jumpingfish

1.

When he was a puppy, Guinness went to Puppy School. Let’s just say… that he was not a high achiever.

As Trudy tells the story, he had trouble with the very first lessons in which the dogs were taught to sit. Still, he and she kept at it, day after day. And in the last session, the instructor brought over a towel and set it on the ground so that Guinness might have something cozier than cold ground to sit on. She had Trudy try the command again. 

“Sit,” Trudy said. And sit he did.

You see, he was a good dog. Even if he barked when he wasn’t supposed to bark. Even if he jumped when he wasn’t supposed to jump. Even when the ground was cold and the best approximation of a sit he could muster was lowering his rear end just a smidgen.

At the end of that Puppy School class, he got an award: Best Tail Wag. That was Trudy’s boy. Despite everything, he always had a big tail wag.

2. 

His last week was hard. He must have hurt so much that he stopped drinking from his water dish, opting instead for the pond from which he could drink without bending down.

And he stopped eating. Although, he’d stand in the kitchen wagging his tail slightly and look up at Trudy as if to ask if she could offer him something else, try again, because he loved it so much when she gave him snaaacks.

“I’m hungry,” his dark eyes would say, but he wouldn’t eat, and he was slowly wasting away.

And then last week, he bit my mom. Maybe she woke him from his favorite place on the Papasan cushion. Or maybe she touched his sore ears. Or maybe she came around him from behind and startled him. Whatever it was, he snapped at her and gave her a nasty bite that took us to the emergency room.

He felt bad. He wanted to tell her that he didn’t mean to do it. But he didn’t have a way to say he was sorry. Because he was old. Because he was deaf. Because he had cataracts. Because he hurt so much. Because he was perpetually thirsty. Because he was having a hard week. Because he was a dog. Because he was dying.

3.

Late last night he and Trudy walked in the back yard. It was after midnight.

They went over to the pond where he drank for a while. They wandered around the yard — this yard that has been his Eden for 16 years. They stood in the half-light of the moon, visiting all his favorite places in the coolness of the evening.

He was saying goodbye to all his beloved places. He was walking his mommy around the yard to remind her what a happy life he had, how happy he was that she had rescued him, that she had been his mommy. He was saying goodbye to her last night as he must have been saying goodbye to me this morning on the bed, me with my hand on his head, he with his dark eyes staring gently into mine.

This afternoon, we buried him in the backyard. In a sunny spot in the butterfly garden beside the blooming Mist Flower and Golden Eye. We dug a deep hole and laid him in it, putting lavender-colored blossoms on his still-warm body.

Goodbye Mr. Guinness.

“We just pulled up to the gate,” I texted Burt and Jenny. “I need to get my checked bag, and I have a book to read.”

They had left their home in Kentucky well before the crack of dawn and were approaching Grand Rapids from the southeast. They were planning to pick me up at the Gerald R. Ford airport, and none of us were quite sure of the timing, which is why I had a book.

“Just west of Lake Odessa,” they responded. “Will call when we are close.”

“Lake Odessa!” I thought to myself.

In the days of our youth, my grandfather used to drive us diagonally across the lower peninsula of Michigan from Jackson to Grand Rapids following a rural route that took us thru Lake Odessa. And there on the south side of Michigan Highway 50 a block or two from the north shore of the lake was a Dairy Queen Brazier.

He’d slowly steer the car into the parking lot and announce that it was time for a snack. We’d all pile out of the car and get ice cream cones that tasted so good that… well, good enough to keep my grandfather stopping there for years, although as for that, the smiling faces of his grandchildren probably helped a bit.

And years after that, during the summer of ’78 while we worked summer jobs at the engineering firm where he worked, Burt and I followed followed our grandfather’s example. After work at the end of the week, we’d drive that rural route (which we both can still do with our eyes closed) and we’d stop at the Lake Odessa Dairy Queen. Every Friday evening that summer, we’d stop there with Jimmy Buffet and Randy Newmann and George Benson playing on the radio, and we’d have ourselves a snack. 

These were the things in my head as Burt and Jenny announced that they had just passed thru Lake Odessa.

“What did you tell him?” he asked her. He was driving. She had done the texting.

“That we were just west of Lake Odessa,” she said.

“Well,” he said. “He’s going to tell us to go back.”

Sitting in the airport reading their text, with horror I was imagining the Dairy Queen receding in their rear view mirror. I quickly texted back a response.

“Go back!” I said. “I have a book!”

The two of them laughed very hard, as did the three of us when they later told me the story.

“Where’s that other cinder block?” cousin Burt asked. He and Jenny and I were pulling the raft and dock out of the lake in preparation for the coming Michigan winter.

I looked to my left and saw one sitting on the hill beside the dry milkweeds with their swollen seed pods hanging from dry stalks.

“You mean this one?” I asked. (I am proud to say that I know just what a cinder block looks like — an example of my handiness in winter prep.)

I picked up the block and set it down on the wet sand beach.

There were two Red-backed Salamanders in the rectangle of dead grass where the block had been sitting. And since it was fall and had been cold the night before, they didn’t move even with the block gone and the sun shining down on them.

These salamanders are not endangered. And there is a lot of habitat in that place, so I suspect that the two of them were not alone. But I must say that seeing them there was one of the highlights of my long weekend.

It’s been a good morning in Chicago. The weather was spectacular for the runners, there.

The elite men have finished in what was evidently a back and forth race at the end. The elite wheelchairs are done in what I heard was a photo finish. And the elite women are done, too. I watched that finish with Florence Kipligat metaphorically thumbing her nose at her Olympic selection committee which passed her up. Kipligat pulled away from her competition and was all alone as she crossed the finish line.

The crowd and the runners are cheering at the 13.1 mile mark. The blue bells are ringing at the Merrill-Lynch cheer station just before the route turns south on Halstead and heads for the Eisenhower expressway and southern Chicago. The crowd is cheering in Pilsen. And the dragons are dancing in Chinatown as the runners pass under the red gate where the route turns south again on Wentworth for that great loop that feels so far away from the finish line, because the skyscrapers of downtown are so small on the horizon to the north.

Our running coach, Chris, is out there, too. Her goal is to break 4:00 with negative splits, and she passed the half-way point at 2:00:44. And five minutes ago she passed the 30K mark running a 8:50 pace.

Looking good, Chris!

1. The Kids Arrive

It took a while for the kids to come up from the library. Three of them arrived first, because there were no more computers downstairs, and the boys needed to put together some kind of storyboard. The sat down at Mr. Roth’s desk in the front and opened some laptops.

“Not that computer, boys,” Mr. Roth told them. “Mr. Hasan is going to use that one.”

A few minutes later, the other kids arrived. The previously quiet room was now a loud, chaotic hustle and bustle as two classes worth of fourth graders filed in and began promptly to sit on the floor as close as humanly possible to where I was standing.

“What are you going to talk about?” one of them asked.

“Well you’ll find out in a second,” I said.

2. Rockets with Stages

It really doesn’t matter what Mr. Roth asks me to talk about, I can usually figure out some way to bring rockets into the discussion. Today Roth’s chosen topic was Analyzing Data for Meaning, Including Making Connections and Finding Patterns.

I don’t know about you, but fourth grade was never quite like that for me!

I had a plan. It involved rockets. Here’s how it went…

First, I showed them a picture of a NASA Mercury Redstone launch. We talked about how simple the launch pad looked. We talked about how there was only one astronaut and how it was only a suborbital flight. We talked about the red escape rocket on the top. And we talked about how there was only one stage on the Redstone.

“I’ll explain what a stage is in a second,” I told them.

Second, I showed them a picture of a NASA Gemini Titan launch. We talked about how that rocket is my favorite all time rocket because the exposed rocket nozzles at the bottom look so cool, which made a father at the back of the room smile. We talked about how there were two astronauts and how the launch pad was a bit more complex. And we talked about how there were two stages on the rocket.

“What about the Saturn?” one of the students asked.

“Funny you should ask,” I said, and I put my next picture on the screen.

So third, I showed them a NASA Saturn V on the mobile launch platform. We talked about how big the crawler is, which was easy to show them because of how tiny the trucks on the ground seemed in comparison. We talked about how there were three astronauts, how only two would actually land on the moon, how Apollos 11, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 landed twelve astronauts. Of course, we talked a bit about Apollo 13, but I told them was a story for another day. And I showed them how the rocket has three stages.

And then we talked about what stages are for, about how it’s expensive to push a lot of stuff into space, about how when the rocket engines burn and the fuel gets used up you end up pushing empty tank stuff into orbit unless you drop it away. At which point…

Fourth, I showed them (of course) a NASA Space Shuttle launch. We talked about the really complex launch pad. We talked about the external tank and the orbiter and the solid rocket boosters. We talked about how the orbiter flew back to earth and got refurbished to fly again. And we talked about how even though there were not stages stacked on top of one another, this rocket still had stages, because the solid boosters dropped off after their fuel was all used up.

3. Solid Rocket Boosters

And with that cool-picture-based intro to the history of America’s manned rockets, we talked a bit about the solid rocket boosters themselves. 

“Have you ever seen model rockets?” I asked. A lot of them had.

“These are just like those, except they’re really, really big.”

And we talked about how the fuel isn’t liquid but solid. We talked about how there’s a hole running up the middle of the boosters which is where the combustion takes place. (Yes, fourth graders can handle the word, combustion.) We talked about how the boosters were so big that they had to be built in segments and assembled once they arrived at the cape. And we talked about O-rings.

To describe the O-rings and how they work, I pushed my hands against my cheeks and squeezed my face while I talked. I told them (with my cheeks squeezed and my lips sticking out) how the rubber O-rings sealed those joints and plugged holes, so that the fire from the combustion couldn’t leak out.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” I asked with my face contorted beneath my pressing hands and my voice sounding a little like Popeye.

“Yessss,” they said.

4. Ice On the Pad

I suspect you might have an idea where this is going, at this point.

The next picture I showed them this picture of ice on the pad on the day that STS-51L was supposed to launch.

We talked about how it was colder than usual that morning. We talked about how when it was cold, the O-rings got stiff and couldn’t seal the joints quite as well as they usually did. And we talked about how NASA had to decide whether or not to launch.

“No!” the kids said. “They shouldn’t launch.” (Keep in mind that these kids were born in 2007, more than twenty years after that day, so they didn’t know exactly where this story was going.)

So we talked a little bit about politics. About how NASA had promised that the Space Shuttle would make spaceflight cheap, about how they had promised to fly the Shuttle several times per year, and about how NASA management was under a huge amount of pressure to launch that day.

We talked about how a lot of engineers didn’t want to launch, and how they tried to make their case to the managers. And I showed them this diagram that the engineers used to try to explain their logic.

It’s a complicated diagram but we talked about it at length. And we talked about how there had been damage to the O-rings before, which was shown in the diagram. And we talked about how the diagram showed the temperatures on the day of launch of each of the (many) Shuttle flights that had already successfully flown.

And all the kids agreed that it was hard to understand the diagram.

“So imagine how hard it was for the managers to understand what the engineers were trying to tell them.”

5. Making Connections and Finding Patterns

So now we come to the reason Mr. Roth had asked me to come that day. It wasn’t about rockets. (It rarely is.) And it wasn’t about O-rings or a cold day of launch.

“Suppose,” I said, “that we took those data and drew them a different way.”

And I showed them this picture drawn shamelessly from the work of Edward Tufte (upon whose insight this discussion was entirely based).

I explained how this diagram had the same data. It had the day-of-launch temperatures (horizontal axis). It showed when they found O-ring damage (black dots). And it had the severity of the damage (vertical axis), something that is actually present but very hard to fully understand on the original diagram.

“Suppose that this was the diagram we showed to the managers to help them understand our logic, to help them understand why we felt it was dangerous to fly.”

And I pointed to the diagram, starting on the right and moving slowly to the left, pointing out to the kids how as the weather got colder, there was more O-ring damage, and how as it got even colder, the damage got worse, as can be seen by the black dots rising off the bottom of the chart.

And then I pointed out the grey-shaded temperature zone on the far left.

“This was the temperature on that morning.” I said.

The kids gasped. The eight and nine year old fourth graders gasped in recognition of what they were being shown. Those fourth graders instantly understood that what they were looking at meant this.

6. In Conclusion

We all sat there for a few moments (although not in silence, because… well because these were fourth graders).

“So what happened,” someone asked from the darkness of the room.

And I flipped to my last picture.

There was instant silence in the room. Every single one of them was staring in disbelief at the screen. 

I stood there in silence, too, not quite sure if I was going to be able to continue, because it’s hard for me to look at that picture. It’s hard for me to imagine the pain those engineers carried with them for the rest of their lives.

I stood there in silence and then said in a trembling voice, “They all died.”

And the room was silent a bit longer.

“So this is why I’m telling you this,” I said. “Your job when you’re an engineer or a scientist or a writer, your job isn’t just to do the fun stuff (building rockets). Your job is to tell other people what you’re thinking, to help them understand.”

“And when you write in your science notebooks, it’s not just about jotting down some scribble-scrabble. When your teachers or your parents tell you to show your work, there’s a reason for that. When they ask you to be neat, there’a a reason for that. When they ask you to put units after the numbers, it’s not just because they’re trying to make you do extra work.”

“Your job in life is to tell a story, to help other people around you understand, to explain your thinking in a way that helps them make the connections and see the patterns that you see.”

And with that, it was time for lunch.