One of the most challenging things about researching the ridiculous hoboes on John Hodgman's list of 700 is finding corroborating sources. These men and women hiked and rode the nation's rails as much as ninety years ago and rarely left any offspring, so eyewitness accounts are few and far between. Finding more than one person who remembers the same hobo from the list is a feat which I have only managed once, and with endlessly frustrating results.
I had only one hour in a nursing home cafeteria with the Trixies, and I was unable to give either of them a copy of Hodgman's list of 700 names prior to our meeting, so I spent way too much of that precious time reading the list aloud, as fast as I could. Trixie of the East had heard of Ol' Barb Stab-you-quick, but Trixie of the West had not. Zaxxon Galaxian was familiar only to Trixie of the West, and so on.
I was well past number 650 when I found one that they both knew. His name was Uranus John, the Star-Traveler. Trixie of the East had accompanied him and a group of hoboes from New York to St. Louis, in the summer of 1938.
"He got his hobo moniker from a bully named Günter, who loved to say 'Uranus.' The 'Star-Traveler' part was about his navigational skills. He had been a junior navigation officer in Hoover's secret hobo navy in 1932, and had a gift for using the stars and planets to guide him from place to place. It came in handy, even on land. Hoboes didn't just ride trains, you know. We walked for miles on end, through the middle of nowhere--"
Trixie of the West interrupted with a bang of her tiny old fist on the arm of her wheelchair.
"That ain't it! That ain't it at all! He was a dual-hobo," she said. "He roamed the American plains, but his time here was just a pause in his real journey - through the stars. He came from some faraway world - he said it was green, and a lot like earth - and he was marooned here, waiting for our industry to mature to the point where he could obtain something he called 'electronics,' to repair his damaged starship."
Trixie of the East grumbled, and West shooshed her with a hiss and a few wags of her bony finger.
"Of course no one believed him. So many hoboes were touched in the head, and there was as much opium in the west as there was lint, but I bought his story - I really did. He talked about wormholes and time dilation and inverse gravitational dropkick tunnels in such exquisite detail. Also, he got so very sad, when he spoke of his true home. He said that, even with his advanced spaceship, he couldn't avoid the pitfalls of relativistic velocity. He explained that when he had set out from his home world for 'a quick errand,' as he called it, our planet - our entire solar system - had not even begun to form."
"What depressed him so was knowing that his world and the star it orbited were already long-dead, or certainly would be, by the time he would be able to return. Apparently, hopping from star to star for a few decades, as he had, took upwards of a billion years, to something stationary, relatively speaking. The price that star-travelers pay, he said."
"I found him deeply unsettling to be around. His eyes were so odd. It was as if you could see in them the vastness of what he had seen, and the interminable time his travels had consumed. I mean, worlds were born, lived, and died in the time it took him to get from there to here." Trixie of the West shuddered, and pulled at her tattered hobo shawl.
The Trixies began to argue, talking over each other with increasingly-shrill insistence. My hour was up, anyway. A pair of kindly Jamaican-accented nurses came into the lunch room and wheeled the old hobo women away. I stood and thanked them for their time, but I don't think they heard me.
I was left with these two stories - one short and relatively unremarkable, and the other sounding like the elevator pitch for a new low-budget Playstation game.
How will I choose...
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| Relativistic Velocity |
Here we go again with the writing prompts from STUDIO 30-PLUS. I've been hoping for something spacey, to combine with this hobo name from the John Hodgman list, and this week's prompt was perfect - "stars." It was plucked from fellow blogger Laura's post, NEWBORN. Please take a minute to check out her work - this is a big part of why I'm here. "Newborn" is a sweet little morsel, but do read on - she is indeed a fine writer with a clean, clear voice.
[Fade in. Interior. American cubicle-style accounting office.]
Sometimes, the effective execution of my relatively simple job is significantly impeded by errors in the input I receive from others. I have to stop and waste lots of time and energy tracking down answers to simple questions that shouldn't need to be asked. This is not unique to my job, and all you need to know about my Monday is that I had a LOT of that, today.
By now you might know that I have coping mechanisms for days like this. Today, I tried a new one. While waiting for my myriad answers to questions that shouldn't need to be asked, I looked up and picked out a faraway speck on the National Geographic world map - a freebie that came with one of [Maris]'s multiple 2012 panda calendars. This part is not new. I often try to put myself somewhere else. As Laurie Anderson said, "Paradise is exactly like where you are right now, only much, much better."
As a kid, I would find myself on the first day of school, only days removed from our vacation trip, trying to picture what was happening at that moment in Rehoboth Beach. Back then, I'm sure not a whole lot was happening in Rehoboth Beach, after Labor Day. Once I had seen the Caribbean, I could close my eyes and see the places I'd been - beaches, bars, restaurants, the house in which we stayed. I knew which places would be quiet, which ones would have a band and a cruise ship crowd, and so on. When weather.com arrived on the scene, my vision could be even more complete.
Today, the first speck upon which my gaze landed was Israel/Palestine, where the pace of killing-each-other's-children-over-bits-of-dusty-earth-and-so-much-less has recently picked up, again. I knew that while I sat there in my cloth-covered work box in Maryland, mothers and fathers over there were crying themselves to sleep over the decimation of their lives, as their midnight worked its way toward one in the morning.
Obviously, that made me sad. I wondered if there was a rule that dictates that all expansions of perspective had to result in melancholy. So I pictured Rehoboth, cold and quiet, but not as dead as it used to be by November. I saw St. Thomas, with the first of the week's cruise ships tied to the docks of Charlotte Amalie, their international passengers scattered about the island, muttering at the immeasurable slowness with which the service personnel moved. I became aware - or at least more aware than usual - of all the activity taking place elsewhere on my planet at that exact moment. At any given second in time on earth, someone is being murdered, someone is giving birth, someone is losing a baby, someone is drunk, someone is blowing an interview, someone's getting arrested, beaten-up, fired, hired, high, sober, dressed, asked out, inspired, crushed, rewarded, passed by, late, early, startled, fed or - just now - hearing his stomach growl. All of this and so much more, all over the world.
I pulled my imaginary camera shot back further, and all those activities melted into a din, loud at first, but growing soft and muddy as I backed away, leaving a view of a quietly humming blue-and-white sphere, set as a jewel against the black of space. I thought, why stop there? There's a little earth-made robot SUV on Mars - right now - and it's doing something at this very moment. At sixty-ish million miles, my picture was a little fuzzy - I had to fill in some of the details - but I could see it. Human-controlled activity, farther away than any human has been from this world - happening right now.
Why stop there, and why stop with human activity? I always tried to picture who was driving my favorite blue bumper-car at Funland when I was home, who was now living in my first college dorm room, who was sitting at [Maris]'s and my table at Louie's Backyard in Key West, and so on. What about Jupiter? Jupiter is spinning in space as I type this. Stuff is going on, there. Storms are raging, thousands of years old and larger than our planet. Somewhere, WAY out there, the Voyager spacecraft are hurtling at inhuman speeds into interstellar space, still calling home.
I pulled back still farther. With 200 to 400 billion suns in our galaxy and at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe (possibly many times that figure), I have no doubt that there are, right this very second, other worlds with intelligent life. I'm sure it's unimaginably different from human life, and I have little doubt that any of it is exactly where we are, technologically, but I'll bet somewhere, somebody is close enough to be considered at least a distant cousin. On that world, as I type this, someone's being born, getting pregnant, stealing something, learning something, fighting over what to others looks like nothing, laughing, sleeping, winning, dying etc..
My perspective was improved, but because I never know when to quit, I took my tracking shot back one last step. Beyond the lives of beings, nations and planets lie the lives of stars. Right now, someone's sun is exploding. Right now, galaxies the size of our own are colliding with each other in multimillion-year spectacles of violence and death on a scale that cannot be expressed in human terms. Right now, in the Orion nebula and millions of others like it, stars are being born.
It's taking place very far from here, and incredibly slowly, by our standards, but stuff is happening elsewhere. Massive stuff. With my brain struggling to get its feeble paws around that, my spreadsheet with the missing $20 payment became so very manageable. I, at least, did not have to give birth to any solar systems, today.
[Fade to black]
