Short Circuits: A Life in Blogs (Volume I) by Dorien Grey

Description:

Lambda-nominated author Dorien Grey (The Dick Hardesty Mysteries, The Elliott Smith Mysteries) knows more than just how to write a great murder novel. He's also had amazing life experiences in the military and around the world. Here, for the first time, are the collected blog and journal writings of this prolific author. As Grey notes, "Sometimes things are more clearly seen through the eyes of others." The hope is that the reader will see similarities to his/her own life, and recognize the commonality of the human condition.

Excerpt:

One of the relatively few advantages of growing older is that the higher you climb on the hill of time, the more you can see when you look back over where you’ve been.

I was born fourteen and a half years after the Treaty of Versailles, which officially ended World War I; eight months and eleven days after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first swearing in as President, in the darkest days of the Great Depression. I had just turned eight when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and remember listening to President Roosevelt’s declaration of war. I was eleven and a half years old when he died. (Because I was too young to yet realize the importance of history, my primary concern was my unhappiness that, for three days following his death, all regular radio programming was cancelled, the radio playing nothing but music, forcing me to miss out on my favorite kids’ programs.)

I was raised in a world of iceboxes and Dixie cup ice cream, of 3-cent postage stamps and twice-a-day mail delivery; of black-and-white movies with newsreels and travelogs and cartoons and 10-cent bags of popcorn. Railroad trains were pulled by steam engines, and there were no interstates or four-lane highways. Cars had running boards. Laundry was washed either by hand or by machines with wringers. Wet clothing was hung outdoors because driers hadn’t been invented yet. To call someone, you picked up the phone and, if no one else was talking on the party line you shared with one or two other families, asked the operator to connect you to the number you wanted (“Forest 984”; “Central 255”). The rotary dial came considerably later.

During the war, gas and food were rationed, and everyone received ration stamps. I remember paper drives, Victory bonds and victory gardens, blackouts and air raid drills (though I lived in the heart of the country). My parents had a small grocery store, and on those very rare occasions when they were able to get a box of Hershey bars, they kept them under the counter and distributed them like gold nuggets to only their best customers. And WWII was followed by the never-declared Korean War, the Cold War, and Vietnam.

Fully 2/3 of the entire population of the world alive at the time of my birth are now dead.

I was born into a world so far different from today’s as to be all but unimaginable to most of the generations who have come after me. It was a world with no computers, no television, no cell phones or iPods, no drive-by shootings or road rage or school massacres. A world where anyone traveling from America to Europe did so by ocean liner because there was no commercial trans-oceanic air service. Up until the mid-1960s, when you did travel by airplane, it was a Sunday-best occasion, and men always wore suits and ties. Diseases all but eradicated from today’s world—diphtheria, smallpox, polio—regularly claimed tens of thousands of lives. Hospital patients were anesthetized with ether dripped onto a cloth cone held over the patient’s nose and mouth. Even penicillin was not discovered until WWII. A diagnosis of cancer was a death sentence.

I served in the U.S. military at a time when, as a Naval Aviation Cadet stationed in Pensacola, Florida, a black serviceman could be asked to move to the back of the bus to let whites sit down. And now we have a black president.

I witnessed the televised assassinations of President Kennedy, his brother Bobby, and Martin Luther King; man’s first landing on the moon, school desegregation, the civil rights movement. Governments and nations rose and fell, as they have throughout time.

Each of us has our own hill of time, and the future is a thick blanket of clouds obscuring the top so we cannot see just how much more hill lies ahead of us. I hope my hill is a very high one, indeed. As may yours be.

* * *

ON BIRTHDAYS Because I truly do consider myself blessed to have been given as many November 14ths as I have, and realize that to complain about getting older is ungrateful of me, I have resolved that henceforth on each November 14th I will celebrate my 21st birthday.

I was born, not in a log cabin, but in St. Anthony’s Hospital in Rockford, Illinois, at 11:15 p.m., Tuesday, November 14, 1933. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been in office just short of a year, and he remained the only president I ever knew until I was 12 years old.

The only child of 22 year old Franklin Guerdon Margason and 24 year old Odrae Lucille Margason (nee Fearn), I entered the world a bright yellow, thanks to jaundice (not uncommon at that time, I understand) and it could be said that I’ve been jaundiced ever since. My mother refused to speak to her best friend for a full year after her friend, upon seeing me for the first time, said “He has really big feet!” Since I was, in my mother’s eyes, absolutely perfect (albeit yellow), she took great affront.

My 21st birthday was spent in Pensacola, Florida while I was a Naval Aviation Cadet. I celebrated the event by catching a bus into town and going to the San Carlos Hotel, where I went into the bar and ordered a Tom Collins.

On my 22nd birthday, I was given a wonderful gift: the continent of Europe, of which I caught a through-the-fog early morning glimpse as the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Ticonderoga approached the port of Gibraltar.

I’ve had a number…well, actually, a rather great number…of very nice birthdays since, but my first 21st and my 22nd stand out above all the rest.

But as the birthdays became more numerous, they also tended to become less singularly noteworthy. The effect was rather like too many people trying to get onto the same elevator, and I’ve been increasingly uncomfortable with their all pressing in on me. So I think my decision to make this and every subsequent birthday a celebration of my 21st is a good and practical one. I may alternate them between my 21st and 22nd, now that I think of it. I will ignore the toll each subsequent year takes on my body, and concentrate instead on those two birthdays, when I and the world were young, and everything wonderful lay ahead. For in my mind, at least, it still does.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll catch the bus into Pensacola and have myself a Tom Collins.