Story Club: Egg

The first time I ever got paid for writing was a travel piece. My dad and I did a road trip around Ohio: Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the Neil Armstrong museum in Wapakoneta, the Great Lakes Science Center. It was 1994, the 25th anniversary of the moon landing, and I was almost 15 years old.

My dad was 15 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. He and my uncles were all space-crazy back then; they loved math and science and science fiction and they were glued to the space race. When the first photos of Earth from space came back, he said, something shifted: seeing our home from space, the big blue marble, made him feel one with humanity. Like dropping Ecstasy. Like we were all the same, even if we spoke different languages and ate different foods.

My uncle grew up to be a rocket scientist. My dad became a science writer, and an astronomy presenter at the McKinley museum. My 21st birthday was a star party at Quail Hollow, hosted by my dad. My 24th birthday was at the Wilderness Center, where he opened up the roof and got out the telescope and showed us Mars, closer that summer than it had been in centuries.

In 1994 my dad still worked at the Akron Beacon Journal, and they still had the budget to send reporters on fun little field trips with their kids and pay those kids for writing. They had the budget to hire a whole bunch of artists to paint the covers of the Sunday magazine; a new painting every week. They painted an astronaut, on the Moon, the lander behind him, the Armstrong museum reflected in his faceplate. Those paintings mostly went into the archive or got thrown away, but my dad went down to the art department and brought that one home, for me, a gift from the artist.

His name was Art Krummel. Art gave me that painting. Years later, he retired from the Beacon and became my college newspaper advisor. Art did his best to fix our problems and teach us the business, and I graduated ready to work because of all the long nights Art spent on campus, helping us put the paper to bed. He’d call his wife, Charlene Nevada, at nine and ten and eleven p.m. saying: I’ll be home late. The kids are still working and so am I.

After graduation, I lost touch with Art. When we reconnected, we disagreed politically. We argued on Facebook and our mutuals said “Block him; just block him.”

But I didn’t. Art taught me how to do my job. I didn’t like his opinions but I couldn’t cast him out into the darkness; I always hoped he’d change his mind and come back.

He didn’t. He died. Last year. And Char called me to say, “I’m downsizing; would you like Art’s books?” I did, of course. They were mostly art books: how to paint, how to draw.

I shelved them in the bookstore, and I loved to look at them. I was so glad to have them. I’ve been so glad to sell them on. I think of Art every time I see them. I’m so grateful Char gave them to me. If Art and I couldn’t reconcile, at least his books and I did.

I’ve been thinking of Art, and my dad, and my uncles, as we’ve watched Artemis go to the Moon. The astronauts went so far away; the big blue marble was receding in their window as I wrote this, as they approached the Moon. I keep thinking about my dad, reading Asimov and Heinlein, explaining how to slingshot around the Moon. It never made sense to me as a kid and it doesn’t make sense now. I guess that’s why I run a bookstore instead of a lunar mission.

Speaking of things that don’t make sense: it’s been Easter. Our tables have been full of eggs. Easter has never made sense to me. Christmas makes sense. Peace on Earth, goodwill, babies. But this whole situation where there’s a state-sponsored murder and then three days in the underworld and then all your loved ones live forever up in the clouds playing harps……that does not make a lot of sense.

What does makes sense is the real world. Flowers coming up in spring. The stars shining dispassionately down on us. The light of the sun to guide us by day; the moon to go ahead of us by night.

The astronauts have gone farther away than anyone living has ever been. The only way to go further is to journey entirely beyond the horizon, like Art did, and like all our loved ones who go on without us.

The way to go further than that is to leave your loved ones without actually dying. To create an impassable distance: fifty miles of highway, harsh words, and a blocked phone number. The way to be further than the moon is to choose fury over forgiveness, anger over apologies. My dad has chosen to be that far away. We don’t go on road trips or write stories or look up at the stars together, anymore. He’s too far away.

(He’s in his living room, in Canton, watching Artemis. Right now. Without me. Like an a-hole.)

I don’t get any comfort from the promise of an afterlife of harps and clouds. I do get some small creaturely comfort from the roundness and smoothness, the sameness of the weight of the eggs in my Easter basket.

But looking up at the sky, knowing Artemis II has gone hundreds of thousands of miles away, slingshotting around the Moon, taking pictures of the big blue marble and finally coming back: that makes me believe. They came back. They’re home with us again.

That makes me believe.

No matter how far we travel, no matter how great the distance we choose to create: our loved ones can and do come back to us. Not as ghosts or angels but as books, and memories; the art they made, the things they built, the stories they told. The stories that we tell, and retell, and keep on telling, together.

It was Ursula K LeGuin, I think, who first said what is now a Dr Who quote: No one is forgotten, as long as there is one person to tell the tale and another to hear it. So when you come to Story Club, whether you tell your story or you sit and listen, you are keeping all of us alive.

We are all keeping each other alive, and bringing each other home, with our stories.

Thank you for reading mine.