Networks of Business

INTELLIGENT LIFE

      It was after midnight.   I lay in the bottom bunk, my arm reaching out to the old radio on my nightstand.   It was a brown plastic box warmed from within by glowing vacuum tubes, and the speaker was covered with disintegrating cloth. I lowered the volume a little before twisting the knob to find a new station.   I didn’t want the static and that wide warble the comes between stations to wake up Patty in the top bunk.   She’d yell at me to turn it off, or worse, she’d tell Mum.
      This was the best part of my day.   I lay there in the dark with just the glowing radio dial and the stars out my window to look at.   Every night, on WBZ,   I listened to the Bob Kennedy Contact show and he had on people like Edgar Rowe Snow telling us ghost stories about places right there in Massachusetts.   Or Jeanne Dixon predicting the future.   Later, I’d twist my way through the radio spectrum, discovering in the static and warble a station all the way from Indiana, and one from Montreal, where the announcer was speaking French.   I discovered news, music, stories.
      I was by myself, but I wasn’t alone.
      The rest of my day was school and homework and some stupid TV programs.   What a relief it was to reach for that smooth knob;   it was like I was scanning the universe for signs of intelligent life.   I couldn’t find it in my house, that’s for sure.   My parents were so boring.   And not in my school.   My teachers were pathetic. The same stuff every day.   Get out your homework.   Open your book… Boring, boring.
      But at night, in the dark, my thoughts spooled out into the universe like fishing line following a hook and lure.   And which was more exciting:   discovering something new, or the anticipation of discovering something new?   Hard to say.
      Well, decades have passed, and now I spend hours every day reaching out to my computer, the transparent blue plastic cover warmed by something mysterious within.   I use it to write stories, to scan the...