former physics student

Once, long long ago, I graduated from high school. I was eighteen so I left home. In a fit of unprecedented kindness, my father drove me to Las Cruces so I could enroll at New Mexico State University. Oh, about the "unprecedented kindness", my father and I hadn't gotten along since I was twelve. We mostly ignored each other or were unpleasant with each other. The kindness was not without penalty. On the 250 mile drive, my father talked and talked to me.

He told me about him and his father, how long it took my father to appreciate his father. I could get that. His father was unpleasant to be around. I only knew him when he was old, but had no reason to believe he had been any different when he was younger.

He told me about his ministry, the early days in small churches, becoming a missionary to Brasil, how he loved the Brasilian people, how disorienting coming back from Brasil had been, how he'd almost stumbled into the work in Clovis, how warmly the people welcomed him and then his family, God's calling him to the job in Albuquerque - to be responsible for missions all over the state for the New Mexico State Southern Baptist Convention. He was proud of all the work he had done for the Lord and for all the work the Lord had done through him. Funny, it was the nearest thing to a conversation we'd ever had and it was a monologue.

He told me again, in case I had missed it the first four hundred times, about Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and asked me if I wanted to pray.

I thought, "Jesus Christ, no! What for? I don't believe!' But I politely said, "No, thank you."

He talked about the work he was currently doing all over the state, but specifically was he was doing in specific towns.

During the last miles he talked about what he hoped I would get from college, a closer tie to God and to Jesus, good Christian friends, respect for my Christian professors that would last a lifetime, and so on. None of them had anything to do with what I hoped for from college: beer, to get laid, to learn from my work at White Sands Missile Range, to learn to be an engineer, and maybe to ride horses. I got the beer and the learning.

But this was supposed to be about studying physics.

Maybe I needed as context what I was fleeing when I left home.

I got there in almost as roundabout a path as my ramble about my father. That is, I started out to be a civil engineer. But we had a teaser course about mechanical engineering, and I changed my major. I had another teaser course about electrical engineering and changed my major again. Then I had my first physics course and was floored. Physics was what all that engineering was based on! I changed my major for the final time.

That first course came with a lab. Goddam! I aced the two of them but I was hooked! It took me two and a half more years to complete my requirements for my Physics degree, and every course was amazing! I loved the problems and the problem-solving. I loved the labs. Sometimes I would babble to Sue Lynn about my courses and how great they were.

I went to work for The Boeing Company and spent three years going back and forth between Seattle and Los Angeles where we "flew" the Lunar Orbiters around the moon.

Then The Boeing Company sent me to Houston for nobody knew quite what and I spent an agonizing year trying to figure out what my job was and what someone wanted from me.

I quit and went back to NMSU for more physics but at the graduate level.

Oh peaches and cream and watermelon thrown in! If my undergraduate courses had been fun (and they had), then my graduate-level physics courses were the party to celebrate that fun! Geeminey I loved that work!

But the problem that showed up when it was time to do my dissertation and earn my Ph.D. was that I'd had such a good time taking my courses that I didn't learn to hear, eat, breathe, and speak Physics. I had no idea how to do Physics. I hadn't a glimmer of what the important questions were that physicists were working on. I didn't know how to set up my own physics problem and solve that. Sigh.

I was a good physics student but never a physicist.

Thank goodness the unmanned exploration of space needed me again just then. I gladly went back to work

Connections: