If You Only New

 The early space capsules for the Mercury and Gemini astronauts allowed little or no room for the physical bodies of the astronauts.  When my sons saw John Glenn's Mercury capsule in the Kennedy Space Center, they didn't believe that someone went to space in something barely larger than a garbage dumpster.  It amuses me that much of the early Sci-Fi space vehicle depictions allowed high ceilings, wide hallways, sliding doors, and lots of arm and leg room to the astronauts.   Today, in 2021, at the age of 73, I am writing computer code for a couple of hours a day in a cockpit of sorts.  It is as cramped as John Glenn's "spam-in-a-can"; surrounded by portable tables and desks that slide away from my recliner, and then slide back into place. It is as cramped and utilitarian a space as the first manned space capsules, but it works. For me, writing computer code has always had a physical performance component.  At times it overshadows the actual logic or pe...

 I spent a challenging year as a switch tender and brakeman on the Great Northern RailRoad in 1969.  It was a year of extremes - I stood  atop a boxcar careening through the urban night in 30 degrees below zero weather, forwarding the star-prick lantern signals of the caboose brakeman's faint light to the engineer in his heated cab just a few feet ahead and below me.  No handrails to steady me against the curves and wobbles of the urban grade, no windscreen to keep my cheeks and nose from the punishment of air that had teeth. In the spring I requested a few shifts in the switch shanty, an oil-burner heated wooden box.  Temps dipped into the nethers then before climbing above freezing.  And wow did the returning prodigal Fahrenheit bring a surprise home.  Grain (which had spilled every time a switching boxcar's door bounced slightly with the impact of one lumbering car knuckling into the fixed rump of another) covered the long aisles between tracks in t...