This MeFi thread about the Hearts of Space radio program compels me to tell you all about the winter of 1995-1996.
≡ 10:44 pm
This MeFi thread about the Hearts of Space radio program compels me to tell you all about the winter of 1995-1996.
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When I left for Rice the previous fall, my parents left as well, moving from Maryland (our home of thirteen years or so) to Augusta, Maine.
Despite being the seat of state government, Augusta is a tiny, tiny town. (It is utterly dwarfed by its southern cousin, Portland.) I had spent a few days there for the Thanksgiving break, but the winter recess was my first real sojourn in the area.
I didn’t know anyone in town, of course, and had precious little to keep me occupied. I took to staying up very late, in a room on the sub-ground floor (the lot sloped down away from the street out front), nominally “Dan’s room” but more of a computer room and office.
I would sit at my mom’s drafting table, perched on a high stool, smudging graphite and ink all over my hands, late into the cold Maine night. I tried desperately to reconnect the wires and terminals in my brain that had allowed me to part with my pride and perfectionism long enough to create Captain Jim in high school; I had so many ideas, so many new stories to tell, so many new shapes and forms to commit to paper. I just wanted to unclench and let it all escape from the electrons in my brain, to be reborn as carbon atoms lodged in an angry sea of bleached cellulose fibers. I always found this bizarre process came more readily in the middle of the night.
The night in Maine is as quiet as it is cold, however. A dry, bony silence wrapped the house that wasn’t home, crushing my ears like wind chill. And so I turned on the radio.
It’s tough to find good radio in the Augusta market; stations are predominantly country and religious. I found myself returning to two stations: WCYI/WCYY broadcasting out of Lewiston-Auburn, and WMEH, Maine Public Radio. MPR (not to be confused with Minnesota Public Radio, also excellent of course) carried some NPR programs, some PRI programming, and classical music.
And, in the middle of the night, when college freshmen may be trying desperately to keep themselves awake (not, perhaps, yet having discovered the sweet taste of coffee) to try to seize the slow rhythm of those precious alpha brain waves, harnessing their mysterious power for both good and evil, before sleep inevitably conquers all … that is when Hearts of Space came on.
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And all this flooded to mind at a quarter to Midnight on a Saturday night. I quickly turned on KUHF, just in time to catch just the last few minutes of tonight’s HOS program.
