Published to the "Atlantis" mailing list, 2 August 2001

Thirty years ago tonight, immersed in a steaming, sweltering August darkness, I was standing in the kitchen of my parents' home, illuminated only by the opened refrigerator door. ... Well, not just that door.

I was getting ketchup and bologna for a sandwich when I heard a phrase from the lit-up radio dial behind me.

(Nutone Intercom System, vintage 1959 when the house was built, complete with round "Phono" patchcord plug and CONELRAD designations on AM for Duck and Cover info when the Soviets dropped the Big One, on 640 and 1240 kilocycles ... still there today, vacuum tubes burned out, and the new owners of the house don't know the first thing about that relic or what love and history it has behind it ... but I digress.)

My mother had left on Arthur Godfrey, who just before 9:00 pm was winding down his evening show, during one of the last few years' broadcasts of his decades-long presence on radio. And he said:

"Today is ... August the twoth."

I don't know why that stuck in my head so vividly. Maybe it was from my being fascinated by even trivial wordplay, especially at age 12, when you start to really know that you know everything about how the world works. (Language as a spontaneous order, thousands of years of undirected development? Nope, I was inventing its wonder as I went along.)

Or it could be from my having devoured my dad's books, tapes, and records about the history of broadcasting, and having bought some tapes from the glory days of radio. Dad got his BFA degree in Radio Broadcasting from the Cincinnati College of Music, worked in it for years. I had the natural curiosity about what my progenitor did for a living, or used to do. I heard some classic radio comedy, especially by Burns & Allen and Edgar Bergen, and was hooked.

For six more years, I was enthralled on Sunday nights by broadcasts on 1390 KCBC, Des Moines, of the syndicated "Radio Theatre ... of the Mind." And by Hyman Brown's revival on 1350 KRNT of "The CBS Radio Mystery Theater."

Godfrey had been a part of it. He always had the perfect voice for radio, and I read later that it came from his unique insight (for the time): Broadcast words don't go to mass audiences, they go to individuals. One or two or four people next to their radios. So you don't hyperemote, or hector, or lecture. You converse.

Anyway. It was "the twoth." Something clicked in me. Maybe it was a moment of growing up. Maybe it was just the splendor of a Summer night, where you don't yet loathe the heat, fireflies light the way, your mother had filled the fridge, and all of life's possibilities lie ahead.

Six years later, I read The Fountainhead, and the author biography I looked up said she was born on February ... twoth. Exactly six months apart.

So I adopted "their days" as two personal and highly unofficial holidays. A streak of unnamed individualism (well, Rand was helping me name it, as I left high school) made me want some holidays that the whole world DIDN'T share. Impish or perverse, I don't know. But I wanted them.

Thus, for me, each year, here begins six months in honor of what, and who, brought me here, and my heritage. And in February begins six months in honor of who, and what, I have chosen, and of the future that still remains open.

A lot, I know, to hang on a whisper from the electromagnetic ether on an August night, but thus do we define our rituals and shape our life's facets. On any 30th anniversary, you have to tell someone.

Wherever you are ... happy days, Arthur. And Ayn. And Dad.

SteveReed@earthling.net

"Humankind cannot bear very much reality." -- T.S. Eliot