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The Story from American Public Media interviewed Betty Brown, an eighty-five year old woman from California, on their June 2007 show that aired the day the movie Amelia came out. The search for Earhart was still ongoing, and someone involved with it got wind of a shortwave radio transcription Betty had made when she was 15 and Amelia Earhart had just gone down. She was listening to the radio with pencil and paper (she copied down the words to the songs so she could sing them later) when she started getting piecy in-and-out voices, Amelia and her navigator, calling for help and cursing, reading coordinates out of the log, even sending some instructions about private papers Amelia apparently didn’t want to survive her. Can you imagine. Betty wrote down nonsensical / insane rants of the navigator and when Amelia was crying. They broadcasted for three hours before the signal cut out.
Betty was home alone, but when her father got home she showed it to him and he took it immediately to the coast guard, who told him curtly that they had everything under control. When the real search began, he didn’t go back — hurt pride — but Betty kept this transcript for sixty years without anyone really being interested. I can’t really imagine hearing something this important and having it repulsed by whatever authorities.
Apparently several people have come forward saying they heard Amelia on the shortwave, too, and I guess a lot of them have been discredited, but this, we understand, was legitimate. Betty said in the interview that it was such a horrible feeling of powerlessness. Girl-child in the thirties home alone, listening to people dying on the radio, as if she was in one of those dreams where you hear something bad in the next room but there aren’t any doors, aren’t any windows. Amelia, a celebrity on such a large scale, a person of such strength and courage, was saying “son of a bitch, son of a bitch” and crying on the radio. Betty said that she decided that she wanted to become a pilot at that point, since it felt like something she could do for Amelia, like all she could do. And she did.
Now Betty’s transcript is in the hands of a non-moron and the search is perhaps over, or practically over.
Stories of vindication, redemption or some kind of restitution that have gone the long way of an entire life mean so much, to me. The familiar raw tragedy of Amelia’s story is balance in my soul with the story of Betty, who could do nothing but only sit and write down the words. Even after high school, even getting her pilot’s license, making a family, growing old, she waited and finally the time came. It came such that she’s internationally recognized (in certain circles of course), that her own voice is speaking on our radios. That she avoided any bitterness is a surprise to me, who can be full of bitternesses at my own lack of…petty vindications, little redemptions.
As I have heard from the beginning, as I hear all the time, patience is the thing. Something about patience must smooth the way for the correct thing, the accurate acknowledgment, the offered apology. Something about this must be true, if not everything.
Josh, thanks for sending this!
I’ve probably overdrafted three times since I’ve been banking, and it’s always been a horrifying realization; I’m financially unstable, therefore incompetent in all areas of life, and obviously so. Perpetually so. Desperately so. This time I’m still feeling sick about it, counting up all possible sources of income and knowing I can’t do anything until Thursday, but I’m ok. God met me today on my back porch, after a day of very dim thoughts, occluded inner passageways, some giving-up, and that means that I must still be living in eternity. Somehow, and so undeservedly.
I wish I knew something. I wish I had control over something. I’ve spent days drifting back to the place I tend toward, over and over, of all this sadness. Cave-living of a kind, forgetting the Eternal Yes. Ironic that I put that Lewis quote up there, not even realizing I needed to absorb fully its force … oh I need that force. Some days are so poverty-stricken. Sometimes I want so, so much to know that something I’m doing matters, or that I am helping in some way. But the porch, see how I drift, I went out on the porch after the long, long afternoon and
there was a mackerel sky spread out overhead, forward from where the sun was setting back behind the trees all lacy with their tiny final leaves. Marshall walked up with a guitar in his arms, stood under those clouds and leaves and played “Naked As We Came,” Iron and Wine. Patterns of intricacy, delicate things alive and being almost more beautiful than I could stand. I had a moment of knowing how the Lord lives with us: secretly, with more forgiveness than we can understand. But now I’m poor again and very lonely. Oh the desires of the heart. How could anything but God fill this hugest of vacancies, honeycombed and stinging with every echo of the thousands of echoes.
What a gorgeous day. Dawning so bright, so bright. Today I pulled the curtains, took a shower, cut my hair, made biscuits, peered at Brittany’s lustrous ring, finally vanquished the confused tomatoes, tore up the nasty old vines next to my back porch, and planted my birthday-present bulbs (Alpine Bells, Dainty Dutch irises and Angelique tulips) (thanks, Mom and Dad) in the tomato beds and in the bed next to the Dear Spot. THEN! I studied for the GRE, making lists of important points and vocabulary words, and feeling the chills of excitement. I like taking standardized tests, not because I’m a minion of the machine, but just because I’ve learned how to do it. And I feel like I just want to take the practice test NOW.
By the way, does anyone know which phrase refers to the act of pulling a curtain aside to let in light: “pull the curtain” or “draw the curtain”? I’ve always been confused about this, and now that I’m taking the GRE — well!
I’ve been thinking a lot about the future, of course. As I always do. Sometimes I think it is terrible, contains monsters, or death and decay, sometimes I think it is full of warmth and light. The latter lived mostly in high school … the former is living mostly these days. I drove to Marshall’s parents’ house with him last night, as his grandmother was in from Phoenix and all the Knoxville family was coming over for dinner, and felt like I was hurtling into space. I wasn’t sure anything was going to be ok. I know this is normal for people in my position, but even normal things are sometimes horrible. I’m coming back to a kind of equilibrium today, today all full of a kind of peace I didn’t even think to ask for. The kind I ought to have gotten up in the middle of the night to pray for, before I got.
I’m getting further and further from the fear of love, too. I was thinking about this this morning, how it’s not dangerous to love, it’s just dangerous to live more with yourself than with God. Everything that happens when you love someone has the potential to become beautiful, if you’re patient. I want to put a Rilke quote up here about patience and love and living. I would someday like to have become a patient person.
I’m getting ready to put together a portfolio of poems. If anybody wants to help me sift & proofread, let me know.
from clusterflock
Yesterday I made another Moleskine cover, from a picture I found of a barn swallow about to fly. I think these wings were carrying the force of something fierce, just about to throw a body of blood and bones high into the air…this cover is for sale…it’s almost Christmas…support your local artist… reeveal.etsy.com …
I’m sitting in a creaky black office chair in the foyer of Tracy Jackson Smith’s office, finding myself in black clothes and unusually smooth hair, stretching the tape across the walls of my heart to see how much space this has brought. I have not brought a hundred things here, I can only stilly sit, answer the phone when it rings, check my email. This means I can think and I am, thinking about all the lines I’ve let cross and crisscross, trying to follow one through the knot to untangle.
1) I will leave the office in an hour and a half to buy
some floss and let Cooper out.
2) I will work today alone on my new journal and on
a grant proposal.
3) I will rediscover the prayers I wrote that I used
to say for matins, vespers, and compline.
The phone here in the office keeps track of all the calls received, even if they’re answered mid-ring, and I don’t know how to clear it. It says “36 NEW CALLS.” My hand says “COOPER” and “GET FLOSS.” Can we all stop shouting for a minute, can I stop shouting and feeling so strongly about everything? The answer is yes, and I can feel a strand pulling looser as I decide this, I decide to build structure into my days which includes:
4) When I get home I’m cleaning my room and
sweeping the house, taking the recycling.
5) When I get home I’m going to find somewhere to
sit still and think … I’m so behind on thinking.
6) When I get home I’m going to find myself and ask
myself where I’ve been and where I’m headed.
I developed two rolls of film, rolls that are months & months old and came out grainy and bad. This is pretty disheartening, and makes me want to throw the other three rolls away. There can’t be anything extremely worth saving, there. I wish I had new shoes so I could throw away a couple of pairs that are becoming largely holes. I have new pants, though, and I love them. I have a new novel to read (new to me), a new title for myself (significant other), and new understanding of my limits and need for boundaries.
7) I have to be still every morning this week, every
night before sleep.
8 ) I have to start a new journal and tell it how I am,
on purpose, so I will know.
9) I have to take care of myself, rebuild fences where
the old fences have gotten lost, or where I unhinged
them myself.
Soon I will be leaving the 21st floor of the First Tennessee building and will be walking. Standing up alone and being independent and deciding what to do next. Something is extremely crazy about being too involved and I need a few moments to hear myself speak, some small voice that I’ve not been catching because there’s been a lot of wind and music. I wish I was older and had more years of experience on me. What is the point of being 23. This is ridiculous and I’m tired of knowing nothing and being wrong. Well, I needed to say that because when I re-read it I almost cried, but now I will say something else: The point of being 23 is that I have to be 23 before I can be 39. I have to know nothing before I can know something, and none of this is ridiculous.
10) I should celebrate something…
11) I should find something beautiful and say it’s
beautiful.
12) I should find again how I’m searched & known,
find that beautiful, find myself beautiful.
