My Moon Landing Was Terrible, But I Made Up For It On The Dismount!

Come Sunday, twelve years ago ...


Proverbs 13:20-26                                                                       July 24
377 days; clamping down on Sudan                                           10407.24


He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fools shall be destroyed.
Evil pursueth sinners: but to the righteous good shall be repaid.
A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children: and the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just. 20-22


Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person.


God willing, there won't be as much blank space in this journal. Martha's watching the annual State Fair parade on TV (the one I had to get around to get to work today), and I got a better look at what Progeny will look like with the current font sizes (AuthorHouse's recommended) I've selected. At 134 pages, I will need to give people their money's worth! They'll get it -- and more.


[On the sides of this opening journal entry are the birth announcement for our niece and goddaughter Josceline born 11:04 pm CST weighing 7 pounds 5 ounces and 19 inches long and some quotes with my review of Naguib Mahfouz's The Journey of Ibn Fattouma.]


Now to the best of my knowledge ...


Contrary to today's title, I did not land on the moon. And the 377 days you see at the top refer to the number of days since Martha and I had moved back to Minot at that time. But I usually write something commemorating the anniversary of the first humans walking on the moon in '69, and even with parts of Minot still under construction looking like the moon with craters and snails'-pace progress -- it seems so to me, anyway; I'm sure people who work by the construction and see it every day might give you a different impression. Sarah and Jeffrey and I saw this when we found Waldo in five local businesses after breakfast from McDonald's with Martha AFTER the kids came from Dakota Kids Dentistry with another six months of no cavities behind them. That, and playing Millipede, Donkey Kong, and Warlords (Warlords is therapeutic) before hearing the verdict.


That, and my kids having no cavities.


Tomorrow's the beginning of the North Dakota State Fair, and my enthusiasm is just wandering this year. True, the only day the whole family (Martha, Sarah, Jeffrey, and I) would probably go is Saturday, while the kids will ride and ride and ride over some days with the mega-ride passes Robert and Sharon (right?) got them. The mugginess we've had the last few days that makes North Dakota feel like Florida as I remember it over the whole summer is supposed to fall and keep falling over the nine days of the Fair, and it's a reminder why Martha didn't move to Florida with me! I'd probably have sopped her up with a sponge by now, wink wink. Seriously, she is tougher than even she believes she is. Growing up here, or heck surviving to adulthood in the civilized world (one point where the "third" and "fourth" worlds can claim superiority over us), that is not an option.


You don't have to worry so much about getting run over.






Travel is significantly easier as well, whether you're using an online platform as I am or are willing to bike, ride, or sail -- but not fly, airplanes didn't exist in the last decades of the 19th century -- around the world. In the blazing excitement and fury that Jules Verne's Around The World In Eighty Days inspired, Matt Phelan in Around The World (ISBN 9780763636197) presents three true stories with his writings and illustration of Thomas Stevens, Nellie Bly, and Joshua Slocum who respectively rode his bike, traveled by every means available, and sailed around the world. I'd only heard of Bly myself, the New York World reporter Joseph Pulitzer sent on assignment around the world (and at one point she even met Jules Verne the author!), and the stories of Slocum who restored a boat to set sail himself and Stevens who started out as a coal miner and decided to bike around the world fascinate!


Contented in his dreams -- where no failure was a disappointment, so sure of he was ultimate success -- the Old Man never heeded the grave procession of the years, nor ever required he aught or man or woman. So his life was perhaps the happiest on Earth.


The next ship I read about is fictional, in case the title of William M. Timlin's sole published book The Ship That Sailed to Mars doesn't give it away. Printed with a new introduction by John Howe (ISBN 9781606600177) this 1923 story "told and pictured" in Timlin's words in forty-eight pages commended itself first to me in the introduction, where Howe asks the reader to read the story first and then come back to he introduction. Having met so many writers through their books and introducers through their boredom -- something along the lines of I've read this and it speaks to us across the decades/centuries/millennia this way, so consider this -- I appreciated that. And who's to say I cannot believe in Fairies like the Old Man cited above who helped him build the ship and guided him through the stars to Mars where the Martians greeted him?


If I don't believe, one dies.


David