I suppose each of us has a turning point, some moment when our lives take a different direction. Probably, each of us has multiple such points or moments: The birth or death of a loved one, a life-altering natural disaster like a flood, a fortuitous economic change or its opposite, or…
The categories of turning points are numerous and varied, and they aren’t all mutually exclusive. The hypothetical “flood” of the previous paragraph might have wiped out someone’s personal finances and simultaneously provided some entrepreneurial opportunity. Regardless of its seeming significance at the moment of occurrence, each turning point gains both recognition and importance in retrospect. “When I look back, I see that I would be a different person today if….”
The conditional, the “if,” is the mere conjecture that one’s history might have been different had the turning point not occurred. It is an unreal condition because one moment leads to the next as we go down one path and reject the Frostian “road not taken.” Life doesn’t always clearly present a bifurcating moment, but when it does, we take one, and not the other, path; thank you, Yogi Berra.* Not always doing so consciously, we nevertheless take that “first” step onto that new path. Sometimes, however, we recognize the significance of the moment, like Einstein’s recognizing “the happiest thought” of his life that became the gateway to his two papers on Relativity, international fame, and a new understanding of the Cosmos. And like the Spacetime Einstein defined, some turning points aren’t angular. They are segments of curves or radians around which life’s paths bend; every point’s mass warping personal Spacetime, with some points warping more and others less.
I suppose I could classify my youth as one lived at the bottom of the Middle Class or the top of the Poor Class. We weren’t flush with money, but we always had food. Money, as we know, is the antithesis of mass: The less one has, the more it pulls one down. Whereas mass creates a well down which objects fall in curved Spacetime, money has an opposite effect: The more one has, the higher one rises in a straight line through society’s hierarchy. As a baby and toddler during the Second World War, I lived with my mother in her parents’ house while my father served in the Marines and fought on Okinawa. Upon his return, we moved into one side of his mother’s house, the other side being occupied by my aunt’s family, with my grandmother living in a kitchen and bedroom/sitting room on the second floor with other bedrooms. For someone who had already lived the earliest years in a house crowded with grandparents and some of my mother’s siblings during the war, the new digs were expansive: I had my own small bedroom; we had a kitchen and living room on one side of the hall, and my aunt and family had a similar setup on the other side. The railing of the steps in the entry hallway between the two “apartments,” by the way, was wide enough and sturdy enough for sliding—my version of a Disney ride very like the sliding board at the local playground.
Okay, you have the setting. Now, what about a “turning point”?
You might say, “Well, I’m guessing that moving into the new house was the turning point.” And you would be right because all “new” experiences or lifestyle changes are turning points in some way. But in retrospect, I see that move to have had less “path-bending mass,” less “warping mass,” than another point.
The turning point did, however, take place in the kitchen of that house, and it forced me to see a world larger than the unpaved alleys and backyard where I played with cousins and some elementary school friends. It was a brief breakfast-time moment centered on a short comment and a photo on the front page of the local newspaper.
The daily paper and the larger world was of little interest to me before that moment. Sure, the paper was always readily available as it is in many households, rich, poor, highly or barely literate. In our kitchen its presence was almost mandatory. For a while, my father, a linotypist,** worked for the Tribune Review before switching to work for a private printing company. I now suppose that in addition to his interest in local, national, and international goings on, he wanted to see that his work bore no flaws, no noticeable typos from his night shift on the linotype. Every morning the paper was always on the table, where I ate my bowl of Wheaties. The paper’s presence was neither unusual nor special; its placement was not for a nine-year-old an inducement to read. Except for the comics section, the accessible newspaper was never the focus of my attention. And then one morning in 1953…
One morning just shy of my tenth birthday, my mother, standing in the kitchen at the ironing board, said, “See that picture in the paper? That was a very bad man who died.”*** That was it; I can’t remember any elaboration. The picture, a rather famous one shown round the world, was of Stalin in his casket. And that “turning point” for Stalin became one of those unnoticed-at-the-time turning points in my life. Suddenly, the world was larger than the house, the yard, the alley, elementary school, and the local neighborhood. Suddenly, there was something larger. And, unfortunately, something a bit more ominous. I found myself unknowingly on that curved path, the one bent by the gravity of the news and the weight of the world.
If you were born into the television age, you’ll probably have to use your imagination to understand how a black-and-white newspaper photo could become a turning point. But before the current age first of network and then of instantaneous 24/7 news, even highly educated adults depended for news on whatever newspaper editors chose to report. Imagine a world without TV and the Internet. Today’s freedom to roam world news stories over the Web gives an amazing perspective and one that theoretically everyone can use to assign value to phenomena, including events thousands of miles distant.
At the time of Stalin’s death, I had no television; in fact, I don’t think I had ever seen one outside the few stores that began to sell them. FM radio was still a long way from popularity; AM radio was my ordinary link to the “outside” through music and evening radio shows that we sat and listened to in the living room. I did see black-and-white Movietone Newsreels before the start of double features of cowboy, comedy, and detective films on Saturday mornings at the Palace Theater, but they appeared as “a curiosity” generally irrelevant to my life. **** My cousins and I were in the theater to see the likes of Lash LaRue, Gene Autry, the Cisco Kid, Batman, the Bowery Boys, and Abbot and Costello. Fidgeting in our seats in anticipation of the quick-draw gunfights and slapstick comedy in Saturday morning films, we paid little attention to the “news” narrated by Lowell Thomas though no doubt some images must have penetrated our bobbing skulls*** My association with a larger world was thus quite limited, so there was no way that I could at the time understand either my father’s wartime experiences half a world away or the politics of a foreign power. In such a context, my mother’s little comment on a black-and-white photo of a “very bad man” who died became a turning point.
Shortly after Stalin’s death, we got a TV, one with a small black-and-white screen. Connected to an antenna on the chimney, it gave me a scratchy view of a broader world. I had stepped onto the path of “virtual” reality beyond the Palace Theater, though obviously in retrospect a rather primitive experience by today’s HD video and Web standards. Those once-a-week world stories from Movietone at the Palace and limited TV coverage of worldwide events didn’t have much mass.
One could argue that I simply followed the normal path to reason and discovery, a path that everyone takes from childhood to adulthood. One could also note that there were children at the time who were far more sophisticated than I, better educated, more widely traveled, and better informed, children who even had their own collection of books. Although my linotypist father could read and correct reporters’ sentences on pieces of metal upside down and backward, he did not have any reading materials in the house save the daily newspaper and maybe Life magazine. “Who,” I might have asked at the time, “is rich enough to own his own books? They’re in the public library.” I owned Little Toot, my favorite book as a toddler and had access to my school texts, including the arithmetic book with those dreaded multiplication tables. Otherwise, a once-a-week visit to the town library was my avenue to the outside world, and I began to pay some attention to it there after Stalin’s death. Lowell Thomas’s Movietone narrations also began to make more sense on Saturday mornings, and the newspaper, I discovered, had more than just comics and sports sections.
Trying to parse a turning point is much like trying to understand light’s dual nature. Is a point really a “point,” a discontinuous unit, or an uninterrupted wave defined by a crest and trough? No matter how discreet the turning point, it always meshes with life’s personal continuum and spreads out through time. “Collapsing” the continuum to a point never really infuses us with complete understanding; rather, the point just draws us to some curvature, no part of which is the whole “curve.” Understanding any turning point requires a broad perspective, the perspective afforded by time and the experiences on many curved paths.
I could argue that I’m making too much of Stalin’s picture and my mother’s comment and that I’m attributing more to radian than to completed curve. In that—in fixed and completed curves—I think of the Saturn’s icy rings and their many shepherding moons like Pandora and Prometheus that exert a gravitational influence on the F Ring. Maybe that’s an appropriate image for a turning point’s influence on a curving path because those moons, while shaping the rings’ curvature, also move. And, for me, at least, there’s significance in the composition of the rings. They appear to be solid from a distance, but are composed of individual particles, each of which is shepherded in its own coincident orbit with other members of the ring. What should we imagine? Every little moving shepherd moon is the analog of a major turning point, and by exerting its own tiny gravitational influence, every moving particle within a ring also serves as a turning point. All those points appear to have a common ring identity by seeming to make up a single object. That’s the way my life might seem to others. That’s the way my life might seem to me unless I focus briefly on a turning point.
Is it thus? Has Stalin’s picture, has the picture of a “very bad man” traveled like Saturn’s shepherding moon Mimas on the curving paths of my life? Am I making too much of a tiny point? Possibly, but I might be onto something. Turning points aren’t fixed. They travel the curves of life that they shape, just like those moons of Saturn.
Do I think of that incident in kitchen often? No, just as I don’t often think of other turning points. Like you, I’m on a curving path, seen more as wave than point, more as radian than as discrete location. Only occasionally, I see one of those shepherding points that exerted and still exerts an influence. The day Stalin died has largely been an unnoticed influence that opened my mind to a larger world; the picture probably started my transition from childhood to adulthood and from relative ignorance to relative knowledge. In perspective, I see the reason that turning points continue their shepherding influence. Movable points maintain identity. Saturn’s rings stay in their orbits. I am who I am because of those points. I know what I know because of them, and I’m driven to follow paths as they shepherd me.
*“When you come to a fork in the road, take it!”—attributed to iconic Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, but possibly falsely so. See his book I Really Didn’t Say Everything I Said, p. 48.
**The introduction to computer-driven printing tech eliminated the need for linotype machines, so my father, a bright man, mastered the company’s newer tech to become foreman. The linotype my father used was essentially the same as those used in the nineteenth century. Wikipedia has photos and an explanation of the machine’s complex operation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotype_machine
***Photos abound on the Web. See here: https://www.thoughtco.com/body-of-stalin-lenins-tomb-1779977
****https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iWQzQBcc8k
The categories of turning points are numerous and varied, and they aren’t all mutually exclusive. The hypothetical “flood” of the previous paragraph might have wiped out someone’s personal finances and simultaneously provided some entrepreneurial opportunity. Regardless of its seeming significance at the moment of occurrence, each turning point gains both recognition and importance in retrospect. “When I look back, I see that I would be a different person today if….”
The conditional, the “if,” is the mere conjecture that one’s history might have been different had the turning point not occurred. It is an unreal condition because one moment leads to the next as we go down one path and reject the Frostian “road not taken.” Life doesn’t always clearly present a bifurcating moment, but when it does, we take one, and not the other, path; thank you, Yogi Berra.* Not always doing so consciously, we nevertheless take that “first” step onto that new path. Sometimes, however, we recognize the significance of the moment, like Einstein’s recognizing “the happiest thought” of his life that became the gateway to his two papers on Relativity, international fame, and a new understanding of the Cosmos. And like the Spacetime Einstein defined, some turning points aren’t angular. They are segments of curves or radians around which life’s paths bend; every point’s mass warping personal Spacetime, with some points warping more and others less.
I suppose I could classify my youth as one lived at the bottom of the Middle Class or the top of the Poor Class. We weren’t flush with money, but we always had food. Money, as we know, is the antithesis of mass: The less one has, the more it pulls one down. Whereas mass creates a well down which objects fall in curved Spacetime, money has an opposite effect: The more one has, the higher one rises in a straight line through society’s hierarchy. As a baby and toddler during the Second World War, I lived with my mother in her parents’ house while my father served in the Marines and fought on Okinawa. Upon his return, we moved into one side of his mother’s house, the other side being occupied by my aunt’s family, with my grandmother living in a kitchen and bedroom/sitting room on the second floor with other bedrooms. For someone who had already lived the earliest years in a house crowded with grandparents and some of my mother’s siblings during the war, the new digs were expansive: I had my own small bedroom; we had a kitchen and living room on one side of the hall, and my aunt and family had a similar setup on the other side. The railing of the steps in the entry hallway between the two “apartments,” by the way, was wide enough and sturdy enough for sliding—my version of a Disney ride very like the sliding board at the local playground.
Okay, you have the setting. Now, what about a “turning point”?
You might say, “Well, I’m guessing that moving into the new house was the turning point.” And you would be right because all “new” experiences or lifestyle changes are turning points in some way. But in retrospect, I see that move to have had less “path-bending mass,” less “warping mass,” than another point.
The turning point did, however, take place in the kitchen of that house, and it forced me to see a world larger than the unpaved alleys and backyard where I played with cousins and some elementary school friends. It was a brief breakfast-time moment centered on a short comment and a photo on the front page of the local newspaper.
The daily paper and the larger world was of little interest to me before that moment. Sure, the paper was always readily available as it is in many households, rich, poor, highly or barely literate. In our kitchen its presence was almost mandatory. For a while, my father, a linotypist,** worked for the Tribune Review before switching to work for a private printing company. I now suppose that in addition to his interest in local, national, and international goings on, he wanted to see that his work bore no flaws, no noticeable typos from his night shift on the linotype. Every morning the paper was always on the table, where I ate my bowl of Wheaties. The paper’s presence was neither unusual nor special; its placement was not for a nine-year-old an inducement to read. Except for the comics section, the accessible newspaper was never the focus of my attention. And then one morning in 1953…
One morning just shy of my tenth birthday, my mother, standing in the kitchen at the ironing board, said, “See that picture in the paper? That was a very bad man who died.”*** That was it; I can’t remember any elaboration. The picture, a rather famous one shown round the world, was of Stalin in his casket. And that “turning point” for Stalin became one of those unnoticed-at-the-time turning points in my life. Suddenly, the world was larger than the house, the yard, the alley, elementary school, and the local neighborhood. Suddenly, there was something larger. And, unfortunately, something a bit more ominous. I found myself unknowingly on that curved path, the one bent by the gravity of the news and the weight of the world.
If you were born into the television age, you’ll probably have to use your imagination to understand how a black-and-white newspaper photo could become a turning point. But before the current age first of network and then of instantaneous 24/7 news, even highly educated adults depended for news on whatever newspaper editors chose to report. Imagine a world without TV and the Internet. Today’s freedom to roam world news stories over the Web gives an amazing perspective and one that theoretically everyone can use to assign value to phenomena, including events thousands of miles distant.
At the time of Stalin’s death, I had no television; in fact, I don’t think I had ever seen one outside the few stores that began to sell them. FM radio was still a long way from popularity; AM radio was my ordinary link to the “outside” through music and evening radio shows that we sat and listened to in the living room. I did see black-and-white Movietone Newsreels before the start of double features of cowboy, comedy, and detective films on Saturday mornings at the Palace Theater, but they appeared as “a curiosity” generally irrelevant to my life. **** My cousins and I were in the theater to see the likes of Lash LaRue, Gene Autry, the Cisco Kid, Batman, the Bowery Boys, and Abbot and Costello. Fidgeting in our seats in anticipation of the quick-draw gunfights and slapstick comedy in Saturday morning films, we paid little attention to the “news” narrated by Lowell Thomas though no doubt some images must have penetrated our bobbing skulls*** My association with a larger world was thus quite limited, so there was no way that I could at the time understand either my father’s wartime experiences half a world away or the politics of a foreign power. In such a context, my mother’s little comment on a black-and-white photo of a “very bad man” who died became a turning point.
Shortly after Stalin’s death, we got a TV, one with a small black-and-white screen. Connected to an antenna on the chimney, it gave me a scratchy view of a broader world. I had stepped onto the path of “virtual” reality beyond the Palace Theater, though obviously in retrospect a rather primitive experience by today’s HD video and Web standards. Those once-a-week world stories from Movietone at the Palace and limited TV coverage of worldwide events didn’t have much mass.
One could argue that I simply followed the normal path to reason and discovery, a path that everyone takes from childhood to adulthood. One could also note that there were children at the time who were far more sophisticated than I, better educated, more widely traveled, and better informed, children who even had their own collection of books. Although my linotypist father could read and correct reporters’ sentences on pieces of metal upside down and backward, he did not have any reading materials in the house save the daily newspaper and maybe Life magazine. “Who,” I might have asked at the time, “is rich enough to own his own books? They’re in the public library.” I owned Little Toot, my favorite book as a toddler and had access to my school texts, including the arithmetic book with those dreaded multiplication tables. Otherwise, a once-a-week visit to the town library was my avenue to the outside world, and I began to pay some attention to it there after Stalin’s death. Lowell Thomas’s Movietone narrations also began to make more sense on Saturday mornings, and the newspaper, I discovered, had more than just comics and sports sections.
Trying to parse a turning point is much like trying to understand light’s dual nature. Is a point really a “point,” a discontinuous unit, or an uninterrupted wave defined by a crest and trough? No matter how discreet the turning point, it always meshes with life’s personal continuum and spreads out through time. “Collapsing” the continuum to a point never really infuses us with complete understanding; rather, the point just draws us to some curvature, no part of which is the whole “curve.” Understanding any turning point requires a broad perspective, the perspective afforded by time and the experiences on many curved paths.
I could argue that I’m making too much of Stalin’s picture and my mother’s comment and that I’m attributing more to radian than to completed curve. In that—in fixed and completed curves—I think of the Saturn’s icy rings and their many shepherding moons like Pandora and Prometheus that exert a gravitational influence on the F Ring. Maybe that’s an appropriate image for a turning point’s influence on a curving path because those moons, while shaping the rings’ curvature, also move. And, for me, at least, there’s significance in the composition of the rings. They appear to be solid from a distance, but are composed of individual particles, each of which is shepherded in its own coincident orbit with other members of the ring. What should we imagine? Every little moving shepherd moon is the analog of a major turning point, and by exerting its own tiny gravitational influence, every moving particle within a ring also serves as a turning point. All those points appear to have a common ring identity by seeming to make up a single object. That’s the way my life might seem to others. That’s the way my life might seem to me unless I focus briefly on a turning point.
Is it thus? Has Stalin’s picture, has the picture of a “very bad man” traveled like Saturn’s shepherding moon Mimas on the curving paths of my life? Am I making too much of a tiny point? Possibly, but I might be onto something. Turning points aren’t fixed. They travel the curves of life that they shape, just like those moons of Saturn.
Do I think of that incident in kitchen often? No, just as I don’t often think of other turning points. Like you, I’m on a curving path, seen more as wave than point, more as radian than as discrete location. Only occasionally, I see one of those shepherding points that exerted and still exerts an influence. The day Stalin died has largely been an unnoticed influence that opened my mind to a larger world; the picture probably started my transition from childhood to adulthood and from relative ignorance to relative knowledge. In perspective, I see the reason that turning points continue their shepherding influence. Movable points maintain identity. Saturn’s rings stay in their orbits. I am who I am because of those points. I know what I know because of them, and I’m driven to follow paths as they shepherd me.
*“When you come to a fork in the road, take it!”—attributed to iconic Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, but possibly falsely so. See his book I Really Didn’t Say Everything I Said, p. 48.
**The introduction to computer-driven printing tech eliminated the need for linotype machines, so my father, a bright man, mastered the company’s newer tech to become foreman. The linotype my father used was essentially the same as those used in the nineteenth century. Wikipedia has photos and an explanation of the machine’s complex operation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotype_machine
***Photos abound on the Web. See here: https://www.thoughtco.com/body-of-stalin-lenins-tomb-1779977
****https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iWQzQBcc8k
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