POEM: SPUTNIK

Sputnik

When Sputnik first flew in the night sky

over our town,

my father called us out to see

the latest wonder in a decade full of wonders.

For by then electric soaps lined the shelves

of the Red and White; lawns were trimmed

straight and bristling as crew-cuts;

windows still held their magic squares of light

and all the phones rang on time.

On that day and the next,

children flew elastic band-powered aeroplanes

over hedges into neighbours’ yards

in honour of the new satellite.

But that night my mother stayed in the kitchen

stirring soup on the stove.

In a white-enamelled pot with a black handle and rim,

steam rose like exhaust from a rocket

about to be launched.

THIS IS BASED ON A MEMORY I THINK I HAD, though I would have been only three or four at the time. I indeed recall my father taking us out into the backyard of our house at Charing Cross road, and we all looked up as something gleaming moved across the twilight’s deepening blue. It wasn’t a shooting star or a star at all! It was a satellite! I don’t know if it was the 1957 Russian satellite* or the American satellite launched in response less than six months later in January, 1958, but boy! It was mano a mano, the OK Corral, and dueling spaceships all rolled into one! Wow! I was there when the Cold War launched into space, and when we used our brave new technology to see who would have the bigger rocket!

     I was such a privileged little four year old, standing on the darkening side of our planet, feet planted on the God-given earth, staring in wonder at the future (while those darned Ruskie kids were no doubt busy doing mindless, drone chores in their communistic hive cities). Freedom: that’s what that twinkling little light bobbing across the night sky represented; freedom and progress. It meant freedom from the fusty, moldy, wood-rot past, and onto the gleaming titanium, steel and plastic of the space age. (And in the 60s, I remember how we kids gobbled down buckets of Tang juice—dehydrated orange crystals full of vitamin C, the same stuff astronauts drank in space! Yum!) The future was arriving; we just had to get onboard. And regardless of whether the satellite was theirs or ours, it was the future nevertheless, and we were all part of it, weren’t we? The moon and Mars were next, and then look out galaxy here we come!

    This is another poem that deals with the time following World War Two, with more than a little nostalgia about my parents who were then in the prime of their lives, with all the hopes, dreams and fears that accompany that stage of life. And it’s about the world they lived in, or at least a faded colour snapshot of it. Looking back, I wonder what my parents made of it all as they began their lives together and started a family? Was technological change, even then, making them slightly dizzy? Or did they embrace it as the natural state of things? Was it exciting for them or a distraction to the practicalities of everyday living? Even in my small South Western Ontario hometown, there must have been the buzz of change, and the sense that new things were coming down the pipe. Satellites in space! What will they think of next!

     I give examples of the times from a kid’s perspective, and I also try to convey a sense of both stability and instability. Cheap electricity from the new hydro, coal and nuclear power plants lit our windows at night, windows that, for children playing outside, seemed magical and mysterious, and at the same time sources of safety and security in the dark. Lawns were cut with military precision by powerful, new lawnmowers made in factories that were beginning to gear up for the consumer spending tsunami that was looming on the horizon. On weekends, all the fathers and their sons would be out noisily cutting away to make their patch of green paradise a uniform height in the ever-growing suburbs of the day.   

     Phones rang on time, suggesting predictability to life, or at least an expectation of predictability for those rising middle classes. What would happen if the phones no longer rang when they were supposed to? I do like the image of the children mimicking the technological achievements and activities of the adult world with their toy airplanes; it suggests innocence, but also a certain level of indoctrination: Will it be warplanes (or drones) those children fly in the coming decades? What will they honour then?

     The final part of the poem is cautionary, somber, and dark in many ways. I recall as a child watching my mother stir soup on the stove (probably chicken soup because that was all I ate, apparently) in a small pot such as I describe in the poem. Did she come out into the back yard with my father, my sister and me? She’d taught high school science before her marriage, so I imagine she would have found such an event interesting and worth observing. Yet in the poem she remains inside. What does her lack of engagement with the night’s events suggest? Were there personal demons on her part, a sense of futility and failure? Or did she have a hidden inner life, simmering away, ready to explode? Or does her absence suggest larger questions about technology and progress, and our dependence upon the former and our belief in the later? I will leave these imponderables for those puzzled, future digital archaeologists to contemplate.

     The picture, probably from the late 1930s that I include here, is of my mother as a teenager. She stands with her whole life ahead of her. She has a plain, round face (unlike the drawn angularity of her later years). Appropriately, her feet are carefully veed and her hands are at her side, for she is getting her picture taken and must be a proper young lady! In the photo she seems happy. I can’t say the same for the woman I remember standing at the stove stirring soup all those years ago.   
 Cheers, Jake. 

 

* “The Sputnik crisis was a period of public fear and anxiety in Western nations about the perceived technological gap between the United States and Soviet Union caused by the Soviets' launch of Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite. The crisis was a key event in the Cold War that triggered the creation of NASA and the Space Race between the two superpowers. The satellite was launched on October 4, 1957 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The term was coined by then US President Dwight D. Eisenhower.”  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_crisis