Letter to Elizabeth,
I Googled The Intention Experiment and watched the author's video. There are many philosophies in man's history and science is only recent. I can't say McTaggart's book is science as all philosophies are belief systems. However, science does acknowledge how little we know. There are more stars...
It was a beautiful summer day, and I had just spent most of it in the 22nd District Court of Michigan, in the city of Inkster, a notoriously high-crime suburb west of Detroit. I was there because, three months before, on Thursday, March 4, 1976, a drunk ran a stop sign and slammed into my shiny black ’73 Ford LTD on Michigan Avenue in Inkster. I was still in uniform after finishing my shift in the scout car and making six arrests. So Jackie Wayne Giles, 36, became my seventh arrest that day.
I worked fifteen years for Detroit’s Wayne County Sheriff Department, serving as a jail guard, undercover narcotics officer, uniformed patrol officer, detective, uniformed patrol sergeant, and detective sergeant in the narcotics bureau. I was also suspended four times without pay.
On Tuesday, September 13, 1977, I walked into your office and saw you for the first time. That afternoon I called and asked you out.
Just days before we met Voyager I and II were launched. Voyager I has now crossed the point where it is the first man-made object to reach interstellar space, the area where most atoms are not from here but formed from other stars.
Since 1979, my wife, Cathy, and I lived in our lovely quad-level home on Grosse Ile, a small island town twenty miles south of Detroit. Our house was paid off and was always a source of pride—to me after growing up in Detroit, and to my wife, who was raised in the government projects of Norwayne (later the city of Westland). We raised our daughter and two sons, and in April 2014, after spending the winter in balmy Huntington Beach, California, far from the snows and subzero temperatures of Michigan, we decided it was time to move. Two of our children had been living out of state for years, our youngest son was in college, and all of our kids hoped to end up in California.
On average, I run 2,800 miles a year, so in the forty-six years since I returned from the jungles of Vietnam, I’ve logged 129,000 miles. That’s more than five times around the Earth, and more than half the distance to the moon. I love running long-range. Going the distance is an Army Ranger tradition, and running whenever and wherever I choose, in good weather or bad, I’m free to think and dream and still live the brotherhood as part of the troop
It’s been several months, and I just wanted to say I miss seeing you walk across the street to let me shoot your Nerf gun and bow and arrows and discuss history, weapons, and space.
My father was a heating and air-conditioning serviceman and a mechanic’s mechanic. We lived in southwest Detroit, and when he got home from work he’d spend the rest of the evening fixing anything mechanical, even turning out replacement parts on his lathe. He loved working with his hands, and a lot of the time he spent working in the garage was really pure mechanical engineering: he’d experiment with everything, whether it was building a new suspension system for his ’58 Olds or designing an electric mixer for my mom.
Dear Stephanie,
It’s been over a month, and not a day goes by that I don’t think of your father. I didn’t know Ed was sick until nearly the end, when Officer Skidmore told me. Now, whenever I’m running along a road, I still half expect to see that black pickup pull over, and Ed jump out with his usual swagger and smile, hollering, “Hey, Iceman!” God knows how many times he did that and we’d just talk right there on the roadside. Ed was always upbeat and funny, and he’d often say we needed to get together. And I would always put it off for another day because I was busy with college, writing my book, or doing some other “pressing” thing. Now it’s too late, and I’m truly sorry for that.
I last saw Mike just two weeks ago, at the Old Chicago in Southgate. We were best friends for forty years.
My journey with Mike began in the early 1970s, when we started hanging together with friends at the K-Andy bar in Detroit. Mike was small in stature and suffered from many physical difficulties, but it would be a mistake to judge a man like him by his size. Mike was a giant.
