil crisis, which led to long lines at the gas pumps and kept us from driving as much. I remember bored in the back seat, wishing for the line to go much longer than it would.

I remember vividly the 1979 oil crisis, the rationing and the long lines at the gas station. When you could get gasoline depended on the last number of your license plate (odd/even different days). My father ditched his amateur-radio license plate because he was tired of arguing with gas-station attendants about the proper time for a plate with a letter instead of a number.

Big difference between then and now? The shale revolution here in the United States.

From the obituary of writer Dan Simmons:

“Every day after lunch, Dan told his students a daily installment of an epic tale that started on the first day of school. As they listened, the students would color illustrations that he’d drawn for them. When the story finally came to an end on the last day of school, many recall being reduced to tears. This story would go on to become Dan’s Hyperion cantos (1989), a critically acclaimed, four-part science fiction classic.”

Seeing Artemis II on the pad gave me Rocket Fever. OK, it doesn’t take much. I’m all about Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and I remember watching Apollo 17, Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz as a kid and, of course, the shuttle missions.

If you want to lead up to Artemis, then a great podcast series is “13 Minutes to the Moon” from the BBC. The first series celebrated the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 in 2019. The second tackled Apollo 13 in 2021. I’m listening to the third series, which came out a few months ago, on the space shuttle.

It’s got some great in-depth interviews with key players like Michael Collins (Apollo 11) and Jim Lovell (Apollo 8 and 13) before they died — both were among the most personable of the astronaut corps — as well as great audio, deep research and, for lack of a better world, dramatic flair. I thought I knew just about everything about the 1960s and 1970s space program, and “13 Minutes” taught me a thing or two.

Start with Apollo 11, go to Apollo 13. You’ll be glad you did.

Writing old-school with notepad and pencil and peppermint brew at a tea bar. Kind of like the feeling.

We could be less than a month away from NASA’s human mission to the Moon for the first time since December 1972. Some of my earliest memories are watching a late Apollo mission on TV. You better believe I’m going to dig this so much when it actually happens, which I highly doubt will be exactly a month away. These things always slip.