Typical Jewish kid, with one difference. None of it stuck.
In all the years I was supposed to be studying Hebrew or learning the Torah, none of it called to me, not even a little bit. Something inside me rebelled at every chance, daydreaming for Rabbi Pfeiffer or yawning by the time the third candle was lit in the winter. All my grandmother’s teachings fell away, shed like rainwater when the sun came out.
What was the sunshine?
Science. That is the religion that called to me. I learned at a young age that the universe was created in the Big Bang about 15.8 billion years ago. There was no creator necessary, just the laws of quantum mechanics and general relativity.
My gods were people like Albert Einstein and Niles Bohr, Edwin Schrodinger and Max Planck, Paul Dirak and Werner Heisenberg, and their lessons stuck to me like glue.
Judaism, Christianity, Islam… I always knew they were all pointless attempts to explain things, but I also knew that real explanations came from understanding the laws of physics.
From the time I was ten, science was my yellow brick road, and taking photographs of science was my life’s goal.
As I’m typing this, I know how foolish this all sounds, so humor me for now. Trust me when I say that my beliefs were as ingrained into me as the Ten Commandments were into Moses.
That doesn’t mean my behaviour was forgivable or even understandable, but I hope it does help you to at least appreciate a little bit of how things unfolded.
I was certainly not immune to being pig-headed, and a bigot on top of that.
****
I touched Karen’s hair and that woke her from her slumber.
“Hi there, sleepy-head,” I said.
She smiled.
A rush of excitement fell through me. It hit me again that I was waking up with Karen, the girl I’d missed so much the past six months. I could feel her skin beneath my fingers and smell her familiar scent. I held her close and wanted to stay that way forever.
“David?”
“Hmm…?”
“You know it’s not long before I start more serious training. I’ll have to be in Houston for that.”
I’d forgotten that, even the me experiencing this for the first time had forgotten. I knew it, of course, but I’d pushed the details to a far corner of my mind, hoping they’d trickle away.
“When?”
“I should be there by the end of July at the latest. So, a couple of weeks… I’ll need to get settled and everything. NASA will help me find an apartment, but I want to get to know the routine and meet the other trainees.”
“I’ll visit as often as I can. I’ve always liked Houston.”
How often would that be? I didn’t know. I did know Houston wasn’t my choice of place to live. Grandma lived near me in Minneapolis, and it was hard to imagine moving elsewhere.
Grandma.
The thought of her living not far from here made me miss her terribly. I could go see her right then. But, of course I was exactly where I wanted to be.
“I want you to pray for me while I’m gone.”
I stared at her. “You know I don’t believe in praying. It’s just hocus pocus.”
“You once told me a story about Niels Bohr. He’s one of your heroes, right?”
I didn’t answer. I knew what she was going to say.
“I probably won’t get this right, but a visitor came to his house and was surprised that he had a horseshoe hung above his door. The visitor said, ‘I thought you didn’t believe in stuff like that.’”
I finished the anecdote for her. “And Bohr answered, ‘I’m told it brings you luck whether you believe in it or not.’”
Karen smiled, and my heart ached.
“So, I need you to pray, whether you believe in it or not. It’s for me, not for you.”
I leaned back, and she surely knew I wasn’t happy. Grandma had long ago stopped trying to convince me of the power of prayer. She knew better. So did Karen.
“I’m going to find a church in Houston,” she said. “I’m going to be making connections within that church, and I’m going to pray and read my Bible every day. I need that security. Otherwise I won’t have the courage to do this.”
“You’re a scientist.”
“Yes.”
“How can you believe in that crap?”
Karen had a Ph.D. in molecular genetics. She was the author of a dozen papers that detailed how evolution had worked its magic on humanity. When aliens were discovered on the far side of the moon, NASA reached out to the top biologists in the country to look for volunteers to join the program. Karen sent in her resume, expecting to be rejected along with a hundred other applicants.
She told me she’d never really thought about actually flying to the moon. That was crazy talk. Until it wasn’t.
“You know what I believe,” she said. “I’ve never hidden that from you.”
“But, it’s different now. Everything is different.”
“No, nothing has changed.”
“There are fucking aliens on the moon! Did your God make them? Doesn’t the Bible say that Earth was created by God for his creations? Did He lie?”
“I don’t pretend to know all the answers, David. You shouldn’t either. We’ve been through this before. I just know what I believe.”
I should have stopped.
I should have learned from the first time around this argument, but I couldn’t help it. The differences between science and religion were so core to my true self, that I couldn’t let it go. It’s one of my least admirable qualities.
“You believe a bunch of nonsense! Why is the Old Testament chock full of miracles, but nobody ever parts the Red Sea or turns water into wine nowadays? Why doesn’t your God just show Himself and convince people like me that He is real? It’d be easy for Him to do, wouldn’t it?”
That was the line I remember most, and I’d now spouted it twice to the girl who meant the world to me, convincing her that in fact she meant very little.
It would have been so easy to just listen to her.
I hadn’t done that. I was as full of anger and loss as the first time we had this fight.
I had always believed in my science, not some kind of magical God who sat on the clouds somewhere with his long white beard, judging people and micro-managing everybody’s movements simultaneously. It was ridiculous to think that nonsense was true in any meaningful sense of the word. Karen was smarter than that.
She shut down, staying quiet. I wasn’t sure if she was thinking about what I’d said, or if she was ready to throw me out. I suddenly wanted to take it all back and to not have her beliefs crushed by me. I was supposed to do it better this time.
My heart sank, because I knew exactly what was going to happen. She was going to say good-bye to me for the last time. We were too incompatible, she’d say, and she couldn’t be with somebody who refused to accept her religion, or at least accept that she believed it to be true and needed it to be a central part of her life.
I didn’t want to live through that farewell again, so I stomped on the imaginary accelerator in my mind, thrusting me forward in time, past the rest of the argument, past my feeble attempts to apologize, past Karen moving to Houston, faster and faster, until I hit my true time.
I was in Grandma’s apartment, and I sat down on her couch, a tear falling down my cheek. I wiped it away and knew I had messed up my chance to fix things with Karen.
Maybe I could take another run at it, moving back in time once more to find her and to not have the same argument. I knew I could do it, but it wasn’t the right thing to do. She was right that we really were incompatible at a very basic level. I’d be lying to her by trying to pretend otherwise, and that wasn’t any way to build a future together.
Читать дальше