Note - Reflection for tomorrow

         You four just had very good dinners at the pleasantly decorated El Camino Family Restaurant in Socorro, NM, and you are staying at the Comfort Inn less than a mile away. An earlier comfort breakfast was at Michael Palatiano’s good and relaxing restaurant off I-10 in Benson, AZ less than a hour out of Tucson. A range of terrain along the way but most of it was hills and mountains in the distance and winds dusty dry and quite warm outside the closed car windows. Once in New Mexico you stopped to visit Steins, now a ghost town. A great travel day. Early tomorrow to Trinity Site about twenty-five miles away.

         I have been thinking about it. Along the way we saw the flat testing grounds to the east. We will absorb some of the radiation from that first nuclear bomb ever detonated. A weak amount, but it will make nuclear weaponry much more personal to me. People go to visit the remains of the World Trade Center in New York and pause sadly, many of them, but this event shook the world much more than any other event ever accomplished by human beings, at least in written history. This first event killed no one and changed the world of human beings forever nevertheless. It changed our concepts and our perspectives. I wonder at the historical accomplishment. The making of and denotation of bomb was inevitable. If we had not tested it the Germans soon would have.

           I feel tied to it via my father’s work as a scientist and to having the first bomb dropped on a city and its citizens on my third birthday. Carol and I met a Japanese woman at a party in Sao Paulo, Brazil (I think – or in Buenos Aires, Argentina) who survived the blast while her aunt and cousin did not. She said they read the warnings dropped by the Americans before the event and were on their way out of town, facing away from the blast when it happened. Her mother dropped her to the ground and fell on top of her to protect. Minutes later they got up and looked to see the mushroom cloud live. Her aunt and cousin did not believe the warnings and stayed. It was as simple as that. This added another personal dimension to speak to an eyewitness. Knowing we were North Americans she was still kind and polite in her speaking and manner. How these things affect me within is unknown, but they do. Tomorrow I will do some more thinking and try to better absorb how the world is with a little more radiation entering my physical system, one that in the fifties absorbed (like every other growing milk drinking child in the Northern Hemisphere) a bit of strontium 90 from the above ground nuclear testing programs of a variety of countries. 

         You ‘feel’ your personal history and presence, orndorff. Makes life more real to you, but it is real, as you well understand, without so much as a trace of a thought from me or yourself. All for tonight. Post. – Amorella.