An old Persian fable tells of a Sultan who asked a sage to inscribe on a ring a sentiment that could be said of bad times as well as good. It’s a popular story, and it varies widely between different tellings, from the writings of Edward Fitzgerald to a speech by Abraham Lincoln. The saying the sage engraved on the ring became to the Sultan as much a curse in times of happiness as it was a blessing in times of sorrow or adversity: “This, too, shall pass away.” Is that obvious? Of course, but it’s easy to forget. And we usually forget it at the worst and darkest moments.

Without a doubt, most of us — and I mean all 7+ billion of us — have been surprised by the turns 2020 has taken so far. I usually bear in mind a simple assumption that, regardless of incidental changes, the future will tend to resemble the past. And all the talk of this dangerous new virus, more than an ocean away from where I live, sounded too familiar to be worth much worry for anyone without significant connections to Wuhan, a name and a place of which I’d never heard a mere six months ago. What looked initially like it would be just an echo of SARS, bird flu, and a host of other threats in our recent past spread like the greatest oil spill to envelop Italy in a devastating overrun, maroon cruise ships mid-ocean, and hobble the world economy as the necessity of mitigating spread has overridden the ability of many businesses and even whole industries to function.

Some things we might have predicted in the face of a pandemic. The massive drops in stock values would make sense, and I know people who have lost millions of dollars due to the market slump. The change in news topics feels like a relief in some ways. A few months ago, the stories and watercooler chat I heard tended to follow a few prominent themes. The current chaos in national and international politics was one. But American news seemed to have lost some of its interest in Emmanuel Macron and Recep Tayyip Erdoḡan and was more focused on climate change and the many present controversies of the White House. Terrorism and security, the national obsessions not quite two decades ago, made fine fallback material; who didn’t want to know what ISIS was up to?

Watching COVID-19 concerns grow from an urgent local issue for Wuhan to the current global crisis felt in some ways like being tied to a telephone pole and watching a house catch fire. Someone driving by flicks a cigarette butt out the window and it lands on the dry, overgrown lawn. No one notices until it’s a blaze too large to put out with garden hoses, and it’s a dry, hot day. In retrospect, we’ll probably tell each other that it should have been obvious all along. And maybe we’ll be right.

Whether we could have or should have expected the pandemic and its direct effects, I can say personally that there are some consequences I never would have guessed. In a TED talk in November 2018, Greta Thunberg expressed bewilderment at the fact that while climate change seemed like the most serious threat to humanity as a whole, it was somehow treated as just another side topic. If it was so important, why would we be talking about anything else?

In a twist of irony that Upton Sinclair would have appreciated, the new threat has taken us all by surprise and wrenched our collective eyes around to stare it straight in the face. And slowly but surely as community spread was confirmed in more and more areas, we found ourselves under a variety of lockdowns and stay-home orders. Most of us haven’t lived through this kind of thing. Though we already know that this won’t be nearly as bad as some of the pandemics in recorded history, this is not history. This is now.

Everything is ugly, dark, and dismal. But is it? I can speak personally. I lost my job with an airline reservation management company in the middle of last month. It was the day after our local school districts announced that they were closing the schools. This was against the advice of the Idaho state health officials, not to mention the CDC and the WHO. But within 24 hours, I learned that my two children would be out of school for at least a couple of weeks and that I no longer had an income.

It seems I was far from alone. Not long afterward I learned that New Jersey alone had seen over 155,000 new unemployment filings in the same week. There were rumors of states seeking federal assistance. Then came the Federal stimulus packages. Three passed, and there was talk of a fourth. With unemployment forecasts off the charts due to many businesses temporarily or even permanently closing their doors, it seems a matter of course to take drastic action.

If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably figured out that I’m not very political. Or if I’m trying to be, then I’m not good at it. Fortunately, this is not a great year for politics in general, at least not the cynical and surreal politics of late. It’s also not the time for ninteen-eighties-era “it’ll all work out” vacuous optimism. But plenty of people, from John Bon Jovi to Sean Penn, have made a point of looking out for their neighbors. And by “neighbors” I mean anyone with a pulse; that’s what is so compelling about this global crisis. The 9/11 attacks left a wake of paranoia, selective antisemitism, Islamophobia, and unprecedented developments in government surveillance. By contrast, COVID-19 seems to have put us all on the same side.

The human aspects of current events aren’t the only changes we’ve seen, either. Scientists have noted striking changes in the natural world as a result of the widespread — and often drastic — social-distancing measures in effect right now. Cities in general are much quieter than they’ve been at most times since the Industrial Revolution. Even the ground itself doesn’t vibrate as much as it did with heavy automotive traffic and other machine activity reduced. With far fewer engines running, and far less than they did only a few months ago, the air in densely populated areas is cleaner than it’s been in decades. If you’re like some people used to noisy areas, you might have thought that birds are louder than they used to be (probably not, but the impression is hard to resist). Even the water is clearer in some areas.

All of that is interesting and encouraging, but perhaps the most compelling aspect to the way life has changed lately is at home. You might already know what I mean. Parody songs abound on YouTube and Facebook, where frustrated moms and dads poke fun about the excess of family time. But if many of them are like me, frustration is only one side of the whole story at home.

In spite of the unenviable but increasingly common experience of unemployment, I’ve found myself connecting more with family than in years. And while I laugh at the jokes about cabin fever and domestic homicide, I can’t say that I’d rather be at an office. Would I like to be more productive? Sure. But those of us who choose to raise children don’t do it so that we can be productive. And where a few decades ago we would all be cut off and fragmented, today we still have the pervasive facility to reach out to each other on a very individual level. I see families under the same roof spending more time together, but I also see family members separated by distance who are still able to talk to and see each other.

I’ve already decried the corny, gilt-age optimism of the eighties, and I’ll do the same again. But optimism in itself isn’t a sin, not when we define it as emphasizing the good in hard times. We are all in hard times, but there is a lot to be enjoyed. The form of life right now is not what it was a year ago, and considering the variety of disasters foretold by credible voices in alarming numbers, the change isn’t all unwelcome. The substance of our lives is still with us, and that old Persian fable comes to mind not so much as a curse against happiness as a warning against apathy. Happiness passes. Time to connect with loved ones, family or not, passes too. Carpe diem. Waste not, want not.

I was eighteen years old when my family moved to Oregon for a short period. The first place we rented was a house for sale, and it sold after we’d been there for six months. It was around Christmas that we had to move across town, and rather than rent a big truck, we carried our belongings by the car-load. We were fortunate to have the help of quite a few friends from church.

It’s struck me since that time that, whatever arguments one might make about the basic decency or evil of individuals, most of the people I’ve known have been apt to share each other’s burdens. Throughout the day I was mostly left to myself because of all the extra hands, though I did learn a few things as I brushed shoulders with some of the people who had come to help. One was the term “Art Deco”, a design style that characterized the house we were leaving. One of our friends, with whom I would later work at a custom logo shop, was an artist and graphic designer. He wasn’t obsessed with his work by any means, but he loved discussing art. We were friends for years.

Another thing I learned was that phrase from the Persian fable, though at the time it seemed like just a kindly platitude. On one of the trips carrying my belongings out of my old bedroom, I passed by a kind-looking older lady. While she was obviously part of the moving party, I couldn’t recall having met her. She apparently had heard someone needed help and she came. We had a brief conversation about the woes and travails of moving and how heavy things are, only half-serious. While I have trouble making casual conversation with most people, I’ve always found a certain ease and comfort in the company of the older generation. Before we parted ways, she said in a casual but matter-of-fact way, “this, too, shall pass.”

Of course she was right.

Written a few months ago and published on my blog at www.liam-brown.com.

Space is not really silent.

Yes, to ears that sense vibrations in liquids or gases it is. Few sensor devices–and no hearing organs of any living thing we know–can detect the whispering oscillations that pass through the sparse nebulae and dust clouds in a practical vacuum

But material vibrations constitute a mere drop among the torrent of energies that course undetected by sapient observers through the black spaces between worlds, stars, clusters, galaxies, and the distances between galaxies, whose vastness obliterates the meaning of scale. All this so-called “empty space” would feel like nothing but a quick and disorienting death to a naked human observer placed in its midst, but every square inch of it rushes with noise spanning an invisible, inaudible radio spectrum. Some of it is so potent and toxic to life that those who venture into the void frequently or for long risk disease and early death from the effects of cosmic radiation unless they travel in protective shells.

One such shell was the Goulet, a ship carrying passengers from Ganymede in an impatient sunward flight. Looking at it from a dozen miles, a hair’s breadth by interstellar standards, you’d only see the bright glint of the sun reflecting off the mirrored hull metal and the fluorescent spurts from its twin fusion engines.

Within the Jupiter system, the engines couldn’t be turned up to their full fury; but once Goulet rounded Europa and plunged off toward Mars, they’d be opened wide to the ship’s full 1/4-gee acceleration.

In the flight cabin, pilot Art Stephens and copilot Randall Krouse sat quiet, gazes flitting across instruments. Here a bare nudge of a lever, there a sparse word and a grunt of acknowledgement. Experience, and the sonic isolation of space flight, made anyone pensive and patient after long enough. Anyone at the controls of a space craft was bound to become as mute as the stars themselves until there was a need for speech. But here there was, so the pilot switched on the PA: “Ladies and gentlemen, your captain speaking. As a token of respect to the Dauntless tragedy, we’ll be observing a brief thrust shutdown while in the vicinity of Europa. If you’re uncomfortable with zero-gee, please buckle in. Attendants on the common deck have anti-nausea drugs if you need them; they’re also stocked behind the wash sinks in your cabins.” He could hear and feel his own voice echoed back to him along the rigid internal structures of the ship, a reassuring reverberation that hinted at the solidity of their transport.

A looming shape below them cut a shadow from the myriad pinpoints filling the forward view. Europa was a mere three thousand klicks off, perfect for a little slingshotting. Even on a routine flight for an old hand, being so spot-on with one’s initial vectors was a matter of pride. Stephens and Krouse knew their reputation, and they watched Europa out their forward bubble like kings riding a great beast. A glowing arc formed at the razor edge of its bulk and began to spread as a sun burst over the horizon, still overbright at this distance. The plaz adapted in an instant: the sun became a dull orange disc, and the stars vanished. The pilot glanced at the clock display. “Cut thrust in ten,” he said to his companion. In response, Krouse’s hand glided to rest over a button on his console. “Ready.” A few seconds passed. “Mark.” He pushed the button in a sharp motion.

There had been a little pressure like gravity pushing them down and back into their seats. This faded to nothing as the engines gently reduced their thrust to zero, and all in the ship were weightless. The dull thrum of the engines diminished to silence. The only sound was an occasional creaking as the ship’s members shed the heat buildup from the fusion drives.

Stephens sat, hands folded, eyes down. Counting the seconds, he could almost insulate himself from the mental images of torn metal and flame. Every ship that passed through Europa’s influence, that burst over her terminator on a slingshot turn, would observe the same silence for sixty seconds. It was nothing special for this route. But the one-man crew of Dauntless was out here somewhere, burnt and frozen, Stephens his one living relative.

A hand on his shoulder yanked him out of reverie. Krouse’s. “You OK?” His face held haggard concern, looking much older than his fifty-five years. Stephens took a deep breath and nodded. “It never quite leaves me, but here…” He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was standing at an unmarked grave.

“Harry was too young,” Krouse responded. “Shouldn’t have gone like that.” But it was the game they all played, rocket jockeys and spaceliners and load-stars alike. Every day atop a rocket was a gamble, and eventually the odds could overwhelm even the most vigilant. Stephens patted Krouse’s hand on his shoulder and glanced again at the clock as the latter withdrew.

“Resume in fifteen.”

“Ready.”

“Mark.”

As the shutdown had been gradual, not abrupt, so the fusion engines started with a bare wisp of thrust at the threshold of detection. It took a full minute for them to build to their orbital thrust level. Jockeys wouldn’t bother, of course, but a ‘liner had to think of passengers. Starting and stopping too quickly would make them sick. Besides, it could be hard on a ship this size, jolting all those members and joints with the full violence of a spaceliner engine. Everyone in the ship felt gravity slowly return until walking and sitting and lying down became practical again, albeit with judicious restraint in such weak gravity.

The ship’s flight recorder captured every nuance of action in the cockpit, and in superfluous detail and precision it recorded input from sensors over all the hull and throughout the vital systems. Even the movements of passengers would be stored in the infinitesimal memory of the black box. Its engineers had in mind a meticulous record of every moment of flight, and the box was virtually indestructible. You could send it hurtling into the sun and it would be obliterated. Few other things in the solar system could effect its demise, as demonstrated by batteries of tests that might have seemed absurd to lay observers. For experienced spacemen, the meaning of it chilled the bones.

That impervious black box, which really wasn’t black but was in fact fluorescent orange for visibility, caught the minute variations in the sophisticated fusion drives, engineered for consistent and powerful thrust at the highest standard for commercial travel. It sensed the un-clicking of restraints throughout the passenger compartments and the flight deck, all the living bodies moving around to stretch their legs, save one.

It recorded the rustle of pages as the one seated, belted soul in the ship leafed through a favorite book, ignorant as all the others of the inaudible but colossal ribbons of energy coalescing around the ship from some infinity to the planet below. The ship sensors, and the recorder, captured hints of this building tension until its gradual swell reached a fierce crescendo, warping and folding the adjacent space and enveloping the ship in weird particles. And the murmuring symphony of ship’s audio the recorder stored was concluded by an abrupt cadenza of klaxons and sirens, screams and slams and thuds, as by an unseen hand the mirrored shell was wrenched, twisted, slammed against a solid wall of energy, then winked into nothingness over the slow, dim Europa morning.

We don’t eat eggs no more around here. I’m sorry. I can get you your waffles with maple syrup, bacon, coffee, sweet tea, unsweet tea, some newfangled egg substitute, on and on. My pa opened this café, and he used to tell his customers “it ain’t fancy, but it’s filling, and if you leave hungry, it’s your own fault.” It’s still your fault if you leave hungry, but not if you leave without eggs. Where the blame goes for that, I don’t know.

Mayor Wilson, about a year ago he was on the ropes for reelection against some young slicker, used to be a big-shot in a fancy drug company or something, come out here and bought the biggest house on the nicest street and started smilin’ and hand-shakin’ his way around the town. Strange fella, looked to be cut out of a cardboard box. Two first names. Robert George, I think his name was. He moved on when Wilson came back swinging and won in a landslide. That whole thing is straight out of Twilight Zone, I kid you not.

What happened was this: like I said, the mayor was on the ropes. George was a natural people person, Wilson’s not. He’s sincere, but, you know, not really likable. So he was in a lot of trouble. Then one day, mid-campaign, the strangest thing I’ve ever heard of happens. Serious, you won’t believe it.

Folks are minding their business downtown like they do, when splat! Outta nowhere comes an egg and hits the sidewalk right in front of a lady, Miss Ormond who works at the library. She shrieks and I swear she jumps three feet back. I can’t blame her; I was there, saw the whole thing, and it sounded like a balloon popping when that egg hit. Then there’s the cloud of egg crap that splatters everywhere from the hit. See, when something like an egg hits concrete that hard, it doesn’t just splat on the ground, it almost vaporizes.

Well, that’s strange enough, right? That’s enough for anybody for one day, but no. While she’s high-tailing it back to her house to change dresses, nobody bothers to yell after her to use a cold wash on the egg spray. We’re too busy scratching our heads about what’s just happened. Lookin’ up at the sky, I can’t see a thing but clear blue. It’s a lovely day so long as you’re not the librarian.

Then across the street there’s another one. Pop! I hear, and then “Whoa! Hellzat?” It’s Corey Winters, one of the old timers in town, and he’s just been spooked by an egg hitting his car as he was getting in. Pieces of it are all over. Yolk and white dribbling down the windshield, and he’s got the most confused look I’ve ever seen. To this day I wish I had a camera, it’s priceless to see a yakker like Corey slack-jawed and speechless. And at that moment, a stiff wind would set that jaw waving like a rope-swing.

Hang on, it gets weirder.

Downtown Bessemer is a nice place. We’ve got a lot of full-glass fronts of shops, all the buildings have awnings for the rain, clean gutters in good shape on all the roads, everything’s painted or polished or something. The awnings and the gutters, like I said, are great for rain, but I ain’t never seen rain like this, before nor since. What happened was more eggs splatting up and down the street.

People started rushing to the stores, under the awnings. Then the splats picked up, like hailstones. Wasn’t safe under the awnings because there was too much spatter and too much egg on the ground. So we’re all crowding into stores. I find myself squoze up to the glass in Broadbent’s with a whole lotta motormouthed chatter at my back and a steady rain of eggs outside. Doesn’t last more than two minutes but the street is sloped, and it’s not long before we see this avalanche of egg mush, along with every loose object in the way, roar down the street like the Blob out of one of those old movies.

We’re all speechless after that, and not sure we want to go outside. Broadbent himself, behind the counter, keeps hollering “what’s happened out there?” It takes three or four tries of that before somebody (Cody Helms, I think) says “egg rain and the meringue from Hell.”

That’s why the town smells so funny. You know Boston smelled like sugar for years after the big molasses thing? My great-aunt Rose lived there in the forties. Said it was like living in a cotton candy factory. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard somebody ask why it couldn’t have rained chocolate or coffee beans or something. Nobody died here, praise the Lord, but FEMA had to come in, we had emergency drinkin’ water, the cleanup was like four weeks, on and on.

Here’s where it gets really sly, see. The whole mess upsets the election just like you’d expect. Then Wilson has this idea. He happens to know this George fella has some business connections, and well, around here you can spin a lot of yarn before people start to question it. And people don’t see Wilson as a politician, so they don’t expect a lot of lying from his corner.

He puts all the blame for the egg rain on a company that George has a stake in. These folks are the only ones who ship groceries anywhere near Bessemer, and they happen to have a huge chicken farm two counties over. Wilson comes up with this tale about an exploding plane dumping eggs and trash everywhere.

George leaps to his own defense first thing. He’s a smart guy who knows his business, and he can prove six ways from Sunday that he had nothing to do with the egg mess. No plane, no explosion, no egg shipment that size, on and on. For that matter, he’s only a shareholder, not a board member for the company.

You’d think that would end it, but Wilson has lit up like a candle. He drowns George out with a juggernaut campaign. I’ve heard about things like this but only from the horse-and-buggy days, you know? Pulpit pounding, dramatic flare, it’s all there. Oh, and the smiles and handshakes! The man is a wizard out of nowhere. Ella, my wife, swears he was possessed by a demon. One of my personal favorites was when he accused George of wanting to rename the town “Eggrain City”, no joke. Speech after speech, he rants, talking about interloping big-pharma alumni, corporate greed, his own moral rightness, and he caps it off with this: re-elect Wilson and run George out on a literal rail, and this egg rain thing will never happen again!

Now I remember. That was October 2 of last year. I remember that speech because it was the first time in 34 years I’d seen an honest to goodness brass band playing live. I don’t even know where they found that band, maybe Harold Hill was passing through or something.

But one way or another, they got the band, Wilson made that Landmark Speech (he called it that, I kid you not), and the next day he won the election by about 12,000 votes. George had a handful, but he was gone. I mean gone. Vanished. The rumor was that he got so spooked by the whole out on a rail idea that he packed his car and drove off. I’ve never seen him since.

How’d I start on that? Right, the egg thing.

So Wilson decided his first move after the election should be to make good on the eggs, so he pushed for a ban. Wholesale ban, no joke. The Council bought it, and it’s on the books now. You can’t buy eggs within city limits, and I wouldn’t suggest bringing any in. Eggs are banned in Bessemer, and Wilson is mayor for life.

One says, “This is old, therefore it is good”; the other says, “This is new, therefore it is better.”

Possibly the strangest moment of my career to date happened a few months ago, when a junior developer on my team noticed that I was using Emacs. He told me with some humor that by using such a dated piece of software, I was liable to suffer some teasing from younger engineers. While I understand that Emacs is old compared to VS Code, Atom, Sublime Text, and numerous other currently popular editors and IDEs, I was surprised to hear that the rules of fashion extended to these tools. After all, nobody has ever teased me for owning an old screwdriver or wrench. I have, however, chided myself for owning tools that are worn out and not reparable, which some might consider the equivalent of software obsolescence. Being old doesn’t make software good, but neither does being new make it better.

What’s most interesting about the idea of using an up-to-date editor is the reason for doing so. Let’s consider: a text editor, the primary tool of any software developer I’ve ever met, is a program for editing text. The most important function of the editor is one that lends itself well to a character-based display. So what’s in a modern IDE or even just a modern editor that makes it so…well, modern?

The answer, as anyone who uses modern programs for programming will tell you, is “a lot”. Search and replace functionality with various kinds of expressions. Advanced selection, like the Atom multiple-cursors feature. Integrations with build tools. Integrated debugging with breakpoints, et cetera. REPL (Read→Eval→Print Loop) functionality. Version control, from Git to SVN. Auto-indentation. Context-sensitive completion. The list goes on. Take a look at a modern IDE and you see a plethora of customization options and a wealth of tools designed to make the developer’s job easier. So it’s understandable that someone would crack jokes about a colleague using Emacs, or Vim, or Ed.

Or not. Remember my screwdriver analogy? Since when is it anybody’s d**n business what tools you and I use, so long as they let us do our jobs and don’t get in the way? Besides which — and this may give rise to the post hoc fallacy committed by the first kind of aforementioned fool — some of the old tools are indeed superior to the new ones in a pairing of respects. First, they do just as well at any of the things modern IDEs claim to do best; second, they often do it with greater efficiency and more to the developer’s liking (depending on the developer, the application, and the platform, mind you — I’m speaking from my own professional context, where this is usually the case).

As annoying as I find it to have someone critique my choice of technologies when I’m working, the more bothersome aspect of those experiences is the ignorance and lack of curiosity the critic displays. A stubbornly closed mind is a major liability for anyone in software development, a field based on and driven by learning and exploration. It may be hard to spot a wise man, but it’s easy to peg a fool.