STAR WARS and "Star Trek" and Jessica and Me

For the last couple of days, Anna and Elyse have been camping at Stone Mountain. While they were gone, Jessica and I watched Star Wars (the real Star Wars, the one that came out in 1977 and blew me away when I saw it at the age of ten, which needs no colon and subtitle or episode number) and four episodes of "Star Trek" (the real "Star Trek," the show that came on the air before I was even born and which I really loved when I was in fifth grade, not long after I first saw Star Wars).

It was quite a triumph to get Jessica to watch them with me. She's been resisting Star Wars for years, though I knew, and assured her, that she would be captivated by it. She liked "Star Trek, " too, though the first episode, "The Man Trap," has that scary salt vampire creature that kind of freaked her out. I warned her, but she wanted to start at the beginning, so we did, scary salt vampire monster or not. That was last night; we watched three more episodes this morning. None of them had scary monsters, but the creepy kid in "Charlie X" has a pretty scary look sometimes.

I had forgotten just how much I was into "Star Trek" back when I was Jessica's age (or actually about a year younger). I had a worn copy of The Star Fleet Technical Manual, which I think I got—possibly stole—from someone at school, and which I used to pore over for hours at a time. I had a copy of David Gerrold's great The World of Star Trek, which I read in pieces (that is, not all at once, from front to back) over the course of a year or so, mostly concentrating on the episode guide which (if I remember correctly) was at the end, and the color pictures, which I believe were in the middle. I'd love to have that specific copy again; I do have the book, a trade-size paperback that came out in the mid-eighties, but the actual copy that I had in fifth grade, which was printed back when the original three-season series was all there was of "Star Trek," is lost to me; I think I loaned it to my friend Skipper and never got it back. I also had several copies of Alan Dean Foster's novelizations of the "Star Trek" cartoon series, but I don't think I actually ever read any of them.

I also started my own science fiction novel, which was a blatant rip-off of "Star Trek" except that I envisioned my ship's captain as looking like Lou Ferrigno, the body-builder actor who played the Incredible Hulk in the popular TV show of the time. Thankfully I never got past the first chapter of that novel.

I loved, and still love, not just the premise and story lines of "Star Trek," but the look of it: the Enterprise, the uniforms, all the reds and blues; the whistles and beeps of the ship's computer, the swish of the doors as they slid open; the style of the captain's chair, which I really wanted in our living room in Lilburn; the phasers and communicators and tricorders; every inside set that looked convincingly like a real starship bridge or sick bay or transporter room, but also like a TV studio set; every outdoor set that looked a little bit like a planet a landing party might be beamed down to, a lot like the planet the landing party was beamed down to last week, and even more like a studio set with props painted to look like boulders and sky and alien ruins.

I hope Jessica wants to watch some more "Star Trek." I do love it.

Nostalgia and T.V. and Me and Jessica

Not everyone is affected by middle age the same way, so I don't know if this is a common experience or not, but one of the things middle age has done to me is to make me pine for things that weren't all that good the first time around.

Earlier tonight I was searching for one thing on the Internet, and, as happens so often and so easily, I got distracted by any number of other things. In the process, I came across a mention on some random guy's blog of the great -- er, "great" may be a bit generous; let's say the factually once existing Vic Tayback. Many years ago, Tayback played the cook and owner of Mel's Diner in the great -- er, again, too generous; in the late-1970's sitcom "Alice."

And, seeing that, I was overcome with a wistful longing to see "Alice" again.

It wasn't that great a show, really; definitely not one that I made sure to always see when it was on back then, and not one that I watched regularly in syndication on Nick at Nite or TV Land; in fact, I probably haven't seen "Alice" in close to forty years. But I did enjoy it when I saw it, which was at least somewhat regularly between 1978 and 1980 or so. If you were around back then, you probably remember the show's breakout star, Polly Holliday, who played waitress Flo on the series, famous for her exasperated cry of "Kiss my grits!" when Mel would get on her last nerve. You may also remember, if your head is as full of as much ancient pop-culture trivia as mine is, that Dave Madden played one of the regular customers at the diner; Madden is perhaps most famous as manager (and Danny's foil) Reuben Kincaid on "The Partridge Family" -- another show I would love to see again, despite its mediocrity.

But what I really want, of course, is not so much to see "Alice" or "The Partridge Family" again -- I feel a similar nostalgia for "The Brady Bunch," and have it in my Hulu watchlist, but I've only actually watched one episode -- as it is to be eight or ten or twelve again, in my childhood home in Lilburn, in the living room (or the den; for a time we had a TV set there, and for some reason I remember watching "Alice" there more than in the living room) with my family, watching...well, whatever happened to be on would do, actually. To be young again, my whole life before me, my parents a full decade and a half younger than I am as I type this, my only real responsibility getting through sixth grade with grades good enough to get me promoted to seventh, my grandmother still alive, my extended family still close enough that I see my cousins every couple of weeks and my cousin Scott, then my best friend, at least once a week, my vague dream of someday being a novelist not yet fully formed, and certainly not dead, as it sometimes feels now.

Without meaning to, I have infected Jessica with a similar nostalgia, though in her case I guess it can't truly be called "nostalgia," since she was not with me forty or more years ago when I originally watched the TV shows she now watches on DVD or streaming from Hulu or Boomerang: "Gilligan's Island," "The Monkees," "The Flintstones," "The Munsters," "The Addams Family"; none of them great shows (though it pains me to admit that "Gilligan's Island" and "The Monkees" are not exceptional TV shows, for I do love them so), but all of them fun and funny and entertaining and basically harmless. I do feel a little guilty sometimes that, in encouraging her fondness for these shows, I am giving her attachments that are totally foreign to just about everyone else her age: when Peter Tork passed away recently at the age of 77, I saw several remembrances of him and the Monkees from my peers on social media, but I'm pretty sure none of Jessica's peers had any idea who Peter Tork was, or that he had even existed.

I don't know if the longing for mediocre elements from your past (even for things you didn't like; sometimes I listen with great enjoyment to songs that I hated when they were first out) is common or not, but I am pretty sure it's a common desire to want to recreate some of your own youth for your children. Jessica, if you read this years from now, perhaps even when you are near my current age, I'm sorry I've done this to you, but I'm really, really glad you like "The Monkees."

Driving Back to Mercer

This morning I went on a drive that took me a little less than thirty miles west and a little more than thirty years into the past.

When I was nineteen, I took a writing class at Mercer University's Atlanta campus, not too far from Northlake Mall (the mall of my youth). It was a continuing education class, not a real for-credit college class, though I did take it at around the same time I was taking English 1101 at DeKalb College (another class I dearly loved). Though it didn't count towards any of my degrees, I consider it perhaps the single most important writing class I ever took.

The teacher was Jalaine Halsall, a short and vivacious red-haired woman with a ready laugh and an infectious enthusiasm for literature. She had recently published a short story in The Chattahoochee Review that had won an award of some sort (I wish I could but I can't remember exactly what; it was so long ago that Google can't provide an answer), and she'd published a number of poems in various literary magazines. She didn't have a degree in creative writing – I believe she had studied psychology at Agnes Scott, years before, though I don't know if she had a degree or not – but she had recently taken a poetry class at Georgia State with David Bottoms, who became one of my favorite poets because of Jalaine's influence. (I also took a class with him when I transferred to GSU a couple of years later.)

The class met one night a week – Thursdays, perhaps? I don't remember – from 6:00 until 8:00 – or maybe it was 8:00 until 10:00; I can recall virtually none of the ancillary details like day and time or classroom number. But I remember the class perfectly. There were eight or ten of us, and at the beginning of class we would drag our desk noisily into a circle, and for the next two hours we would devote ourselves to literature: some nights we would begin by reading and discussing a poem or part of a story, or talking about something that was going on in the reading and writing world, and some nights we would jump right away into what made up the most substantial part of the class: the workshop, where we would all give input on the stories or poems – our stories and poems – that we had distributed the week before. Every kind of input was encouraged, from high-level general feedback ("This character doesn't seem quite as mature as I think you want him to be") to specific line edits or word suggestions ("'rend' might work better here than 'tear'").

I wrote a number of stories and a few poems for that class. I craved the attention and feedback and, yes, praise that environment provided. I learned from all of my other writing classes, too, of course, the ones I took for college credit at DeKalb and then at Georgia State, and the classes I took in graduate school at Kennesaw and GCSU years later, but I think the Mercer continuing-ed creative writing class with Jalaine is the class from which I gained the most.

I took the class two terms in a row (quarters or semesters or eight-week sessions; I don't remember what the terms were), and I stayed in touch with Jalaine for a year or so after that, but then I got busy with college and work and life and I lost touch with her. I wish I hadn't.

That was all thirty years ago. Now, this morning I needed to return a few things to JC Penney, a few shirts that Anna had picked out for Jessica but which Jessica didn't like, and I decided to take them to Northlake – even if it is not the mall it used to be (and what mall is?), I still like to go to Northlake and walk around and have lunch in the (ever shrinking) food court a few times a year, just to revisit my youth.

I had plenty of time this morning (I don't teach on Wednesdays), so I decided that before I went to the mall, I would drive over to Mercer – it's not far from Northlake, remember – and see what it was like thirty years later.

It's a beautiful, heavily-wooded campus with about a dozen buildings, some of which were constructed (I'm pretty sure) after my short time there. It was mostly empty this morning – their fall semester must not have started yet, so I passed only a few students during the forty-five minutes or so that I walked around. I went into several buildings, including, I think, the one in which my creative class met all those years ago, but nothing seemed especially familiar; everything has probably been changed several times over since I went there.

I kept expecting someone to challenge me – "Can I help you? Could I see your ID?" – but no one did. I walked into the bookstore; one of the young women who worked there asked if I needed anything, and I told her I was just looking around randomly, and she allowed me to do so in peace. I kept thinking that everyone can tell I'm not really a Mercer student and I didn't belong there, but I doubt anyone actually gave me that much thought.

I enjoyed walking around that beautiful campus; it didn't make me as melancholy as I thought it would – mourning my lost youth and all that. I treasure my experiences from that time in my life – reading the authors of that time, like Amy Hempel and Bobbie Ann Mason and Raymond Carver; discovering Chekhov; writing my own attempts at minimalist short stories, a few of which were published in amateur little magazines that nobody's ever heard of (Green Feather Magazine, The Agincourt Irregular, and The Ecphorizer, among others); dreaming about the literary life I would someday lead.

And now, thirty years later, I don't lead an especially literary life – not like I thought I would, anyway – but I don't especially mourn its absence. I still read Chekhov sometimes, but I haven't read Hempel or Mason or Carver in years, though Hempel and Mason are still alive and writing. I'm pretty happy teaching English 1101 at a two-year technical college rather than teaching creative writing and literature courses at a major university, as I once aspired to. I'm not writing fiction these days, but I do intend to again some day, and I keep myself at least somewhat creatively fulfilled with photography, essays like this, the family blog, and (believe it or not) the many exercises I create for my students.

I'm glad, though, that I can go back to the places that have been important to me over the years, and think back on the times that were special to me. I may not go back to Mercer again anytime soon, but this morning's walk around the campus nourished me enough for a while.

Me, just before I got out of my car to walk around Mercer for a while

The McAfee School of Theology at Mercer

The cafeteria (tiny though it appeared to be) is in this building