All the light you see is from the past.
Alicia Eggert
Almost every engineer in my professional orbit in the early 80s sat somewhere beneath the three-acre hangar-turned-cube-farm that was Building Three of Rockwell International’s Space Systems in Seal Beach, California. Rockwell built spacecraft and satellites in those days, and the engineers in Building Three wrote the systems that tracked the more than one million parts that combined to form America’s first space shuttles. And played chess on their lunch breaks.
The first-rate mind that was B___ sat in Building Seven, a secretive facility. I was not cleared to go anywhere near. To join our lunch hour chess game, B___ would have had to descend a flight of stairs and pass through a connecting breezeway or two to negotiate his way to the eye of the cubicle labyrinth where we set up a small board next to my desk. B___’s Building Seven contribution was to calculate the composition and shape of the ceramic tiles that covered the underbelly of the shuttle and shielded it from the intense heat of atmospheric re-entry. For security reasons—and maybe the fact that materials scientists did not consider software developers to be proper engineers, B___ might never have made the daily descent to Building Three had he not also been a first-rate chess player.
Nearly every lunch hour of my two-year stint at Rockwell, four or five engineers from a universe of seven of us—B___, myself, Rick, Lance, Ledesma, John, and Ann—played exactly one game of chess between us. Despite its solo nature, chess can also be played as a team sport. Beyond the match being contested on the board itself, the one being “played” in the peanut gallery above the board could get as competitive as the nominal game, and every once in a while, turn completely tribal. This was because of the constant working out of player options by non-players, reacting not-always-non-verbally to missed opportunities and impending crises, and—and this is where re-entry between player and spectator could get really hot—second guessing each player’s every move. We were all such active players of the outer game that when Rick, our designated peacemaker, drafted the Rules of Engagement for Onlookers—No Talking; No Pointing; No Gasping—B___ immediately tore it up. Had either of us been inclined to pugilism, B___ and I might have come to blows during that single game of the hundreds played when both of us had had enough of each other’s not-always-non-verbal antics, leading to an altercation I continue to deconstruct four decades later.
Where Building Three engineers wrote software to support space shuttle manufacturing, B___ worked out the equations that kept the bird aloft after returning from space. A materials science guru whose knowledge of what things were made of, and in particular how they behaved under intense heat, B___ helped solve a conundrum faced when the space shuttle re-entered earth’s atmosphere and essentially caught fire. When any object from outer space, whether meteoric or fabricated, encounters the earth’s atmosphere at just the right angle and velocity, the air it meets—mostly nitrogen molecules which at speed compact to form an effectual brick wall—one of three outcomes is guaranteed to occur. The space object—in this case a shuttle—will either bounce off the atmosphere’s outer wall, burn up trying to pass through it, or slip into parallel orbit within it. In all three scenarios, a ‘falling star’ is temporarily born as the friction generated by the molecular collision will burst anything solid into a 3,000 degree flame. The shuttle’s trajectory on re-entry was calculated to slip through that nitrogen brick wall with as little friction as possible. The thick, almost cube-shaped tiles glued to its underbelly to absorb the brunt of the heat never survived re-entry fully intact. Instead, the tiles melted, though not always entirely, and in no instance uniformly. B___’s genius was to calculate the makeup and placement of the tiles so that when they melted, their blow-torched sculpting would perfect—rather than distort—the airfoil’s ability to fly true to a safe landing.
“They’re just words. They only mean what we intend them to mean, and I intend nothing.”
The thick-as-brick friction that sometimes built up in our outer game of chess was not molecular but made of pure pride. It built up not between the actual players but spilled over into the universe of onlookers hovering above them. The matches we played were always cordial, the victories distributed evenly among us. But when in response to a player’s questionable move—with an incredulous groan here, a condescending grunt there, a sudden intake of breath by a concerned if impolite onlooker—temperatures could rise between player and spectator. And on the rare occasion, a personal attack lodged at just the right speed and angle—”You Nincompoop!”—could set the game aflame to where Rick the Peacemaker felt compelled to recite from memory the Rules of Engagement for Onlookers in an effort to extinguish it. But every once in a while, ‘Nincompoop’ proved the mildest of insults. During hotter matches, colorful epithets of the sort not allowed on TV back then occasionally slipped into our atmosphere. During one particular lunch hour, when B___’s tongue burst into flame over some dumb chessboard move, my heat-nonresistant underbelly did not melt away so perfectly.
“B___,” I managed as diplomatically as my heart-in-mouth could articulate, “let’s walk over here for a minute.”
I was raised in a conservative family when it came to colorful vocabulary. Neither my parents nor any of their children embellished in my presence the English language with even slang expressions like “Golly” or “Geez,” let alone in graphically demeaning terms. The same was true of my homogeneous neighborhood where, as a kid, I spent summers playing backyard baseball. For me, baseball chatter was half the game’s fun: “Hey batter-batter-bat-ter! … Swing!” Or, “Pitcher’s got a rubber arm!”
Indoor games like chess with my father and younger brother were studiously silent, even reverent. Since Rick’s Rules were honored mostly in the breach, it took some time for me to drop my inhibition against first tensing, then grimacing, then on to whispering, and eventually laughing at some antics the more daring amongst us tried to pull off on the Rockwell chess board. But the saucy language… Getting used to that part of the Building Three matches took much longer if I ever got completely comfortable with it.
“B___, we all break the rules. That’s not what bothers me. It’s the language.”
“What do you mean, ‘language’? We’re both using ‘language’ right now.”
“You know what I mean?”
“Do I?”
He wanted me to spell it out, probably confident I would never go there.
So he spelled it all out. We were nose to nose by this point. “Oh, you mean words like &^%$ and @#$*.”
Literature and learning filled my boyhood home. My grandmother, an elementary school teacher for 40 years, came to live with us during the last decade of her life. In her last years of teaching, she did so blind, after committing dozens of books to memory. I can still see her ‘reading’ to her students and, after she retired, us grandchildren. Her daughter, my mother, had been an English major before switching to child development because she “tired of correcting everyone’s grammar.” But she never tired of correcting us kids. We learned proper and unaccented English, sometimes by precept but mostly by example.
“Just say it, Scott. &^%$!! and @#$*!!.” On the edge of the cube farm, B___’s profanity became a muted shout.
In contrast to my mother and grandmother, my father was not a man of words. Occasionally surprising us by storied detail about old acquaintances, he mostly kept himself to himself, his quietude increasing inversely to his gradual hearing loss. As his 10 children multiplied to become 20 with spouses, and over 70 with grandchildren, family gatherings became for him what must have sounded no more articulate than a stereo cock fight. After his first stroke, overly conscious that the flow of his sentences was not entirely sensible, he withdrew even deeper into his thoughts. My wife will sometimes equate my own silent retreats to that same place my father’s distant mind ran off to.
When I was six, I knew beyond doubt that the best gift I could give my dad for Father’s Day was a ‘fill-up’. He would sometimes drive me to the service station where he paid the nice man to put a long black hose into a hole in the side of his car and “Fill ‘er up!” Wouldn’t he be pleased, I imagined, if I were to “fill ‘er up” from our house’s very own long black hose? He’d never again have to drive all that way. (And he wouldn’t have to pay the nice man all that money!) I learned from my mother after my father passed away that when he went to start his car that Father’s Day and quickly put two and two together, he didn’t utter a sound. He just went straight to that distant mind of his and worked out a way to remove and drain a gas tank full of water.
Hippocrates advised his medical students to practice three acts: declare the past; diagnose the present; foretell the future. Only then, as we observe in the modern practice of anyone who swears an oath in Hippocrates’ name, can a physick truly change anything in her patient’s life.
“Scott, you’re taking personally something that has nothing to do with you. Communication Theory: from my brain to my tongue, to the middle distance, to your ears, straight into your head. They’re just words! They only mean what we intend them to mean, and I intend nothing. You can think whatever you want. But I’m going to keep saying &^%$ and @#$* and whatever the *%^$ I feel like whenever the *%^$ I feel like it because that’s just how I talk!”
What could I say? The son of both my parents, I am as I write this neither surprised that I spoke up when B___ let loose nor that it was B___ and not me who commanded the last word. But he never swore again in my presence. And 40 years later I’m still unpacking my first postmodern lecture, delivered with force by a materials scientist.
“They’re just words. They only mean what we intend them to mean, and I intend nothing.”
Only as I write that sentence a second time do I ask myself where B___ might have been coming from. Not just then, in that instant, but in all things. Did he remember his grandmother? What was his father like? Did he ever play baseball? Had I ever bothered to inquire? What was it about his past that led him to negotiate the meaning not just of certain words but possibly of all language? How did such a brilliant mind communicate with one so different from it? What even made it want to try? And what meaning did his ears and mind transpose from the middle distance when I used my mind-to-mouth generated words on him, or even when I didn’t? All that distance. All those words.
Hippocrates advised his medical students to practice three acts: declare the past; diagnose the present; foretell the future. Only then, as we observe in the modern practice of anyone who swears an oath in Hippocrates’ name, can a physick truly change anything in her patient’s life. Was I trying to change B___? (Was that even possible?) Did B___’s view of language as nothing more than a mutually negotiated compact change me? (Would that have even been his aim?) How much potential for change did I leave on the table when what I must have been practicing (or not practicing) came only from my past? To what extent did/could/should one’s personal eternity intersect with another’s?
When I began writing this entry, I pinged B___ on LinkedIn, telling him I had just begun writing what I called my professional memoirs. 38 years after the last time I saw or heard from him, in the middle of writing this paragraph, it prompted me to check LinkedIn for a response. And there it was.
“Hey Scott. Good luck on your prof memoir. It takes a lot of focus and work writing anything 🤨.”
From his mind … to his fingers … into the ethereal distance … to my eyes … and my brain … and to eternity and back, I understand the following. B___ knew then, and still reminds me now, that words are tough. They matter differently to him than to me—requiring great effort on both our parts to unpack and repack, over and over if need be, from all sides to all sides, up and down through some kind of eternal matrix, before daring to use them in reply. Regardless, words always matter.
“Thanks, B___. Maybe this time I’ll be willing to put in the work 🤔.”