6. In a telegraphic mode

How long did it take to arrive at us? Four billion years of evolution, is that correct?

I read on Yahoo today that the Earth cries too, an ear-piercing shriek when solar winds collide with the planet’s magnetic field. As the lament beams itself out into the cosmos, the Northern Lights descend upon us like the visual diary of a sound.

Humans celebrated this week the hundred years of their first universal distress call, the SOS signal. Three dots, three dashes, three dots, for a pure rendition of what’s become in popular culture Save our Souls.

I learned how to use the telegraph at the train station near my school. The employees had kept the outdated equipment at the back of the main office, in a closet. They took it out for me and explained with much attention to detail how it worked. I then wrote a poem for the school’s newspaper using only long and short marks.

It wasn’t a success. I might have been only eight or nine years old, but I knew rejection when it presented itself.

Fine, I wasn’t a model student. I was known as a lunatic, investing huge amounts of time and energy in great ideas that systematically fell flat.

To this day, sweetie, your laolao still doesn’t understand why the chute at the end of each of these extraordinary attempts at killing boredom.

I took my first flight to the moon with Tintin in Destination Moon, written the year of my birth. I considered this a major omen.

In my mind, I imagined the spaceship to be of a design very close to what the Soviets at the time were probably developing.

Now, that was a sensitive idea to conjure. We were, then, barely out of McCarthy’s era, and hunting communists was still on the lips of many down the street where I lived.

Caution was a must. Intergalactic exchanges and globalization weren’t fashionable in those days. Had no choice but to hide my launch pad under the façade of mental disorders.

To fight the gloom, I would often remind myself that, indeed, four billion years of natural selection had led to the person I was.

Sometimes, such discourses, when repeated like a litany, did help. When they failed, as if I deliberately meant to annoy others, I would just go on, tapping my pencil on my desk
. . . _ _ _ . . .

counting, hoping to reach four billion times, the secret number for personal consecration.

Grandma says: When it’s your turn to go to school, baby, try not to do that. It's never well perceived.

Laolao