1999 - Togetherness Despite the Cracks; Linda Excels at Acupuncture; Making Space
Click on the arrows below to open each topic
If anything, acupuncture training at that time offered a mishmash of competing new age mystical and old age traditional lore, called superstition by some. But as an eclectic cauldron of boiling ideations, it seemed right up her alley and she excelled. Five-Element, “Balancing” Meridians, she encountered lots of woo-woo theories and practices not at all part of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), most with little scientific research to show they had any effect, much less better outcomes than TCM. Nonetheless, training with some downright wierdos who never continued on to be acupuncture practitioners, and several who did it right and did it well, Linda appeared to be the perfect match of common sense and glorious intuitive medicine.
The at-odds perspectives they each had on acupuncture became emblematic for the other few but persistent dispositional differences they felt. Their unified intentions for the children and their life-long aspirations to live and explore held them together, though. Other than a few explosive and deeply damaging episodes, in those years they didn’t fight much. Linda skirted dealing with anything other than what she already chose to have on her plate. Paul hoped something might break good for them, perhaps the still nascent plan to travel to China.
They worked out together at a place called Nautilus by the Sea that also had a steam room. Two often three times a week they’d hire a local to stay with the children, and together work out. They channeled their frustrations to work on resiliency and strength, physical, emotional, and psychic. Afterwards, they often had sushi in Point Orange, or the absolute best blue cheese Tuna Au Poivre at Vic’s Backstreet Cuisine (long gone).
(NOTE: For readers who already viewed narratives on Linda’s love of stars and space in prior year postings, this section may be a bit repetitive, but bears elaboration and some repeating.)
Their New Smyrna home location marked the start of dozens of miles of wilderness shore and encompassing wetlands, both serving as a buffer for the launches from Cape Kennedy 20 miles away down the coast. When the wind infrequently blew off the mainland, it dispelled the ever-present mist from surf and waves. The visual juxtaposition never ceased to astound and delight them, the utmost primitive wild dunes to uber tech aspirations, unspoiled wild lands embracing the distant gantries of Launch Complex-36 and the massive Vehicle Assembly Building.
Those were the hay days for the Space Shuttle, launches often several times a year, several spectacularly at night. From the widow’s walk on their roof, each launch the beach lit up as though spotted by the world’s most brilliant headlights. After the first startling sun-like burst of brilliance lighting the horizon, the Shuttle rising skyward appeared almost imperceptible. It was instead the pillar of fire and smoke stabbing downward at incredible velocity to collide against the Earth that seized the senses. The sound reached them only seconds after actual ignition and liftoff did – a subsonic shaking of the earth, shuddering acoustic ripples in the air between their perch and the release of more kinetic energy than the Hiroshima bomb.
Whose mind could fail to be blown?
Once launched, the Shuttle arced almost directly overhead, the solid rocket boosters puffing off and drifting away on their own ghostly white upper atmosphere contrails. To their wondering eyes, the shuttle with its three “110% engines” remained visible for hundreds of miles as it powered east across the Azores, a thousand miles away by then as it entered low earth orbit, then catching another glimpse again hours later as it orbited overhead.
Linda became more of an aficionado and devoted to spaceflight than her husband, and to the stars and constellations. Truly, she marveled about and perhaps yearned for the daring, the escape and freedom, the risk and nobility with all its cosmic implications that the Space program represented to many.
In later years Linda updated all who’d listen about stellar conjunctions or meteor showers, and gifted Paul a telescope to see the night sky.
Once going west while still living in Florida, they wandered into Cedar Breaks National Monument in south Utah. There amateur astronomers set up on a high-ridge parking lot away from the light pollution of the cities. With professional-grade telescopes, eyes glued to eyepieces, images appeared minuscule compared to photographs. But the astounding vividness, the sparkling clarity, the sense of depth and texture never apparent in photographs pierced the retina and their heart with an aching appreciation and awe. The rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter, star nebulae and clusters, the universe…
Linda kept their childhood 3-inch refactor telescope, but in all the years of their traveling and moves never set it up. But boy did she otherwise stay on top of it.