Month: August 2022

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A Hole in the Silence

In space, no one can hear you scream. Unless you’re a black hole, apparently.

File this one under “weird but true”: a few days ago, NASA released the sound of a black hole to the internet. More specifically, a low, unsettling moan that prompted one online listener to declare “Space is haunted.”

What in the name of George Lucas is going on here?

After all, most of us learned the same thing as kids: there’s no sound in space. Well, unless you live in the Star Wars universe, where fast things roar and big things rumble because it’s Just That Cool. I mean, what’s the point of a space battle if you can’t rock an entire movie theater with the blaster bolts and explosions, am I right?

But for a galaxy that’s not run by Industrial Light & Magic, we’re used to thinking of things as being spooky silent. No air to push. Therefore no sound waves. Right?

Well, it turns out we all should have paid better attention in science class. Because as often happens, what “everyone knows” isn’t quite the whole story.

This particular black hole, you see, is in the midst of the Perseus galaxy cluster. A star cluster has hot gas. Gas that can transmit sound. Not very much, not very well – NASA had to enhance this one like a 1980s rock concert, to present a sensation that’s normally 57 piano keyboards below our hearing range – but enough to make a faint impression.

I don’t know about you, but I find that weirdly hopeful.

Space gives a different perspective on things, both overwhelming and awe-inspiring. Earlier this year, when the first images came back from the Webb space telescope, it made some people feel small while others felt connected to something wonderful. (For the record, I’m in the latter camp.)

This touches something similar. Once again, it’s a wonder that most of us didn’t expect. Not a vast interstellar panorama but the smallest of whispers in a sea of silence. Waiting … but only if you know how to listen.

And sometimes that seems about as rare as a sound in space.

We’re not a patient people, by and large. So many of us feel the need to do something and do it now. One reason the early pandemic lockdowns were so unsettling, I suspect, is that for the first time a lot of us had to hold still … and had almost forgotten how to do it.

The thing is, it’s not hard to make an impression. Even a black hole in the middle of nowhere can do it. What’s harder is to step back and actually see beyond our own impressions and efforts. To experience and understand. To be.

How many things do we miss hearing because our head is filled with our own chatter?

How much do we ignore without knowing we’re missing something worthwhile? It might be as vast as a black hole … or as small as the person next to you.

Hear the silent. Listen for the impossible. Touch lightly. Once we’ve learned that, we’ll know that even a murmur can matter. That the acts we do take, however small they may seem, always leave something behind.

Give everything its space. Haunted or not.

That’s the hole lesson right there.

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Into the Depths

Some journeys call for a special kind of hero.

One doesn’t just walk into Mordor … without a pair of brave and compassionate hobbits, anyway. Going to Oz calls for some Kansas common sense. And if you’re going where no man has gone before, it helps to have some Enterprising people along.

But all those pale before the adventure that starts with one simple question:

“Missy, where did the stuff I just had on the table go?”

And so begins the Plunge Into Missy’s Purse.

If you’re a long-time reader here, you may already be shuddering. For the newcomers: Missy, our developmentally-disabled ward, goes nowhere without her purse. (Trust me, it would be easier to separate Indiana Jones from his whip.)  Like a Joseph Campbell hero, it has had a thousand faces over the years, ranging from a tiny satchel to an oversized beach bag.

But a few things remain constant. They’re almost always red. They usually have a working shoulder strap (for a while). And they attract everything nearby like a miniature black hole.

So when something I’d left out for a visitor abruptly vanished between one moment and the next – well, it didn’t take Lieutenant Columbo, right? Especially since Missy the Everlastingly Curious had already been interrupted while trying to send it to Purseland earlier.

“Honey, can I have that for a second?”

And so began a quest worthy of Don Quixote … or at least Oscar the Grouch.  Patient exploration unveiled:

  • Two stuffed animals (among the few things to ever escape the Purse Event Horizon for brief periods)
  • Cards from at least three different games
  • The cover of a Random House book – just the cover, mind you.
  • Papers and programs from a dozen different activities.
  • A pocketbook and two plastic bags filled to bursting with random items of their own.
  • The Ark of the Covenant, a lost Shakespeare play, two turtledoves and a partridge in a pear tree.

You get the idea. Just about anything and everything was there for the finding it seemed … except the thing we were looking for.  But there didn’t seem to be anywhere else for it to go, at least not in this corner of the space-time continuum.

Except …

“Scotty?” my wife Heather asked. “What about my purse?”

Bingo. Prevented from using her own Satchel of Many Things, Missy had decided to be helpful and leave it for Heather. Without telling anyone, of course. (Maybe we should have called the Lieutenant after all.)

I had to chuckle. Every quest, of course, has to include a valuable lesson. And this was one that I’d seen in the larger world more than once – namely, that “help” sometimes isn’t.

So many of us are quick to help a person or a problem and that’s wonderful. But sometimes we’re too quick – we don’t stop to think about what the situation actually needs. At best, that can mean a lot of wasted effort, like the folks who self-mobilize at a disaster against instructions. At worst, it can even be actively harmful.

It helps to start with what I didn’t do … examine assumptions. By asking, listening and thinking ahead, we can be the help that’s welcomed instead of one more distraction.

It sounds simple. It is simple. And if more of us keep it in mind, it can make any task a lot easier.

In fact, you might even say it’s in the bag.  

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Tellers of the Tale

It’s a truism that we lose celebrities in bunches. We lose everyone in bunches, really, famous or otherwise.

But when the bunch includes some of our storytellers, I pay a little more attention.

And so, in a time when Hollywood passings fill the headlines, my own eye wanders to the microphone and the keyboard. Simple places. Places of magic.

Places that, for a while, were the homes of Vin and David.

**

Vin Scully was the greatest of American baseball announcers. No argument. Also, no frills. In a television era, he brought the tools of his radio days: constant description, constant stories, with no signature catchphrase or verbal pyrotechnics. Baseball suited him like no other sport could have, with a pace that allowed him to put just the right word in just the right place … or even no words at all, in times when a few seconds of silence would say it all.

David McCullough? So often, the subjects of his histories were the overlooked: landmarks so common that we’d stopped thinking about them or presidents we’d passed by. The Brooklyn Bridge. The Panama Canal. Harry Truman. All gained a new day in the spotlight through his pen. One of his best-known biographies even wound up turning John Adams into a television star – a fate the notoriously cranky Massachusetts lawyer might have regarded with a bit of bemusement.

And somewhere along the line, the Voice of the Dodgers and the popular historian reminded us that there aren’t’ any ordinary moments. Not really.

Because if you look closely enough, the extraordinary can wait anywhere.

**

When I used to work as a newspaper reporter, I spoke to a lot of kids about the profession. I always said that my favorite part was that everyone had a story waiting to be told.

Not everyone, they’d insist. Not me. And so I’d spend a few minutes asking questions, listening to the answers, sharing the neat stuff. We never once failed to find a story worth hearing.

I still believe it. We’re walking story generators, each and every one of us. We live, we learn, we experience. In the words of the musical Hamilton, “We rise and we fall and we break and we make our mistakes.”

And a lot of times, we fail to notice it.

No surprise, really. We’re all busy living that life, after all. We have bills to pay and families to worry about and a million things knocking at our door (some of them with car warranty offers). It’s easy to get pulled into the illusion of sameness, to think that most things don’t really matter all that much.

That’s the power of a storyteller. To pull back the cloak of the ordinary and reveal the magic that we’ve forgotten to see.

Wonder and purpose. Humor and sympathy. The same no more, but truly unique.

Even in a forgotten bench player in a midsummer baseball game.

Even in a one-term president from an age no longer our own.

And yes, even in each of us.

**

And so, here’s to Scully and McCullough … no, that sounds like a law firm. To Vin and David. Here’s to the words they shaped and the moments they opened.

Thank you for the stories you saw and shared with all of us.

May your own stories never be forgotten.