Every cosmic vacuum is filled with cosmic energy
Now watch this empty field explode with meaning
According to standard cosmology, which I do not understand, there is no such thing as pure nothingness, because in the words of the cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, ‘nothing is unstable’ and therefore ‘virtual particles’ are ceaselessly coming into and going out of existence even in pure vacuum. By unassailable logic, pure nothingness is impossible. I read that in Krauss’ book A Universe from Nothing, which I picked up from a free book shelf at the Chatham, NJ train station in 2013. I am aware that Krauss is a problematic personality. Because I do not understand cosmology and because Krauss is a problematic personality I will now change the subject.
Here is a picture, taken by Tim Johnson for the Vineyard Gazette, of two firefighters in the bucket of Tisbury 651 during firefighting operations in February, 2022.
I wrote about my experience in that very same bucket in a similar fighting situation in my 3-post series A Scared Firefighter up in the Bucket. In those posts I came close to talking about my non-understanding of cosmology but I didn’t really go into it.
Interwtingled
My earlier post What’s the Frequency, Tom? concludes with a photo, which I took sometime in the summer of 2011, of a fire hydrant on Main Street in Vineyard Haven that had a mysterious and quite amusing sticker on it. The whole essay leads up to this picture. My caption to the photo includes this declaration: “[E]verything is intertwingled. Everything ramifies.”
Today we’re concerned not with the hydrant, but with the rock wall behind it along the sidewalk. Below, a photo of that hydrant and wall and a bit of the house behind that wall. In 2010 I stood by that wall, wearing my firefighter turnout gear, next to the noisily idling Tisbury 651, during a call for a furnace backfire at the house across the street. As I stood there basically doing nothing I was approached by a gentleman who stood on the slope above the wall, and he and I had a fascinating conversation. We’ll come back to this.
A dinner party
For nearly 20 years, starting in 2001, my wife Betty was coordinator of programs for adults at the Vineyard Haven Public Library. She organized lectures and seminars and cooking classes and plays and bicycle repair classes and showings of movies and election-results-watching parties and much more. In 2010 she organized a lecture/discussion series on The American Identity, led by the historian Sheldon Hackney, and at the conclusion of the series Sheldon and his wife Lucy hosted a dinner party at their lovely home, to which I got to tag along by virtue of being Betty’s husband.
Sheldon’s & Lucy’s personal histories are too extraordinary to go into right now. Remind me later.
As Betty & I were preparing to head over to the Hackney residence I grabbed my windbreaker. Betty said, “Ugh. Are you really going to wear that thing? It’s so garish.” To which observation I took great offense, for I thought wearing that windbreaker gave me a distinct air of sophistication. Garish? As if.
As always in those days as my final sartorial step I affixed my pager to my belt just above my right hip. Then we left.
There were about 12 or 14 guests, more women than men, and Sheldon and Lucy (the proverbial, and actual, perfect hostess). Of them, before that evening I had only met Sheldon and Betty, and Sheldon only in passing. That evening I met several fascinating people, some of whom became good friends.
The first person I met was a guy who introduced himself as ‘Tony.’ We met in the kitchen, where both of us had gone in search of beer. There was ample wine available in every other room. But alas, there was not a single bottle of beer to be had anywhere in that house. Tony and I bonded over that shared immiseration. Soon we were talking about baseball. That man had an absolutely encyclopedic knowledge of the Washington Senators, a team, according to Wikipedia, “[best] remembered for their many years of mediocrity and futility,” a team which, moreover, had ceased to exist when Tony was two years old. He was perhaps the only person on earth still passionate about the Washington Senators. I liked him immediately and I so wished there had been beer there.
Festschrift
A year or two later there was a catered lawn party at Sheldon and Lucy’s house on the occasion of the publication of Dixie Redux, a book of essays in Sheldon’s honor. On that day there was a good selection of beer available. But it was early in the day, so I drank fizzy water.
Within another year or so later Sheldon was gone, taken by ALS. Lucy followed him a few years after that, Alzheimers. Tony’s gone too.
Nevertheless the connections I made that evening still ramify.
The Hackney house fire
The house burned in a spectacular fire during the first week of February, 2022. Tisbury 651, my alma mater, played an important role that day, as the Tisbury Fire Department was assisted by the departments of the five other island towns. The Vineyard Gazette and the MV Times have informative stories and spectacular photos. Go see.
I would have loved have been able to help on that day, but I was off-island. More to the point I had reached the mandatory retirement age five years earlier. I was then and remain now an impoverished member of that benighted class, the civilians, the non-firefighters.
A month after the fire Elizabeth McBride, Sheldon and Lucy’s daughter, whose family occupied the house at the time of the fire, wrote a very moving account of what the house had meant to her and her family, and what the island community still did mean.
The gentleman on the wall
So about that gentleman who introduced himself to me as he stood on the wall near the Tom West Face hydrant during a ho-hum call for a smokey-basement situation in 2010 as I was hanging around by the truck, 651, with my radio, with the assignment to stand there, do nothing, and be on the ready.
My interlocutor was an impossibly cute ~five-year old Black kid who had a total obsession with fire engines, fire trucks, firefighter gear (especially helmets) and ‘firemans;’ so totally thrilled by all the noisy firefighting excitement playing out in front of his house that he could barely contain himself.
What that has to do with the dinner party at the Hackney’s house we’ll get to in a moment.
A dramatic alert interrupts the dignity and repose of the assembled cohort of the intelligentsia
I was seated for dinner at the Hackney’s, talking with my chance dinner companion the Prize Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks, about dystopian science fiction. Across from us sat the NPR/PBS journalist Charlayne Hunter-Galt. Rose Styron, the widow of the novelist William Styron and undisputed doyenne of literary Martha’s Vineyard, was at the next table.
Geraldine’s Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist husband and baseball aficionado Tony Horwitz was in the next room with some other impressive lit'ry types when my pager screeched its ‘alert’ signal.
The alert is loud and sounds kind of like a fire alarm. After the alert comes the message from dispatch: “Tisbury firefighters, respond to {such and such a fire or emergency at such and such an address}.”
That pager has a way of shutting down conversation for a beat or two, fer sher.
I excused myself, found my garish windbreaker and drove to the scene.
Is the plural of ‘meet cute’ ‘meets cute’ or ‘meet cutes’ or???
Wikipedia:
In film, television, and literature, a meet cute is a scene in which the two people who will form a future romantic couple meet for the first time, typically under unusual, humorous, or cute circumstances. This type of scene is a staple of romantic comedies, though it can also occur in sitcoms and even soap operas.
I should make clear that in my book it’s perfectly OK to use the term ‘meet cute’ to describe this kind of first meeting between any two people, whether or not they go on to form a future romantic couple. So my meeting Tony Horwitz as we both rooted around in Sheldon Hackney’s kitchen looking for beer at a wine-only dinner party of fancy intellectuals is a meet cute, as was my chance seating assignment next to Geraldine Brooks right before my pager went off, and, especially, my introduction to Tony and Geraldine’s son Bizu, he of the firemans fixation, is a meet-cute as far as I’m concerned, about which more below. For the record, I have never formed a romantic relationship with any of those three people.
A little while after meeting Geraldine at the Hackneys’ party I conducted an interview with her (by email) for my site Wetmachine.com. The introduction I wrote to that interview follows.
If you click on the above Wetmachine link to the interview (which holds up pretty well, I think), at the end of the interview you’ll find the text of my diary entry about my encounter with five-year-old Bizu Horwitz. He really was pretty insanely adorable.
I met Geraldine Brooks when we were seated next to each other at a small dinner party about two months ago. (Geraldine and her husband Tony Horwitz (also a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize — his is for journalism) and I have many mutual friends, including my wife Betty, who directs the lecture series at the Vineyard Haven Public Library, where Tony has been a speaker and Geraldine is on the hook for a talk next year.)
At that dinner party Geraldine and I discovered that we had many similar interests, including a shared taste for dystopian science fiction novels — the very kind of book I write. I offered to drop off a few copies of my books at her house and she said, “Oh, please do.” So the next day I hoped on my bicycle and rode to the address she had given me, and that’s how I discovered where she lived and that I had met her young son Bizu some 9 months earlier, when the fire truck to which I’m assigned, Tisbury 651, was parked in front of their house during a routine “furnace backfire” call. When I got home from dropping off my books I sent Geraldine the write-up in my diary about that fire call, and she was thrilled to get it, saying “That’s fantastic. Thank you so much for sending this. I remember that day quite vividly. I thought, that’s a very nice man out there, letting Bizu ramble away at him.”
Since then Geraldine & I have become pals. I think the moral of the story is, if you want to get on the good side of a famous writer and get her to answer questions for your insignificant little blog, let her observe you being nice to her child without having any idea who he is or that she’s observing you through the window.
Since then, of course, we’ve lost Tony at the obscenely young age of 60. Geraldine is no longer a mere rock star novelist, she’s a mega-superstar novelist, a veritable Serena Williams of novelists, a Taylor Swift of novelists. ( This profile of her in the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald is informative and touching.) Her latest:
Ms. Brooks is also a founding member and regular reader of Sundman figures it out!. And so I ask you, those of you who are not Geraldine, what further kind of endorsement do you require before you’ll share or like or restack or upgrade to paid?
Bizu, now 21 or so, is also a subscriber to this substack; I know that because his mother gave him a paid subscription as a gift. I have no idea whether he reads it or not, I have not spoken with the man since the day we met. But if you’re Bizu and you’re reading this, hello, how are you.
(By they way, it was a car fire. My firefighting services were not required. I went back to the dinner party)
Promos
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Coda
There’s a quaint old cemetery out on West Chop. It’s got about a hundred markers, going back two hundred years. If more than that, not much more. The kind of place so picturesque and perfect that people are just dying to get into it. I went there yesterday & took a few photos. There are graves there of people you may have heard of. Graves of several people I knew. They were all interesting people, good people. Real Vineyard people.
I hope to someday write about them.
Yesterday evening at the deli counter at Cronigs I ran into Greg, Tisbury’s Fire Chief. I told him I was working on a story about the Hackney fire. (Greg supervised all firefighting operations on that day.) He told me, in an almost hushed voice, “We put one hundred thousand gallons of water on that thing. It just would not go out. I didn’t want to, but at the end of the day I had to call for the machines to demolish it. We might still be there pouring water on it.”
Loved this essay. All our lovely ghosts from all those memorable feasts. Ah well. At least our Rose still blooms.
Your train of thought has had many sidings.