After the war he worked with Teller. They detonated bombs capable of reducing fairly large parcels of the known world to uninhabitable rubble. Everybody hated Teller and they hated my father. Too bad. I dont know what to tell you about his sleep. I never slept either. And I didnt bomb anybody.
You were born at Los Alamos.
Yes. Boxing Day. Nineteen fifty-one.
Boxing Day? What is that?
It’s the day after Christmas.
Why is it called Boxing Day?
It’s called Boxing Day because that’s the day you box up all the crap you got that you dont want and take it back to the store.
That’s not true.
No. Traditionally it was the day you exchanged gifts. Boxes of cookies or whatever. An army sergeant drove my mother to the hospital in one of those olivedrab sedans left over from the war. There was nobody else around. She was supposed to go to Tennessee but in the end they wouldnt let her travel.
Where was your father?
He was in Providence. The one in Rhode Island.
Why was he in Providence? He was visiting with his family?
He went to hear Kurt Gödel give the Gibbs Lecture at the American Mathematical Society at Brown University.
Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris
Someday I’d like to write something about McCarthy’s final two books in relation to Blair’s Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, but it’ll take me at least another lifetime or two before I can even begin to grasp either one.
And on that note, thanks to Hannah’s uncle Bill for rounding out the collection yesterday:
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