REALITY & NEW MEDIA: Space Forks

It is hard, and took this long, to put the pieces of yesterday back together. The main story was textbook routine; up at five, showered, dressed, studied, and out of the house by seven-thirty, on campus through two classes until one.

But yesterday, I took a left out of the campus lot instead of a right to go home, yet I still was heading home. My home for decades, and yet unlived in for decades as well. My father’s house; forty-five miles and forty-five minutes in time and place away.

Beautiful there, peaceful. But empty until the memories filled it with five people, sometimes more, growing together, growing old, leaving and returning over segments of time in flashbacks. I put some water on for instant coffee, instant cream, because we can no longer keep fresh milk there as it will turn before it’s even half-way used. The sound of water turning into bubbles on the stove still makes me cry. I wander through the rooms that look so lived in but the people just aren’t there. I’m waiting for the furnace man to come and fix the noise my father said it didn’t make, because he tried to fix it all himself.

I spread my homework out upon the kitchen table; it looks so oddly out of place. I go upstairs to beds that look just freshly made, that no one’s slept in for two months. His room–my room–is still the celery green we painted it together. My mother’s still the cool baby blue it always was. I go down to the cellar, put some lights on, check the furnace, glance over at my father’s workbench neatly filled and organized. There’s the McCullough chainsaw that for several months he wanted us to bring to someone to have fixed. The dying weeping willow tree had bothered him, and he was anxious to cut it down. He finally once again tried to fix it himself as we lied and stalled and said that we’d forgotten. It is too heavy. It is too dangerous. We saw the weakness that we also lied about.

Needed air to breath from the beauty of the day, its freshness, newness; life. Sitting on his chair in the sun on the porch, reading Theodor Nelson’s old and new ideas on the future of New Media. Sitting in the past of building campsites on the hill, my “thinking rock”, the trees we planted that have grown so tall. Space of June where I would not be sitting on this chair, but on the edge of porch and talking to my dad. Space of just two years ago and sitting with my mother, nodding yes a hundred times to the same saying that the trees have grown so tall.

Hungry, there is food to eat, and yet I cannot eat it. Unopened bag of Pecan Sandies that I always snuck upon a shelf. It is so quiet here and yet so noisy in my head. I call the furnace people to let them know they can come early. Halted by the menu I’m supposed to choose by punching numbers. Staring at the rotary dial, I wait for someone real. The phone is old, it is technology that’s made it almost useless. Changes made in time that could not somehow change as well the physical reception. I hear my maiden name repeated through several calls; give up and answer to it. I’m changed with time as well.

He comes at last, the furnace man. Back to the present for a little while, but then it goes back forty years. He has worked at B.F. Goodrich, where all my family has; he graduated from the high schools where we’ve been. He knew my dad, and told me—at once confirming to me that he did—how my father always wanted him to be the one who came to fix the furnace, how he stood there watching as the work was done. Here and there of thirty years, the spaces in the times I wasn’t there.

Hard to follow where the paths of yesterday had gone, and wondering how they all led to today.

New Media Moment: The turn taken out of the campus parking lot had taken many paths beyond and through that afternoon. Without the learning of the awareness of space, the blocks of time that are constant yet rearranged by memory within the block of present time itself; the learning of the trails that lead to different places, this day would not have been what it became. Another block of time that holds within it several more.

New Media Moment #2: Real time vs. story time: This sentence, “The main story was textbook routine; up at five, showered, dressed, studied, and out of the house by seven-thirty, on campus through two classes until one” covers eight hours, yet can be related and read in six seconds.