Grim-Reality TV

Whenever I run on Lilly Stone Drive, a hilly, well-shaded street about a mile and a half from my house, I think of Brad Bishop. I wonder if he’s still alive, and which of the tidy suburban homes I’m passing had once been splattered with blood.

On March 1, 1976, Bishop was a 39-year-old officer in the US Foreign Service, stationed at the State Department in DC. A Yale man, he was fluent in five languages. He’d previously been posted in Italy, Ethiopia, and Botswana. On that late-winter day, however, he’d learned he would not receive a promotion he’d sought.

Subsequent events would suggest he took the news poorly. The sequence later pieced together by law enforcement started with Bishop leaving work early, then had him withdrawing several hundred dollars from his bank, next had him going to a hardware store to buy a ball-peen hammer, a shovel and gas can, and, finally, had him returning that evening to his Bethesda-area residence, where he bludgeoned to death with a blunt object his wife, mother, and sons (ages 5, 10 and 14).

The next day, a forest ranger 275 miles away in North Carolina responded to a smoke alert and found five partially burned bodies and a shovel that had been purchased, according to its label, at Montgomery Mall in Bethesda.

On March 18, 1976, the Bishop family station wagon was found abandoned in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, about 400 miles west of the site of the grisly pyre. The spare tire well was covered with blood. Among the items inside the car was a box of dog biscuits; the family’s golden retriever was missing when police searched the crime scene on Lilly Stone Drive.

On March 19, a grand jury indicted Brad Bishop on five counts of first-degree murder. But where the accused was by that time—or where he’s been anytime since, for that matter—is anyone’s guess. Given such factors as his one-week jump on police before the burned corpses were linked to Maryland, his diplomatic passport, and the easiness of inconspicuous travel in those days before electronic tracking and terrorist threats, escape really hadn’t been that difficult for Brad Bishop. (This isn’t legitimately analogous, but I always think about how Dr Richard Kimble, The Fugitive of 1960s TV, remained successfully on the lam all those years simply by dyeing his hair and mumbling his way through a succession of blue-collar jobs.)

There’s a Wikipedia page for “Bradford Bishop,” just as there’s a Wikipedia page for everything. It features an age-enhanced photo from 1986, copyrighted by NBC News, depicting what the accused might have looked like 10 years after his disappearance. It notes that the case has been featured over the years on America’s Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries. It mentions that alleged Brad Bishop sightings included one by a former neighbor who could swear that was him on a train platform in Basel, Switzerland, in 1994.

Several years ago, the Washington Post interviewed the guy who then lived in the former Bishop home—without revealing the homeowner’s real name or the address on Lilly Stone. The guy said, essentially, that he’d gotten such a great price on the place, and that he liked living there so much, that he didn’t give a damn if the Holocaust had been perpetrated within the structure’s whitewashed walls. He allowed that he occasionally had to shoo away gawkers who knew the home’s history and wanted a look inside. (I never would be that rude. I’d just stare from the street. OK, and maybe ask the homeowner to pose outside for a quick snapshot, holding a hammer and shovel.)

Oh, here’s one other detail Wikipedia contributors turned up somewhere. Brad Bishop had complained to a co-worker that this wife and his mother constantly belittled him as a loser whose career was going nowhere. (So, case closed! Justifiable homicide, apparently.)

As you may have inferred by now, the Bishop case fascinates me—as do, to a lesser but still considerable degree, several other local crime scenes past which I run on a fairly regular basis.

There’s the idyllic Brookmont neighborhood off MacArthur Boulevard near the District line—a haven for kayakers that’s an easy walk to the Potomac River. That’s where Alison Thresher’s parked car was found in 2000. The 45-year-old divorcee had just started a new job as a Washington Post copy editor when she went missing without a trace. Police classified it a homicide. Years later she finally was declared legally dead, allowing her two daughters to collect Social Security survivors’ benefits.

A few miles south of there, on a handsome stretch of Reservoir Road NW across from the German Embassy, is a cute house I’d seen trimmed with crime-scene tape in 1999. It was the site of a murder-suicide in which an estranged husband blew out his romance-novelist wife’s brains (no wonder she took refuge in flowery prose) in front of the couple’s two young children. A “short time later,” according to a news account, the husband, a retired Marine, drove his jeep to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, put a shotgun barrel down his own throat and pulled the trigger.

Northwest, DC, in fact, for all its pricey real estate and leafy beauty, is fertile ground for tourists of headline-grabbing homicides. One of my frequent weekend runs, for example, takes me past not only the Rock Creek Park hillside on which former congressional intern Chandra Levy’s badly decomposed body finally was found more than a year after her 2001 disappearance, but also past the home near Chevy Chase Circle where, on July 16, 2003, a promising Indian-American poet named Reetika Vazirani stabbed to death with a kitchen knife her two-year-old son and then herself. That story was made even bigger by the fact that the home was owned by prize-winning novelist Howard Norman, for whom Vazirani had been house-sitting. (Presumably “No violent crimes!” subsequently was added to the tenant agreement, right after “Please do not use the good china.”)

I don’t listen to an iPod when I run, so that may be one reason these crimes have gotten so deeply inside my head. Speculating on how Brad Bishop’s conscience is treating him at age 75—or whether Reetika Vazirani was a sad caricature of the tortured artist, or if the guy ultimately convicted of Chandra Levy’s murder entirely on circumstantial evidence really did it—is a welcome distraction from my own cardiovascular distress as I huff and puff my middle-aged way over hill and down dale. I’m not a violent person, and I don’t romanticize violence. I’m not merely in favor of gun control, but of repealing the Second Amendment right of private citizens to bear arms. I’m opposed to the death penalty, feeling strongly that state-sponsored killing of murderers is simply an ugly case of two wrongs not making a right.

But here’s my dirty little secret: I am addicted to ID. As in Investigation Discovery, a four-year-old cable television channel whose market niche is all murder and mayhem, all the time. They’re all events that really happened, and the vast majority of the programming is original—put together at low cost by pairing law enforcement and eyewitness accounts with historical footage and an abundance of cheesy reenactments in which the actors are more physically attractive than were the actual victims and criminals. (This is particularly true of the actresses who play unlucky wives and the voluptuous chippies who fueled hubby’s murderlust.)

Actually, if ID is news to you, the following list of selected show titles gets straight to the telltale heart of what the network is all about: Blood, Lies and Alibis, Nightmare Next Door, Unusual Suspects, Deadly Women, Disappeared, Scorned: Love Kills, Who the &!$/ Did I Marry?, Wicked Attraction. (My dream job once was writing headlines for the New York City tabloids—the all-time classic there having been “Headless Body in Topless Bar.” But now my ideal employment might be naming TV series on ID.)

To say that this lineup has been a winning formula for parent company Discovery Communications is putting it mildly. I’m far from the network’s only fan, abashed or otherwise. ID advertises itself as “America’s fastest-growing network,” a claim that is dead-seriously accurate. The channel has added 30 million new subscribers since its changeover in 2008 from something called Discovery Times (focused, damningly, on culture). As of this February, ID was the third-most-popular network among women in the coveted 25-to-54 age bracket. (Their allegiance being a reward, no doubt, for ID’s excellent guidance on who not to marry, and on which crazy-bitch dames to bar from the book group.)

I’m neither a psychiatrist nor a sociologist, so I can’t definitively say why I and so many other Americans (a lot of them women, apparently) have fallen so hard for ID. (Talk about your wicked attractions!) But I’ve got some theories.

I found an article online in which Paula Zahn, the bona fide investigative journalist who’s worked for ABC, CBS and CNN, discussed her initial skepticism when ID wooed her to lend the upstart channel some credibility. The economy was in the tank, the public was depressed, nobody in TV was spending money on programming, yadda yadda yadda. Well, exactly! as it turned out. Zahn signed on to host a show anyway, and ended up being happy she did. Bad economy? What better tonic for underemployed and unhappy Americans than to feast on shows with such takeaway messages “At least no one’s murdered me!”, “My no-account spouse may be a worthless shit, but no he’s killer,” and “Ha! No gambling debts requiring extreme remedies in this house!”  Little money to spend on high production values? Who needs it? America loves cheaply-produced reality television, and you can’t get more real than true-life crime stories.

Not that fascination with violence is a uniquely American phenomenon, but I also think there’s something in this nation’s history—from the Second Amendment through the Wild West, the gangster wars of the Depression era, the Manson Family, Jonestown, even that horrendous killing of Afghan civilians by a US Army sergeant earlier this year—that somehow makes violence part of our DNA. We may embrace it or reject it, arm ourselves or rail against arms, seek retribution or demand preventive measures. But violence, whether we like it or not, is part of who we are as a people. It’s seductive to most of us in some way, even if only as a foil or a perverse entertainment.

But I don’t know. Maybe I’m unjustly sullying the reputations of millions of peace-loving Americans who’d never give ID the time of day. Perhaps I should be ashamed of myself for watching these shows, rather than just a bit embarrassed. But, do you know what? I hope my friend Kathy will forgive me here for implicating her in my own search for absolution, but she is one of the kindest, most loving people I know. She radiates such Goodness that I sometimes feel blinded by her light. Kathy wouldn’t be satisfied with just giving you the shirt off her back—she’d go into debt, if necessary, to buy you exactly the shirt you really wanted. Yet when I mentioned ID to her in passing a few months ago, her eyes lit up. Her peepers told me she was a fellow addict before her mouth did.

Maybe, too, I’m over-thinking all this. There’s something inherently compelling about stories of crazy passion and fatal consequences that in no way resemble our daily lives, but that aren’t so very far-fetched, either. I write that as a guy who lives in the safe suburbs, yet who, in the course of a single not particularly ambitious run, can encounter an array of sites that are associated with murder most foul.

The nightmare next door, indeed.

On the One Hand

You might wonder what it’s like for someone to go through life with only one hand. You might not, too. Regardless, I’m going to tell you—hopefully without going into too much tedious detail—how that’s been for me over the past nearly 54 years.

I’ve referred to my congenital abnormality (“birth defect” sounds a little too much like I should’ve been tossed off the assembly line) only peripherally in the almost two years I’ve been writing this blog, and I don’t mean to make a huge hairy deal out of it now. But I was prompted recently to think about the pros and cons of one-handedness when I exchanged a spirited stump-bump with a street person in Alexandria—putting huge smiles on our faces and prompting a horrified mom to whisk away her transfixed little girl. I’ll get back to that later.

Make no mistake: The cons of one-handedness have far outweighed the pros. I write that not to elicit sympathy, nor to make my poor mom feel any guiltier for birthing an incomplete baby than she likely already has through the course of her 80 years. (Never mind the fact that my mom presumably never will read this account, because by design she doesn’t even know this blog—in which I discuss my agnosticism, liberal political views, etc—exists. And since my parents don’t so much as own a computer, let alone know how to conduct a Web search, it seems unlikely they’ll ever find out about Lassitude Come Home unless one of you readers turns traitorous.)

Rather, I mention the cons of my situation because I don’t want to leave the erroneous impression that I’ve coped fantastically with this situation throughout my life, made lemonade out of lemons by virtue of my inspirationally upbeat, striving, Horatio Alger-esque attitude, and all that kind of crap.

To the contrary, in kindergarten I raised my hook to club a kid who was taunting me, opening a gash on his head. Which landed me in hot water and taught me to internalize the shame and self-consciousness and anger I felt. Which, in turn, led to behaviors like wearing, well into my teens, unbearably hot long-sleeved clothing even at the height of summer. I didn’t go on my first date until I was a senior in high school, or have my first real girlfriend until I was 25. I was kind of fat and unkempt for much of that time and was by no stretch a smooth talker, so I don’t want to suggest the arm thing was entirely to blame. But it was a major factor. I’d surely have felt more comfortable talking to girls if, for example, I hadn't been preoccupied assuming from the get-go that I’d be shot down on account of my freakishness.

My attitude and comfort level with myself are light-years better now than they were in my earlier decades. There came a point at which creating my own personal sauna in summer became literally unbearable, and as the layers of clothing came off (I’d often wear a sweat-stained sport jacket—now there was a fetching look), I was inspired to reduce the girth of the revealed body. As I got in better shape, my self-confidence increased. Not to great heights, but to where my shyness and hesitance in social situations went from painfully acute to something much more manageable.

Then Lynn capped my renaissance by literally embracing my Otherness. She actually liked the feel of my stump on her skin—and said so. Sort of like black people who rob the “n word” of its awful power by using it appreciatively and sometimes ironically amongst themselves, she took my one-handedness (“disability” seems inaccurate because there’s little I’m physically incapable of doing) and made it a source of playfully mocking dialogue between us. For example, when I’d ask her to tie my shoes for me, she’d say, with exaggerated earnestness, “I think you’d feel better about yourself if you tried to tie your own shoes.” Whereupon I’d answer, “No, really, I’m good! I’m kind of in a hurry here.”

For another example, we love to skewer the dreadfully patronizing word “handicapable,” which was created by God knows which undoubtedly well-meaning person, but which seems designed to elevate and honor those who’ve heroically, even beatifically risen above their handicaps to successfully complete tasks any “normal” person can do. I’ll enlist Lynn’s help to scratch an itch I can’t quite reach, and she’ll say, “I’m sorry you’re so handicapped. It must be awful for you.” I’ll respond, “Nuh uh! Cuz I’m handicapable!” (Other times I’ll invoke Damon Wayans’ bumbling crip superhero character from the old In Living Color, proclaiming, “Nuh uh! I’m Handyman!”)

One last example. (Not to drag this out, but I really like this one.) Lynn will affect a Hungarian accent and channel my late grandmother (my dad’s stepmother). She was a very strange and, in the latter years of her life, oft-intoxicated woman who, one Christmas, saw me struggling ever so slightly to unwrap a gift and implored Lynn, in her best pitying Zsa Zsa Gabor accent, ‘Please help him, honey!” This was after she’d told my wife how, when she first learned in July 1958 that I'd been born with only half a right arm, she “cried and cried!” Lynn enjoys sometimes getting her Hungarian on and reliving that moment by emoting, “I cvied and cvied!”

Getting back to the point, thanks to Lynn, thanks to some welcome maturity on my part, thanks to great friends whose acceptance of me is total, and thanks to the natural impatience with obstacles that comes with age, having one hand sucks far less now than it did when I was younger. Sure, I still don’t much like it when little kids call attention to me in public places by loudly asking their mommies and daddies why that man has only one hand. But they are kids, after all, and I’m not something they see every day. (Although, given America’s needless wars of late, our youth have, unfortunately, gotten far more accustomed to seeing grown men with missing limbs.) I continue to almost always feel at least a little self-conscious in public—especially in short-sleeves season—even though you’d think I’d be over that by now.

Be all that as it may, now it’s time to write about the pros of stumpiness. Because there definitely are some.

I’m sure cancer survivors get tired of being told how “heroic” they are simply for doing the things they must to extend their lives. But it’s got also to feel good, sometimes, to be placed on a pedestal—however undeserved the elevation might be. In a far less dramatic way, that’s what being one-handed feels like for me at times.

I’ve always remembered the words Teddy Conklin scrawled in my junior high yearbook. He was one of the more popular kids, and thus not of my social circle, but he seized the yearbook from me and wrote in emphatic blue ink, “For one great arm, you’re the best @#!*! kid I know.” I’m not sure why he felt compelled to take a cartoon-character approach to profanity—if he was so concerned about school censorship, why even bother?—but, anyway, I was far less offended by his innocently patronizing message than I was thrilled to not only have been noticed, but to have actually been complimented by, a superior in the school pecking order.

Many, many times over the years, by an astonishing array of people—classmates, teachers, employers, people in bars, you name it—I’ve been honored, sometimes lauded even, essentially for Just Showing Up. For simply, like those cancer survivors, having chosen not to kill myself, I guess, but, rather to have gone about living my life. I had a French teacher in junior high who absurdly inflated my grades, and I sensed even then that I somehow was being rewarded for perceived spunkiness. To my teacher, it was as if I’d stood up and exclaimed, flanked by the proudly waving French and American flags, “I may be an unfortunate wretch, but, as Dieu is my witness, I will conjugate these verbs!”

Similarly, a gym coach once advanced me to the second round of the baseball team tryouts not, clearly, for my mediocre fielding skills and non-existent hitting ability, but because I was more interested in trying to play baseball than in conceding the very long odds against me.

Later, when I was a newspaper reporter, certain co-workers and even bosses seemed blown away by my ability to write stories on deadline via one-fingered, non-touch typing. (That having been the self-taught, inefficient style I employ to this day, which I surely could have improved upon had I ever sought proper instruction.) On my reporting beats, I found that my sources sometimes gave me exclusive information because they thought I deserved a break, given the cruel hand (or lack thereof) I’d been dealt in life.

Even today, I find that my line between feeling patronized and pleased, between con and pro, often is a fine one. I chafe when grocery store checkers assume I need help carrying my items, but I conversely enjoy imagining their admiring surprise as I walk away with laden bags suspended from the crook of my right elbow. When people not infrequently volunteer that I don’t seem limited in any significant way by my disability, I simultaneously think, “Well, duh! It’s not like I’m short a frontal lobe, or even a leg” and “If that impresses you, I’ll take it! Now watch me act all humble.”

Maybe the best “pro” of one-handedness, though, is that it sometimes offers me entry into a weird form of community. I say “weird” because it’s not an organized thing, like the sorority of pink-ribboned breast cancer survivors, but something impromptu and generally unstated. While I may sometimes be imagining this, when I encounter other one-handers on the streets and catch their eye, I tend to feel as if we’ve made a connection. Our exchanged glances seem to say “I/you get it.” Sometimes, depending on the mood I’m in, I fancy our exchange fairly shouts that boisterous line from a thousand mad-scientist movies, “The fools! They know nothing of our work!”

The absolute best pro of being mono-armed, though, is those rare occasions when it brings me together in a visceral way with unlikely compadres. Like the time when I was 16 and had one of the best and most frank conversations with an adult I’d had to that point in my life—with the congenitally one-handed-wife of my driver’s education instructor. More recently, when I was at Walter Reed researching a story for my current employer, an Iraq war veteran rehabbing from traumatic brain injury opened up to me in a way I don’t think he would have had he not felt he and I shared something in our respective losses. (I don’t mean in any way to equate my randomly doled inconvenience with his heroically incurred devastation, but the point is, in that case one-handedness afforded me a seat at a very special table.)

And then there was the encounter this past week to which I’d alluded at the outset of this post.

I’d just exited a jewelry store where I’d gotten a new watch battery. I was walking down King Street, Old Town Alexandria’s main drag, when suddenly a head leaned into my path and a guy exclaimed—through a dentally challenged smile and in a cheerily accusatory tone, “You didn’t see me!”

Well, I looked up and to my left, and now I did see him. He was a scruffily dressed black guy who I guessed to be around my age. His most notable feature besides his gap-toothed grin was his truncated right arm, which ended in a stump just a few inches below his armpit. With his left hand he pointed at my empty sleeve and said, “So, can you help a Brother out?”

It was a brilliant sales pitch. Any ambivalence I otherwise might have felt about giving him some cash immediately vanished. But I knew I had only a $20 bill in my wallet, so I assured him I’d be right back with change from a Starbucks across the street.

A few minutes later I slipped a five-spot in his hand during the handshake he’d insisted upon. That business completed, we exchanged names—his was Roger, he said—and I asked, “I was born this way, but what about you?”

Roger said he’d lost most of his right arm to a roadside bomb—during Army basic training. In Vietnam. In 1985. Wow, I thought to myself, which part of that makes the least sense? That there’d be live bombs in proximity to Army trainees? That the US would be conducting basic training in a foreign country? Or that the foreign country involved would be communist Vietnam 10 years after the last US soldiers cleared out?

What did check out, though, was that something had blown up Roger’s body. He supplemented his story by lifting up his T-shirt to reveal a veritable interstate system of surgery scars across his torso. He then made reference to a prosthetics specialist elsewhere in Old Town and said he’d long ago abandoned his hook as uncomfortable and largely useless.

“Me, too!” I said—relating, as Roger nodded vigorously, how hot it had been to wear in the warmer school months, and how I realized very early on that I had more dexterity, and thus could do more, without it.

“Why would I want to wear something like that?” Roger asked, knowing he was preaching to the choir.

“Exactly!” I responded.

We talked for a couple more minutes. He told me more basic-training stories that didn’t make much sense, but I nodded and commiserated as if they did. It was clear that conversation was winding down, so I started pulling up the sleeves of my sport jacket and the shirt underneath. I had something in mind, and Roger picked right up on it.

My stump uncovered, I raised it toward his as he leaned his into mine. They collided, and we laughed like old buddies clinking steins at a bar.

“Take care, Roger!”

“Good meeting you, Eric!”

It was then that I noticed a girl of maybe 5 standing nearby, dumbfounded by what she’d just witnessed. She didn’t strike me as afraid at all, but the same couldn’t have been said for her mother. Mom yanked the kid’s arm while shooting me a look that said, “My God, there are children present!” She hurried her daughter down the street, clearly hopeful the girl would not be scarred for life by the freakish double-crip, interracial, interclass spectacle that had just shattered the calm of a suburban afternoon.

I don’t think Roger noticed the mother and daughter. I was glad, although I imagined revulsion—overt or muted—was something he experienced with some regularity as a one-armed, gap-toothed, shabbily dressed panhandler.

No, the last I saw of Roger, he was smiling from ear to ear. As was I, a minute later in my car, as I pulled up my sleeves to expose my bane and joy.

Skies: The Limit

When I was a kid, space travel was exciting.

I’ll never forget sitting in the Claremont Theater in Montclair, New Jersey, in 1968, when I was 10 years old and watching 2001: A Space Odyssey on a towering screen. Of course, I had no idea what director Stanley Kubrick’s film treatment of Arthur C Clarke’s novel was supposed to mean—those shiny black monoliths materializing on prehistoric Earth and the modern-day moon; that soft-spoken computer calmly murdering those poor astronauts; the lone survivor’s spectacular rebirth as a star, or part of the space-time continuum, or some damn thing.

I’m still not sure what it all meant, despite having read various interpretations over the years. I’m scarcely more of a Deep Thinker now than I was at 10, when I hooted over Mad magazine’s parody of the highbrow epic, which was titled 2001: A Space Idiocy. I remember Fred Flintstone standing among the apes that were stoning the monolith. His take on the mysterious structure, as I recall, was a spirited “Yabba dabba doo!”

But man, what a day that was! And not just because Stephen Wasserman’s dad had driven several of us neighborhood kids to one of the Garden State’s fanciest cinemas in celebration of his son’s birthday, and had paid our admission, and afterward had bought each of us a premium sundae at the adjoining ice cream parlor.

The film’s images were so vivid and intoxicating. A space station where beautiful people sipped cocktails, living the Mad Men life far beyond Earth’s orbit. A ship hurtling quietly through the cosmos on autopilot, its crew free to enjoy the infinite vistas beyond the windows. Until, that was, the robot HAL wigged out, advancing his own homicidal agenda in an unnervingly mild voice. Then, finally, there was that crescendo of imploding, strobe-like images, heralding Dave the Astronaut’s reincarnation as the Big Baby of the Universe. (I can’t remember what Mad did with that denouement. I picture a wailing brat in a diaper as big as Jupiter. With wavy stink lines rising from it, suggesting a BM for the ages.)

Then, the following summer, Apollo 11 landed on the moon—for real!—in what was a huge, televised global event. The lunar footage was no less awe-inspiring to me for its primitive black-and-white graininess. Nor to just about anyone else tuning in that day—the Vietnam War, civil unrest and everything else that was happening be damned. It was amazing to think that human beings—Americans, no less—had actually touched down on a distant orb in our night sky. Not only that, but the moon landing fulfilled a seemingly unachievable government promise in an era of “don’t trust anyone over 30” cynicism. It came just eight years after President John F Kennedy had vowed that the US would land a man on the moon by decade’s end. Many years hence, the satiric Onion would perfectly capture the exhilaration of that feat in the hilariously profane but scarcely hyperbolic headline “Holy Shit! Man Walks on Fucking Moon!”

Seriously! People who didn’t live through those times have no idea how motivating and unifying Kennedy’s Cold War bet on Yankee knowhow had been, whatever the sociopolitical maelstrom swirling around it. When Woody Allen joked in his stand-up act around 1965 that a woman had refused to sleep with him “even if it would help the space program,” the comprehensiveness of his rejection was devastatingly clear.

At the dawn of the 1970s, it seemed anything was possible when it came to space exploration. After all, hadn’t man just walked on the fucking moon? (Woman surely would be next, right? Watch her roar!) Back then, it seemed to me—it seemed to most people, I think—that we at least would approach, if not outright achieve, Arthur C Clarke’s vision by 2001. (Ideally without the homicidal computer or the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, though.) It was easy for me to imagine US astronauts literally being in position, by the turn of the 21st century, to know if Martians wore silver spacesuits and resembled actor Ray Walston, as they had on CBS.

But that wasn’t the course history would take. By 1972 the moon landings were over, as costs mounted, political will waned and earthly priorities shifted. In the decades since, the US, the Soviet Union/Russia, other nations and private industry have launched or partnered in a variety of celestial meet-up stations, rockets, shuttles, rovers and telescopes. We’ve gotten great pictures back from Mars, Jupiter and beyond. Probes and cameras have found evidence of water and other building blocks of life “out there.” Scientists now believe that, given the vastness of space and the statistical likelihood of countless Earth doppelgangers, we’re about as likely to be Alone in the Universe as today’s wired teenager is likely to sit unplugged and alone with his or her thoughts for more than two minutes.

It’s intriguing stuff. But it’s not the same as placing human bodies on celestial ones. Don’t get me wrong. I understand all the reasons why putting an American on Mars or even back on the moon isn’t in the works. We’re dealing, after all, with skyrocketing (no pun intended) budget deficits. And anyway, most pertinent information about space can be obtained by onboard technology on unmanned flights. Also, it’s clear by now that our beleaguered planet will be toast long before we can ever colonize a new one—what with global warming, the coming water and food wars, the multitude of unsafeguarded nuclear weapons lying around, et cetera. So where’s the urgency?

Piggybacking on that last point, it seems to me that our hope for the future has taken a huge hit in the 40 years since the last moon landing. So, we beat the Soviet Union to the moon. Big deal! That entity later disappeared altogether, along with our assumption that winning the Cold War would usher in a new order of peace and prosperity. Where we once looked to the skies with great anticipation, we now see ominous holes in the ozone layer. We envisioned continued public support for real-life star treks, but every last one of the TV iterations ultimately died for lack of audience.

Speaking of piggybacking, what prompted these thoughts was Tuesday’s piggyback flight, atop a Boeing 747, of the space shuttle Discovery to its retirement home at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport. The flight pattern brought Discovery very near my office building, which sits along the Potomac River in Alexandria. This prompted my boss to send out an e-mail encouraging us to step outside and watch. Crowds gathered on the National Mall, too, to witness what was billed as a historic event. Discovery’s fly-by was all over the news.

I did not move from my desk, though. I could not gin up the enthusiasm others felt. One of my co-workers returned from outside to exclaim that the shuttle sighting had moved her to tears. Whether from admiration, pride, sadness at the end of an era, or a combination of emotions, I didn’t ask. She did pronounce herself a “space geek,” however, and observed that my lack of interest suggests I’m not.

I guess that’s right. If space geekery means being awed by Discovery’s history of manned flights to the International Space Station, I’m underwhelmed. If it means seeing majesty in a double-decker flying object winging its way to the DC suburbs, my glasses do lack a rose-colored tint.

What I said to Lynn when I got home Tuesday was, “It’s not like Discovery went to Mars or something.” Earlier, in an e-mail to a friend who’d watched the fly-by with rapt enthusiasm, I’d written, “To me, the space shuttle is just a fancypants vehicle that hasn’t even been to the moon, and its retirement is a sad reminder that our once-vaunted space program is now earthbound and reliant on private industry. There’s no romance in any of that for me.”

Again, I get it. Successfully transporting astronauts to and from the space station several times ain’t chopped liver. Discovery did boldly go where few humans have gone. It’s an amazing piece of engineering that parents now can share with their children and grandchildren, even as they regale them with the tale of having witnessed Discovery’s final flight. Tuesday’s fly-by was history. It was a singular moment—the conclusion of one chapter of America’s space story and the beginning of an unclear and uncertain future.

I do not, however, regret in the slightest having stayed at my desk while Discovery neared its final destination. I mean, c’mon. My formative astronomical experience was seeing man walk on the fucking moon! The headline this time, to me, was “Hitchhiking Space Taxi Arrives for Museum Debut.” Little mystery or majesty there.

Lingua Stanca

The New York Times helpfully pointed out recently that my hapless monolingualism not only makes me stupid now, but also may hasten the onset of Alzheimer’s in my fast-approaching dotage.

The op-ed piece was headlined “Why Bilinguals are Smarter,” and its author was Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, a staff writer at Science. I felt hugely defensive from the get-go, and not just because I’d been already been implicitly outed as “dumber.” With a name like Bhattacharjee, I had to assume the author is fluent in Hindi or Urdu in addition to English—making him one of the countless millions of world citizens who are smarter than me.

Then I got to wondering, is “Yudhijit” a guy’s name or a woman’s name? How do you even pronounce it? I felt more stupid by the second.

The word Science gave me pause, also. I mean, Was there any subject at which I’d sucked worse when I was in school? Mathematics, maybe. But that was about it.

I began reading the piece—a decision I quickly regretted. This was the lead paragraph:

“Speaking two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental that being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.”

That got me to wondering my if lifelong ineptitude at bilingualism means, conversely, that my cognitive skills are actually deficient. That’s a depressing thought, given that even though I took French from junior high through my freshman year in college, the best I can do now is pick out the odd word here and there. When I overhear Gallic conversations on the streets of DC, they translate in my head as roughly “Blah blah blah TODAY. Something something RED something NOW. Yadda yadda yadda MARCEL MARCEAU.”

Not that I was anywhere close to fluent even back in the day. Or back in the jour, as I like to say. At the height of my “powers” (and no, I don’t know the French word for that), I could conjugate a few major verbs and utter a smattering of complete sentences—in the present tense, anyway. Even there, I often mixed up masculine and feminine words. My pronunciation always was atrocious, and I could read at perhaps the comic book level. (Not even the graphic novel level, though graphic novels weren’t yet a thing—a chose!—back then.)

For the life of me, I don’t know how I ever passed a French course. I do have a recollection of linguistic binging and purging—stockpiling French words and phrases for tests, spewing them onto the page at exam time, then walking away empty and spent. Is it possible that I simply retook Beginner’s French every time? It’s a mystere.

What I’m saying is, bilingualism hasn’t even really been a “use it or lose it” thing for me. It’s more that I never had it in the first place. True, I seldom even hear French in my daily life, let alone have occasion to speak it. The point, though, is that I had precious little aptitude for the language even when I was regularly hitting the books. Hitting the … romans? No, wait, that means “novels.” Hitting the … livres! (OK, busted—I just Googled that.)

Lynn took French in school, too, and she’s about as fluent as am I. We joke that we could reside in France for the rest of our lives, hearing nothing but French spoken every day, yet still live to a ripe old age as clueless monolinguals—eking out an existence by pointing pitifully to eau and pain and prevailing upon the kindness of etrangers. Except that it’s not quite a joke. At least in my case. Lynn might eventually pick up the language. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t, though, even if an entire village were to adopt me as its community service-project idiot.

I’m always amazed by stories of non-English speakers who became fluent in our exceedingly difficult tongue simply by watching American TV. I can envision myself sitting intently through entire seasons of old French sitcoms, yet picking up only the nonverbal stuff—like the Romanian fan of Happy Days who arrives at long last in the city of Milwaukee and longs for someone to ape the Fonz’s “Aaaaay!” because everything else sounds like gibberish.

Several years ago, suckered by the propaganda one hears that Spanish is easy to learn, Lynn and I enrolled in a night class offered by our county government. For several weeks, we drove on a weeknight to a middle school for instruction from a Castro-hating Cuban matron who thought the best way to teach complete novices her native language was via total immersion. Frankly, that lady was insane. But anyway, ask me what Spanish I remember from those weeks. I’ll tell you: Nada. And I didn’t even learn that word there.

Here’s another passage from the New York Times op-ed piece:

“The collective evidence from a number of studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function—a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind—like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.”

Great! I’m easily distracted, and I remember pretty much nothing that I don’t write down. In fact, I’ve missed more than one meeting at work after blocking out the time on a desk calendar that I then neglected to consult. So, I’ve got to figure that if I weren’t moron-lingual, I’d in many ways be in much better shape. Talk about that “executive function”! What my brain’s got is more like untrained administrative assistant function. (No offense to secretaries and other office aides.)

This, finally, was the New York Times piece’s penultimate paragraph:

“Bilingualism’s effects also extend into the twilight years. In a recent study of 44 elderly Spanish-English bilinguals, scientists led by the neuropsychologist Tamar Gollan of the University of California, San Diego, found that individuals with a higher degree of bilingualism—measured through a comparative evaluation of proficiency in each language—were more resistant than others to the onset of dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease: the higher the degree of bilingualism, the later the age of onset.”

Again, I’m wondering if my complete failure in the area of bilingualism conversely portends a particularly dismal fate. Perhaps the fact that I couldn’t beat a French toddler in a debate means I’m due any day now to start losing even the tiny store of mental acuity I currently possess. This thought is very upsetting. Why, I’ll even go so far as to exclaim, “Sacrebleu!”

But damned if Wikipedia doesn’t advise that sacrebleu—described as an “old French profanity meant as a cry of surprise or anger”—no longer is in widespread use in the major French-speaking countries.” Zut alors! Now my working vocabulary of French words may not even surpass double digits.

I guess the one positive in all this, if you want to call it that, is that given the Alzheimer’s thing, I soon may forget all about my complete inability to transcend the English language. Along with everything else.