Security Clearance Part I

Get a personal view of the Kennedy Space Center in this essay, which was originally published in Burrows Press (http://burrowpress.com/security-clearance-linda-buckmaster/). They used a very cool photo from the olden days of space history. It will be re-published here in four installments.

Security Clearance

“Wait here. I have to put my knives in the car to get through Security,” my brother Ric says.

I have just met up with my brother at the entrance to the Kennedy Space Center. I never like to wait, and I told him earlier we’d have to go through Security. We are here for “the ultimate journey,” as the website says, “where the sky isn’t the limit—it’s just the beginning.” And if that weren’t enough, we also have reservations for the special bus tour offered by the Center—“Cape Canaveral Then and Now.” But before we can blast off, I have to wait for Ric to drop off his knives.

My little brother, age fifty-six, has a slow, hobbling walk. Maybe it’s from decades of carrying seventy pounds of welding equipment a half mile to ships in drydock. Or maybe it’s from walking the streets of Jacksonville during his junkie days, or a deal gone bad. And he’s carrying knives—plural?

I can see I’ll have a bit of a wait. He and I have parked our respective cars at the far end of the lot. His is the black Lexus, the one he got used “for a very good interest rate,” he tells me, at one of those “no credit, bad credit, no problem” places. Mine is the bland rental. I’m here because I’ve undertaken a research trip to the Florida coast, coming down from my home in Maine to try to re-construct a childhood of wandering the palmettos and watching rockets. Despite return visits to family most years, I haven’t before connected the actual childhood geography with the present one.

“Space Coast” Florida in the 1960s is, or was, my homeplace, and I’m trying to remember it as it was to write about it.  A confluence of Florida geography, the space race against the Soviets, and the go-go era of the larger culture launched me in ways I am still learning about.  When I left home as a hippie chick in 1969, I “couldn’t have cared less” about the space industry, to use a favorite expression of my father’s.

My re-entry, on the eve of the launch of the final Space Shuttle in 2011, widely considered the end of an era at the Cape, is a conscious return to the landmarks of those early days in which I grew up. I’ve spent the past week visiting my few remaining relatives—stepfather and wife he married after my mother died six years ago, my late father’s second wife who I haven’t seen in twenty-four years, and Ric from Jacksonville. I’ve heard stories or the lack of stories about the old days. With Ric, I’ve visited the East Coast Surf Museum and Ron Jon’s Surf Shop, where he could tell me stories about the locally famous surfers in the photos. We later cruised the docks of Port Canaveral like teenagers sharing a joint with friends. 

Our father was an engineer at the Cape in the early days of the industry, the Fifties and Sixties, and I want to see where it was he actually worked, an area that was only open to employees with government Security Clearance like my father.  At least, that’s why I’m here, and I’ve invited Ric to come to with me.  I know Ric has a much better memory of the past than I do, and I need his commentary. Ric and I haven’t spent this much time together over the decades since we were kids and he was “Ricky.”

As I follow the cement walkway to the famous Center, bland marigolds bloom in evenly spaced rows, and the mild air and warm sun conspire to make it a real Florida tourist “attraction.” The swells of welcoming recorded “space” music unfold forever as if I were actually moving into and through the black and starry great beyond rather than to the ticket booth.  By the time Ric returns, I am more than ready to get in line at the ticket kiosk and a little edgy from the music.

 “Oh shit,” Ric says, patting the front pockets of his jeans as we get to the entrance door. “I forgot about the Mace. I have to go back to the car.”

“No way!” I say. “Just discretely toss it into that garbage can.”

“It costs eight bucks.”

“So?”

“I’ll stash it in the bushes over there,” he points to a cement flower planter attached to the side of the building.

“What?”

I look around hoping no one notices what he is doing. What a hassle it would be to get busted in front of a federal building hiding a can of Mace in the bushes, especially with a two-time felon. I can see how he’s made some less than smart choices over the years. I can’t believe he’s not extra careful to avoid doing even the tiniest thing that could land him back in jail. I know I would be.

We’re now ready to push our tickets into the machines and walk through the Security Clearance turnstyles. “One at a time,” the guard says. I imagine this is something my brother has heard before in other situations involving guards. To be continued.

         Copyright, 2016, Linda S. Buckmaster

"Turtle Moon." Genealogy of an obsession.

 Sometimes writers write about the same thing over and over. Sometimes they discover something new with each re-do.

If you read "Space Heart" on this blog, you know that there is embedded in the piece a story about a sea turtle coming ashore and laying her eggs on the beach. In that story, the experience of watching the turtle one May night becomes an extended metaphor for the experience of surgery and anesthesia. It also serves as a contrast between the wild ancient natural world and the cutting-edge technology of Cape Canaveral during the Fifties and Sixties.

I have used that turtle story in multiple ways over the past twenty years, based on my own experience growing up on the Atlantic coast of Florida where masses of sea turtles make their way to the beaches every spring. In fact, the coast of Brevard County is still the largest nesting area in the world for loggerhead and green sea turtles. http://www.seaturtlespacecoast.org/

My original version in the 1990s was in fiction I was writing in the voice of Celia Elizabeth, a twelve-year old in 1917 who lives in Fort Pierce, Florida. At the time, Fort Pierce was a small town, an outpost really, on the edge of undeveloped South Florida before the Miami land boom (and bust). In her diary, Celia records the story of going on a "turtle turning" expedition one night led by a Bahamian named Jack. Turtle turning was how they hunted sea turtles back then for meat and to use their shells.

As a turtle came ashore to lay her eggs, the hunting party would turn her on to her back, making her helpless before they killed her. (I know -- we can't imagine doing that now.) Celia Elizabeth separates herself from the crowd and sits against the dune as she watches one turtle come ashore, make her nest, and lay her eggs in front of Celia. The turtle's focus on her mission captures the preadolescent girl's attention in a way that feels important to her. 

And to me, evidently. I had to write about the turtle again in the poem "Turtle Moon" under the mentorship of poet Constance Hunting http://archive.bangordailynews.com/2006/04/06/constance-hunting-a-literary-legend-dies/. In this version, it is the beautiful mindlessness/mindfulness of the natural world I am most taken with.

A few years later, I realized there was more to the story for me. Instead of Celia Elizabeth's point of view, I had to re-tell it from mine in what were contemporary times when I was a pre-teen. This version is an essay that begins:  "It was sometime between the ages of 11 and 14, in an era when 'pre-teen' still meant inexperienced." What I realized as I wrote that version is that the experience represented to me, an impressionable young girl back then, the (female) focus of the turtle's work, duty even, and her commitment to make it a reality. I was of an age then to be wondering what my role in the world and how would I make that happen.

As I was putting together "Space Heart," I realized that all the major aspects of it -- my heart surgery at age 11, Alan Shepherd's launch, the turtle expedition -- all converged at the literal same time in my life but also in my understanding of it all. That is how I came to weave the threads together, each of which were originally stand-alone pieces in their own right.

But I'm not done yet. I've just used the story in a collection of short short stories (500 to 2,000 words) about American boomer women. In this story, the narrator is talking about coming to terms with dying of breast cancer.

So, what is it about this turtle story that so obsesses me? Where will it pop up next?

Copyright 2016, Linda S. Buckmaster




 

Flash Essay "Becoming Memory" in Becoming Memory Series

 Becoming Memory

We’re standing in the Florida night outside the hospital where my father is dying so Christine can have a smoke. She pushes back her Farrah Fawcet hair with bright sculpted fingernails I imagine floating above the typewriter keys at her receptionist job. Both middle-aged now, she is reminiscing, laughingly, about the first time she met my father twenty years earlier when her big sister Mimi, now his wife, brought him home for dinner.

He was such a character, so funny, fit right in with the family, attributes apparently any daughter should be proud of. Christine had been especially taken with him, she tells me, because she was only fifteen at the time. I stare at her blankly. She keeps on talking.

If Christine was only fifteen at the time, I realize, I was only fifteen. I was only fifteen and waiting for my father to come home. Waiting for him, and he was with another family, a big, sprawling, messy family that parked their many cars on their lawn. What was another plate for dinner at that house? We never added another at ours. When would he come home? What shape he would be in, fumbling the front door handle? Who needed the embarrassment? And then the later years when you hoped he wouldn’t come home at all.

But we’re together now, Christine and I, waiting for death. The heartless rhythm of disco music pounds from a car leaving the parking garage. We stand with our separate memories, my father upstairs becoming only memory, while the flat humid air holds the cigarette smoke around us and doesn’t let it go. 

Copyright, 2016, Linda S. Buckmaster

Flash Essay: "Alibi Bar" from BEcoming Memory Series"

 Alibi Bar

Duane Eddy’s twangy guitar rakes the smoke-filled air as my eyes adjust to the dim light. The jukebox is playing his hit from ten years earlier, “Rebel Rouser,” but nobody in the Alibi at 3 o’clock on a beautiful Florida afternoon looks like much of a rebel rouser. I spot the broad, square back of my father’s plaid cotton shirt hunched over the bar. I hear him, of course, from across the room, and I can tell by the tone of his voice that he’s repeating himself, his pointed finger punching out the words.

“Hey Buck,” the bartender jerks his head toward me, an almost eighteen-year-old in short-shorts and matching top trimmed in the same polka dots. My usually humid-frizzy hair has been ironed into a smooth helmet against my head, the sides curving like the letter “C” by my cheekbones. My father lets go of the bar long enough to turn toward the door.

“Lee-Lee,” he says in semi-ironic joy, calling me by the nickname that no one else uses. I roll my eyes but still feel warmly acknowledged.

Almost a year has passed since the divorce went through—irreconcilable differences—and my mother has remarried. I’m leaving for college in a few weeks thanks to my new stepfather’s financial contribution, and I want to see my father before I go.

I never heard of the Alibi before; never called here asking for him at dinnertime. I had started my search at Bernard’s Surf, the more upscale place where the Cape Canaveral rocket engineers hang out. My father hasn’t been a rocket engineer for a while, though, not since he lost his government Security Clearance.  I heard he was now working as a day laborer laying cement block, but, I laugh to myself, this must be his day off.

I walk toward him as he gets off the bar stool to introduce me around, his arm draped across my shoulder. “She’s going to college in a few weeks,” he repeats with every intro.

“Hi honey,” growls the one woman at the bar.  The introductions finish about the same time as the two minutes and twenty-one seconds of “Rebel Rouser.”

But one guy, Tinch, straightens himself up a bit to shake my hand and slur into the sudden silence, “Your dad talks about you all the time.” It will be later I learn that his daughter is the young woman Mimi my father is shacking up with, a secretary at the Cape six years older than me.

The next song up is a rhythm-and-blues, the kind you’d expect to hear on a bar jukebox anytime during the fifties or sixties, bumper pool in the background and a Schlitz sign illuminating the scene. The kids would be sitting at a table sipping Shirley Temples with the mother, who would be probably nursing something. 

Copyright, 2016, Linda S. Buckmaster

"Greyhound Station Stop" -- Becoming Memory Series

 Greyhound Station Stop

We had waited until he finally came home to leave for my seventeenth birthday trip to the Keys. Now we’re all in the car like any family on vacation, my mother driving, he being too drunk and ugly. I’m not usually the object of his ugliness, but I was just caught smoking the week before, and he is haranguing me about it. He leans over the front seat toward me, sweaty forearm below his checkered shirt. His face is like a cornered rat’s, his broad nose distorted, the teeth smoker’s yellow. 

“I don’t care how goddamn smart you are,” he slurs, warming to his topic. “This is just the first step. The first goddamn step. Next thing you know, you’ll be knocked up.” I focus on the tiny foam of spittle forming in the corner of his mouth to block out the words. My thirteen-year-old brother rolls down his window, maybe pleased to not be the subject of attack for once.

My father bends toward my mother. “Knocked up, Thelma,” he says in his louder, needling voice, as if she can’t hear him from a foot away. “Then what will that do for your darling daughter? Your smart-ass darling daughter?” She focuses on the road.

He turns back to me. “What will that do for your goddamn collage plans? Huh? You can’t go to college knocked up. How wudja like them apples?” I’m surprised when he sloppily swings the back of his hand towards me, something he has never done before. His aim is way off.

“Balls,” he mutters to himself and slowly repositions his body to face front. Everyone keeps looking out their respective windows.

Whether it’s his idea or my mother’s, I’ve lost track, but she pulls into the Greyhound bus station when we reach Ft. Pierce so he can go back. I’m willing to just let it go, to go on, to have the trip we’re supposed to have as eventually we will when he sobers up. But she opens the trunk and the gray suitcase so he can get the only thing he really wants to take with him—the fifth of Jim Beam wrapped in a pair of underwear—while we continue south without him.

Copyright, 2016, Linda S. Buckmaster

"Stitches" -- Becoming Memory Series

 Stitches

From my bed, the house is quiet, too quiet until I hear the clickedy clickedy clickedy of my mother’s black Singer sewing machine. A deeper click—metal arm on metal—as the presser foot is raised; a small clunk when she lowers it again. A hum rolls the flywheel forward, and then clickedy clickedy clickedy under the machine’s tiny light, now faster, now slower, my mother’s hands under the machine’s strong light.

Plink—a pin drops into the pin box. Plink. Plink. Silence and I know she is re-pinning, re-folding alone at the dining room table, hunched over the dining room table, hours with that tiny, strong light.

How smart I will look in my new pleated skirt, I think. Her handiwork gathers yards of plaid into neat folds, over and over all that fabric into neat folds secured at the waistband with a straight topstitch. The pleat edges meet perfectly, obscuring the layer beneath. The cloth’s cross patterns always line up— “matching the plaid” the mark of a careful seamstress.

Tomorrow I will stand on a dining room chair and turn, turn one pin at a time as she folds the hem just below my skinny knees. It takes so long that a little restless hot spot burns in my belly. I hate how tiny my turns have to be. I want to be able to twirl and leap. Eventually, the ironing board will be brought out, and each pleat ironed so that they march briskly around the skirt, ready to give and flow with movement.  A pleated skirt is not as good for twirling as a flared one, but the accordion action of the pleats is excellent for leaping.

Copyright, 2016, Linda S. Buckmaster

"Gunsmoke" -- Becoming Memory Series

 Gunsmoke

My father plays out his cowboy self with a .22 pistol the year we live in Sunnyvale for his temporary job in California. Some Saturdays, he takes my brother and me out to a gravel pit in the hills for target practice. I aim for those concentric circles off in the distance, just like my father shows me. The kickback, relatively small, makes my ten-year-old arm jump. My father kneels behind my brother, only six, to hold his arm up when it’s his turn.

Afterwards, we study the little holes we made in the target paper, unable to tell whose is whose. Together in the faint autumn sunlight—Central California before the rains and the smell of dry leaves and my father’s suede jacket and his Chesterfields all mix together. It always hangs around him, that outlaw smell, but he was never really an outlaw himself. He didn’t have the heart for it.

It’s that Thanksgiving my father shoots himself in the thigh practicing his “quick draw,” like on “Gunsmoke,” my brother’s toy plastic holster strapped to his leg, Jim Beam by his side. The women and kids are back at the house helping my aunt clean up dinner when my uncle brings him hobbling in, blood streaming down his leg. They don’t bleed on television shows in those days, and we all stare in fascination. “He got me. He got me. The S.O.B. got me,” my father, the great kidder, moans in mock agony.

My mother takes him to the hospital where they pull the bullet out and stitch him up. The story becomes a family joke, a neighborhood joke, a workplace joke, a bar joke, a story about how tough my father is that morphs into a story about how cool and ironic my father is as I grow old enough to want to be cool and ironic myself.

One of his buddies makes for him a commemorative wooden plaque—a two foot by ten inch piece of pine stained a dark brown and carved with the tribute:  “Dick ‘Quick Draw’ Buckmaster. November 24, 1960.”  Mounted in the center like a trophy fish, smaller than you would expect, is the bullet, the legend being larger than reality, as legends usually are.  

Copyright, 2016, Linda S. Buckmaster