The Challenger Disaster and Generation X

As the sun rose on America that January morning, some cities lay quietly under a blanket of snow, and while the Atlantic waters lapped onto the shores of the Southeast, a threatening chill arrived with them.



As the 30th anniversary of the Challenger Disaster is commemorated and the events of that day surface once again in the media, for some of us of a certain age, the tragedy of that day is with us all the time. 




I was a child of the '80s, and in the months leading up to that day, the Challenger was constantly on my mind - like in the afternoons when I would run in circles and land on my back in soft green patches of clover in the park near my house. Through my nine-year-old eyes, I'd look out to the infinite blue of the universe, to the east where shuttles are launched, to where impossible things seemed possible, even if just for one minute.





In the mid '80s, while the members of Generation X were growing up, modern American public educations standards were at an all-time low. The Reagan Administration saw the upcoming Challenger launch as a way to remind the nation of the important role of teachers and maybe to reboot hope in the American school system. Out of thousands of applicants to the Teacher in Space Project, the charismatic Christa McAuliffe was chosen. Those of us in elementary school closely followed these events from sources like NASA and Weekly Reader, so that these people would continually be on our minds, so that they could, in every sense, become our heroes, so that we could know their stories and their lives, so we would love them.

The pint sized propaganda was delivered to our desks every week, and we drank every drop of it.  By design, the anticipation of the launch hit every major nerve in me - the women among the crew became role models to the Cabbage Patch-carrying girls of the 1980's.

In this Morning in America era, every kid you knew was dreaming of being an astronaut. On the playground, we would tell each other which of the seven was our favorite. In one way or another, every one of the seven carried with them the hopes and aspirations of our generation. Whenever I have asked fellow Gen Xers about their recollection of that day, those in elementary school were often the most impacted. Those about halfway through elementary school, like myself, were old enough to intellectually grasp the significance of this day and yet were still young and tender enough for the event to inflict powerful emotional damage. Because the Challenger launch became synonymous with our education and our hope in our future, the tragedy of that winter day is one of the main reasons my generation instinctively distrusts institutions. While there was a spectrum of responses to the event, ranging from confusion to grief, the school kids affected the most will tell you that day changed their lives. I can tell you that it changed mine. It was a day that left my generation standing alone, in a "sunlit silence".

Custom watercolor by Emblaester, artist on Fiverr.com

If I allow my mind to fully go back into the moments of that day, it is hard to breathe. I can still feel the chill of that morning on my skin from where I was two time zones away from Florida in the high altitude desert of New Mexico. I saw it live on TV from a classroom, along with millions of other kids, and watched quietly as the twisting contrail imprinted itself as an image of horror onto the collective consciousness of my generation, like some coiled up snake that struck without warning. Palpable feelings of excitement degenerated into confusion and then anxiety; and then the teacher abruptly shut off the TV. We were told that it was over and to get back to our desks. In that moment that I was supposed to stoically return to school work, I found myself caught in some delicate place between life and death, somewhere between hope and hopelessness. It took me the whole day to process what had happened, and as I did, an emptiness hovered above my head, above my school, above my country.

So much dialogue was happening in our classrooms in the months leading up to that day about how anything was possible, that we could be astronauts, that we could be anything we wanted when we grew up, and that the shuttle launch was going to be the moment that would demonstratively prove this to us. When the moment defining how anything was possible went entirely wrong, I felt panicked to my core - maybe my future was going to be dark, maybe my dreams would be swallowed whole with no explanation. Not only did our heroes die that day, but a lot of our hope did, and much of this hope was replaced with fear about the future - an anxiousness that has stayed with us our whole lives. Many of the traits that Generation X is known for, from our negativity to our cynicism, can be traced back not only to the state of society in our formative years, but to the exact date of January 28, 1986.

That evening, millions of us gathered around TVs once again, and this time it was to watch Reagan deliver a speech about the catastrophe. His words made the event unbearably real, and while he spoke, my heart was forced to shift from somewhere within the first stage of grief, denial, to somewhere within the dark gravity of the next stage of grief - anger. The only words from the speech that gave me any comfort were that our fallen heroes had "touched the face of God." When he quoted the poetry of aviator John Gillespie Magee Jr. in the speech, I did not know that he, too, had died at a far too young age - during WWII. I could not yet fully know of the service and suffering of the GI Generation before me, of all who had lost their lives in order to pass on freedom before my own generation was ever born.  And what the older generations did not know, was that, as icicles formed around the shuttle that night before, that the world had already had become a much bleaker place than the one they thought they passed on to us, and when morning came, the disaster confirmed it.



In mourning the death of Christa McAuliffe, the Generation X student body of her school came together for a memorial service in the school gym.  "Life in a Northern Town" by Dream Academy was the song that concluded the service. While this song is a quintessential piece of Gen X music, the lyrics actually reference the experiences of Christa's generation - the Boomers. In the song, it mentions that in the aftermath of JFK's assassination, "it felt like the world would freeze."  On January 28, 1986, it did.  Society told Generation X who our heroes should be, and made us love them. And from our schools we watched our heroes perish, so that no place, not even the familiarity of our own classrooms, not even the "high untrespassed sanctity of space" seemed safe after that. All my heroes were taken away from me that day.  In front of my eyes. All seven of them.

On January 28th, 1986, Gen X witnessed the launch and loss of a shuttle crew, just as we watched our parents' marriages dissolve, just as we watched society dissolve. That decade, educational quality had trended to an all-time low and divorce rates had reached an all-time high - and those statistics weren't just numbers, they were our families. As Generation X was growing up, there was this idea that kids should fend for themselves, solve their own problems, and more or less raise themselves. Society told parents they should be considerably more concerned with self-actualization or self-fulfillment than with parenting. Ten miles above the earth there was a structural failure that took seven lives, and meanwhile, on earth, there was a structural failure in how a generation was being raised. Generation X wasn't just the latchkey children of broken homes, we were the latchkey children of a broken society. Something is truly wrong when children are conditioned over a long time to anticipate an event, and are told that their own futures are tied to this moment, only to watch that event unfold like some kind of nightmare.  "Obviously, a major malfunction" were the words of the NASA launch commentator. Those words haunt us, because, in many ways, it not only articulated a moment that we were unprepared for, but also defined the background of our formative years, and even, in some ways, our entire lives. Gen X grew up too fast and any lingering naivety dissipated alongside the vapor of the shuttle that day.

We study history to learn from it and to not repeat its mistakes. Let us, as a society, as human beings, never let another January 28, 1986 happen again - not to heroic explorers, not to children whose hope in the future is hinged on a moment that could have been full of possibility, but instead was full of malfunction and fear. It altered the collective psyche of my generation - how we see the world, our lives, and our futures. We are still mourning. That day for us, for Generation X, was the day that the world froze. It affects who we became and how we see the world, thirty years later.

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A Journey to the Challenger Memorial in Palo Alto, California, January 2016...the seeds from these Redwoods orbited the earth in the Challenger Shuttle one mission before the disaster took place, and here are several photos I took of the park:

My family and I went here to remember the day in 1986 that forever altered history, to remember the seven people we lost that day. This small memorial grove sits in the back of a park.    

As I approached this grove of trees, a train was speeding by just behind here and at the same time, I could feel my life speeding before me, flashing through my mind were the images of my whole life. It was as if my soul was trying to tell my mind how pivotal this experience was to the entirety of my life and my being.

Redwoods stand in a circle - one for each of the astronauts. To stand in the very middle of these trees is powerful.  You get the feeling someone, or several someones, are watching over you. From the large branch that had fallen in the middle, I took some small pieces home with me as a memento. 

Each tree is numbered, coincidentally, or maybe not so coincidentally, 

with the birth years of Gen Xers. 

Such an extraordinary piece of history and of science. Experiments are an important part of shuttle missions and the seeds from these trees were part of an experiment - they were in the aboard the Challenger and orbited the earth over a hundred time as we experienced the summer of 1985. To physically walk up to a space that represents, or even encompasses an event that altered your life is intense.  Many say that the Challenger Disaster is one of the events that most affected Generation X. Many also say that it is the event that most affected us.

To stand above this stone on a California overcast day while reading the words between the cracks brought me several tears. A weathered piece of metal mounted on a large rock reflects three decades of facing an usually blue sky.  

"These redwoods grew from the sees of El Palo Alto that orbited Earth on board the Space Shuttle Challenger STS-51F July 29th - August 6, 1985. On a later mission, Challenger and the lives of seven astronauts were lost in an explosion on January 28, 1986."

Redwoods can live for a thousand years or more - I wonder if the story of these trees will.  I hope so.

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(c) 2016 by Chloe Koffas - all rights reserved.
NASA photos: public domain, writing and other photography by Chloe Koffas, words in quotes from the poem, High Flight by John Gillepie Magee Jr. 

Many thanks to my dear friend, Jennifer McCollum, who hired the artist to do the watercolor classroom picture of January 28, 1986 above. What an extraordinary gift ~

Link to lyrics: Life in a Northern Town
Link to poetry: High Flight

Why Every Christmas Brings Me to my Knees

Each Christmas season, we take our nativity scene out of storage, unwrap the packaging and put it on display.  I go outside to cut branches from evergreen trees to place around the scene, and I cover the greenery in amber colored pine cone lights to softly glow each winter evening. This year, we added in real pine cones with edges covered in gold glitter to go along with the lights. It is, in essence, a way of bringing together nature and theology, of bringing together heaven and earth.  

In this nativity scene, the mother of the Christ Child both holds and kneels before the baby. Some know her as Mary, some call her St. Mary. In Greek, she is called Theotokos - the God bearer.  

Each Christmas season, there are these lovely moments, these simple moments, when ornaments go neatly onto the branches of the tree, when we put all the pieces where they belong, when we step back to see the beauty, or even the perfection, of the decorations. In those moments, I feel so grateful for every good thing that has been given to me. 

Yet each Christmas, we are reminded of how so many pieces in our lives won't seem to go where they belong at all.  We are grieving some recent loss, or we are remembering those we once spent Christmas with who are no longer with us. Maybe we are looking back on a year when things did not fall into place in ways we wished they had.

Sometimes we bring our best and good comes of it. Sometimes we give our best, and it doesn't seem to be enough.

There are Christmases in my life that I would rather not remember. There were a lot of sorrowful holidays for me growing up, and many other Gen Xers would say the same. Of course, we find new ways to be happy, we make new traditions, we try not to let the past overshadow the present. In those evening moments when the sun sets and the Christmas lights start to come on in the neighborhood, if I need to, I let myself grieve for a few moments, and then and then I move on to something quotidian to bring me back to the present, like putting dishes into a sink of hot soapy water, or making hot apple cider so that the house is full of the smell of cinnamon and cloves.  It is amazing what spiritual beings we are, and at the same time, it is profound that we are so rooted to the earth, the way we are flesh and blood beings, connected to the physical things around us. Christ was born into the most humble beginnings imaginable, and when he did, God became less abstract to us, he became someone who breathes the same air that we do. He became incarnate. 

Why the world needs God is because it is a broken place, and because we live in a broken place, we also at times find ourselves broken. And when God made himself incarnate, he made himself vulnerable to every wound, heartbreak, and betrayal that a person can experience in this life. This is what brings me to my knees every Christmas - that God made himself a defenseless infant to the coldness of night, so that he would fully know what we feel like when we are cold. When Christ was born, the love of God became so profoundly palpable.  When Christ was born, he proved that love means suffering with those who suffer. When Christ was born, everything changed.  

God is with us.

The white-golden glow of Christmas lights from our tree shine on these small nativity images of the most extraordinary story I have yet to hear.  And to know that Christ was laid in a wooden manger so that he would some day show sacrificial love by hanging on a wooden cross - - I just cannot get over this story, I cannot help but be moved, even changed, by it every Christmas. I have devoured as much literature as I can get my hands on from the centuries of the human experience, and no story has ever brought me to my knees like this one. 

And when looking back on a another year of life on this earth where darkness has tried to make us all live in fear, this is the story that instead gives us hope. When dusk comes and goes, and the Christmas lights on the houses shine in front of a backdrop of a cold winter night, when the soft glow of candles flicker on the table that you eat from this holiday season, remember this:

A light has shone in the darkness, 

and the darkness has not overcome it. 

Generations of the View-Master

There's something about this time of year...when the morning chill makes its way through the turning colors of the leaves, and as we turn to our Charlie Brown and Rankin Bass holiday specials, a certain nostalgia rises up within us. This is the time of the year where find ourselves making holiday shopping lists for remakes of retro toys we once had as Gen X kids or pulling down our own retro toys from our shelves for the kids in our lives who come to visit us.




In 1976, it was the Bicentennial of America, and everything around us from the pot holders in our harvest gold kitchens to the fire hydrants on the streets became red, white, and blue. The View Master model that year was also one of those things....

This was the most beloved toy of my early childhood.  When I would lift the lenses to my eyes, it created a certain magic. The sun would send its slanted rays onto the shag carpet of my bedroom and I could lose myself in another world as I pulled the reels out of its round canister. I would lose all sense of time and a whole afternoon would disappear into moments.







This is the time of the year when the most epic stories usually make their way to the movie screens in theaters and in our homes - when we are more likely to be indoors, when we are more likely to look inward, or to take a moment to look back. The beauty of storytelling always seems to come alive around the holidays.

When the 1970s rolled into the 1980s, the kids of Generation X kept on using our Bicentennial View Masters to view the new pop culture that came at us in a new decade.

        

The stories to go along with the images were neatly folded inside the View-Master envelopes and there was nothing more fun than pulling these out for the first time when you got a new View-Master. It was a lot like getting a new record, a new cassette tape, or a new CD, and pulling the sleeve out to read the lyrics.

The stories that we remember from our View Masters include characters from every TV show, movie, or cartoon we knew. This included Snoopy, Herbie, Holly Hobbie, E.T., Star Wars, Adventures of G.I. Joe, Looney Toons and Disney characters, Captain Kangaroo, and more obscure stories like Sigmund and the Sea Monsters.

Of course, Benji made his way into our View Master reels - especially since he had already made his way into our hearts.









I have 3D images forever imprinted in my mind of so many different stories - Winnie the Pooh eating honey, Peter Pan and the Lost Boys trying to escape Captain Hook, the reels that came with the Bicentennial View Master that showed images from 1776, and others. 



Just about any character we remember from the stories or pop culture of our youth probably found their way to these reels.





Even our superheroes would come alive for us in all their dimensional glory....

Some of the images of View Master reels over the decades of the 20th Century were photos, some were in cartoon form, and some in claymation form.  Some were of historical events like the coronation ceremony of Queen Elizabeth.



There was nothing I loved more as a small child than seeing the world in 3D - how I first experienced the sites of America was through my View Master reels. I could feast my eyes on the Golden Gate Bridge hanging gracefully over the San Francisco Bay, the surreal vastness of the Grand Canyon, the stalactites hanging from the ceilings of Carlsbad Caverns, and the palm trees leaning over the Atlantic lapping up onto the Florida Coast.






The larger world became real to me through images, like the tulips of Holland or the pyramids of Egypt.   It was national parks and travel destinations that were the original images on View Master reels from the 1940s....



Since moving to my new Northern California neighborhood a year and a half ago where the tree lines on the horizon don't become red or gold until late fall, I have become friends with a sweet neighbor who is from the Silent Generation, and she has been here since the neighborhood was built in the mid 1970s. This is where she raised her Generation X children, stayed home with them when most moms didn't do this, and even kept her family together in a time when families often didn't stay together. She knows the value of story, and of history, and has kept many of the retro things of multiple generations safely tucked away in her home.  She has kindly shared many of these things with me - to keep in my Gen X retro writing nook, or to take pictures of, or to hold in my hands for a moment and remember. One of these things is her collection of View Masters and reels.

The first View Masters were sold at the 1939-1940 World's Fair in New York soon after Kodachrome color film was invented.  Some of the pieces of my friend's collection date back to the era of her early childhood - the 1940s. I remember looking at some of these as a child, when friends of mine had gotten these as hand-me-downs from grandparents.




The plastic View Masters I had once held in my hand as a child had been grandfathered by the original metal ones.


During WWII,  the US government commissioned millions of View Master reels from the Sawyer's Co. in Portland to train serviceman how to recognize planes and ships from a distance and for range estimation.









Stories from the View Masters of the 1940s included classic fairy tales, national parks, and celebrity cowboys of the time like Gene Autry.







C.S. Lewis said that some day we become old enough to read fairy tales again.  He also said that we should read books from different eras than the one in which we find ourselves - this is because each era (and generation) is good at seeing certain truths, and liable to make certain mistakes. What I did not know as a child is that when I was learning many of these stories, I was looking back to the 3D images of a decade that was far before my time, and in the case of fairy tales, these images were bringing alive stories that were written in the centuries before my time.

Over time, there have been almost 30 viewer models in every color you can think of, each representing the era it came from. There have been hundreds of different themes for the reels, though the View Master itself has remained basically the same so that any reel made from any decade can be used in any View Master.

When we are long gone, if our civilization is buried in rubble, what will they unearth of our old belongings? How will the history books sum up the 20th and 21st centuries in which we straddled with the timeline of our lives? They will see that we took the stories of the centuries before us and turned them into 3D images, that we took black and white and turned it into color, and that we escorted an analog world into a digital one.

What I know is that the Silent Generation and Generation X had something in common - our stories often faded under the sound of the louder voices of other generations of our time, and that is why, while there is still time, we should tell those stories. What I know is that every generation has a story to pass on to the next one.  When we look at time and generations and the stories that formed us, we begin to see how much the narrative of all of our lives intrinsically connects us.  

When I would look at my View Master as a child, I would look at the enormity of the trees of the Redwood Forest reaching toward the blue California sky or the depths of how far the waterfalls of Niagara Falls were plunging into the water below. I was looking at these images with all those who had the same reels, and even with those who had actually once stood in those places. We are truly are connected, and for all the differences that exist among generations and cultures, we have more in common than we usually realize. From the tulips of Holland to the pyramids of Egypt, nothing we do connects us more than storytelling, nothing connects us more to others than telling our own story, and to listening to the stories of others.

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Thank you, Louise, for letting me borrow these symbols of time, to photograph them, and to see 3D images again that I had not seen in decades.  Sending you love for the history you have been a part of, and for the story you have lived.  

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(c) 2015 writing and photography by Chloe Koffas - all rights reserved 

When the Message Reaches You

"Do or do Not...there is no try."

When Luke Skywalker is having trouble using the force to get his X-Wing out of a swamp he has crashed it into, these are words of wisdom from Yoda. In other words, don't just sort of put some effort into something, really try, make it happen.

That's about as philosophical as it gets, especially when it comes to the movies/pop culture of the formative years of Generation X.

Earlier this year, I was walking past Union Square in San Francisco and this giant heart statue caught my eye...

Artist: Lawrence Noble

So I took a photo, walked around to the back of it, and took another photo....

And as I lowered my camera back down, I saw my own reflection in the words, and I have to say it felt like that specific message had somehow been delivered to me the way a letter is delivered in an envelope.  Maybe that's why it was designed this way, so that if you look close enough, you notice your own reflection and take the words more seriously. I sat down for a while to watch other people look at this giant fiberglass piece, and while some were just taking selfies next to it, I could see other people having the same reaction that I did...feeling as they walked up to it that the message was for them.

As I saw this message I resolved to not just try, but to fully embrace the opportunities that presented themselves to me in the days that followed. Soon after, it was as if the universe began unfolding around me in a way it had never quite done before, and it felt as if I took a huge turn around some corner in the timeline of my life. As fall begins, and as I begin to plan out the rest of this year, I realize that this has been one of the most amazing years of my life - not easy, but amazing.

Sometimes, a moment presents itself for us to change our thinking, for us to resolve to do something, or even to do something differently. Sometimes it is a moment that is profoundly beautiful, sometimes it is a moment that hurts.  Sometimes we stumble upon these moments so that we can turn a corner, or change direction, and it is these small moments than can change the trajectory of our lives.

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This sculpture was painted by Lawrence Noble who has made numerous Star Wars sculptures, some for Lucasfilm.  This piece has been part of a charity drive to benefit San Francisco hospitals.


Photos and writing by Chloe - 2015

Meeting Jennifer

This summer, I took a trip to Oklahoma to see someone I needed to reunite with even though we had not yet ever met: Jennifer. I had been connected to her online for years, and had been reading her blog for even longer. I left my 20th high school reunion in the New Mexico desert for the singing of cicadas and the sound of the wailing trains passing through Oklahoma City - for the feel of the summer humidity and heat on my skin in a way that I had not felt in a very long time.

Jennifer and I both spent a good portion of our nomadic childhoods on Route 66 and in the cities and towns that are dotted along that highway. I have always felt such a connection to her through her stories, partly because we grew up in the same generation, and part of that is because we were in the same places growing up - New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, many of the Midwest and Southwest states.

 I took a snapshot of this wall that is in the Albuquerque airport on my way to Oklahoma City see her....



Some nights, while Generation X sleeps, Jennifer is up, collecting and archiving the photos of our generation before they disappear forever, putting together the story of our generation, so that it won't be forgotten. In looking through these photos online, she has found at least one picture of herself from her childhood that she had never before seen. Someday, I hope she finds some retro photo of both her and I standing right near to each other in line at some roadside Tastee Freeze or Dairy Queen when we were very young.  I am convinced that she and I passed each other at least once on Route 66 or some similar highway as kids. Whether we glanced at each other through the back window of a car on the road, or whether we were shopping at the same souvenir shop, I have always had this feeling I had seen her somewhere before - decades ago - and most likely for only a fleeting second. Maybe the yellow NM license plate on the wall of the airport is sending some cryptic message that means the two of us saw each other in 1980 on the road somewhere in New Mexico?

When I visited Jennifer, I stayed in her guest house which was originally built as the maid's quarters about a century ago.  The kitchen inside had a coffee pot on the counter that I put to good use each day I was there and I drank my coffee out of a Fiestaware cup.

One evening at her house, we sat down to a sturdy wooden dining table heavy laden with all the colors of Fiestaware, and with skewers of grilled vegetables and burgers fresh from the grill that her husband Robert had barbecued for us. It reminded me of summer meals I ate as a child with family in Texas - it was profoundly meaningful to share a meal with her family, to see everyone in real life that I had only seen in digital pictures for years. The cool of the air conditioner fought back against the humid summer heat outside. The sun came in to puddle up onto the wood floors of her lovely house. I did not photograph the table or the house because it was too beautiful - it was more important for me to just be in the moment. I told myself I would photograph my own Fiestaware when I got home to tell the story.



I first ate on Fiestaware when I was a kid - it was at the home of my after-school babysitter, a lady who was from the last Lost Generation, who had lived through the Great Depression, The Dust Bowl. Fiestaware came about during the Great Depression - all the bright colors were meant to cheer people up.  While families often try to pass on the same china patterns through the generations, the reason I put these on my wedding registry years ago was so that I could share the same pattern of dishes with women from many generations even beyond my own family - it is a symbol of all the people who I would feed from my table who I had not yet met, of the connection we have to people who have had the same life experiences to us, whether we ever meet them or not. Both Jennifer and I are quintessential Generation Xers - we know what it's like to live through a dust bowl of our own - to come of age and continue to live on the timeline of history during an extended Crisis - when everything is turned upside down and the wells are found empty.

I was anticipating my visit to see Jennifer as the worst drought in California history kept hanging on, just as it still does.  One evening after packing my bags, it was hot and my back was aching fiercely, so I slept on the floor. In the middle of the night, I felt an earthquake quite unlike anything I'd ever felt. I could feel the house go over a wave of sorts as the plates of the earth shifted. My arm was up against the wall and my back was on the wood floor so my bones could feel the movement of the structure of the 1970s house that we live in. I could feel the framing of the house move like the skeletal structure of a whale move as it slowly goes over a large wave in the ocean. The movement was subtle enough that I knew everyone around was okay, but I wondered for a moment if any of my Fiestaware was going to slide off the kitchen shelf before I fell back asleep. One afternoon a few days later in Oklahoma City while laying on the bed to rest my tired back I felt a sharp jolt as if someone had rammed a car into Jennifer's guesthouse. I jumped up and ran in a sort of panic as the ground was moving.  It was another earthquake.  The shamrock green Fiestaware cup and saucer Jennifer had left for me on the counter sat calmly in its place. Jennifer is someone who kept herself stable for others even when some of those around her did not stay stable for her. 

Sometimes it is as if the very plates of the earth below us have to shift so that we can get to the next place in life that we are supposed to be.  And we see there is good in that.  Some days though, we feel fear as we brace ourselves against the next natural disaster, and it seems that the droughts will go on forever, and we wonder why it has to be that way.

Jennifer was given her name for some reason much larger than she may have ever knew - maybe because it is the most popular name for the women of our generation, maybe because she knows the suffering of all the Jennifers. She has been through a lot in this life - so much I know that she could empathize with any person of our generation.  She has gained a lot of wisdom through the hardships of life, and through her story she looks for redemption, and creates beauty of it all.  She reaches many other Jennifers through her story - many other Gen Xers.  She is a natural born storyteller, and when she speaks, light fills the room. She knows what it is like to have the foundations of life moved below her, yet she uses her difficulties to pass on hope. Sometimes when I look at people's lives who have had a large amount of suffering, it makes me think of the suffering of saints.  

Both Jennifer and I write about, and are fascinated with history, and generations, and generational theory - the generational turnings of history. Every four generations, at least in the Western World, there is what is called a Lost Generation - the last one were those who came of age during World War I. The current one is Generation X.  We grew up in a time when children were valued the least in modern history, yet we are now known as the best parents in modern history. At Jennifer's house, I watched as she took care of each little detail of her kids' lives, how she entered each present moment with them. Maybe each Lost Generation is the ultimate salt of the earth....

There are these extraordinary moments I have shared with Jennifer over the years, these things that have happened that are far too coincidental to be a coincidence, that have been seemingly cosmic, divine.  There are too many moments to name, and many of these moments would be almost impossible to describe, though there are a few that I can share with you....







One of those moments was in 2012, when right around the same time, both of us found an almost identical, newly hatched, little blue egg shell laying in the grass - for me it was in Oregon, for her it was in Oklahoma, and we both saw a delicate beauty in it and photographed it.

There was another time when we both had similar experiences of experiencing God's presence on baseball fields...and we both stopped to take pictures of the moment - the list goes on and on and goes back further and further in time....

There were moments when, around the same time of our lives - for her it was in the summer of 1978, and for me it was in the summer of 1979 - when we each stopped and watched fireflies glowing on a warm evening, ascending and descending, and each of us experienced a juxtaposition of beauty and tragedy going on in our lives as young Gen Xers as we stared at the fireflies.

The last night I was with Jennifer in Oklahoma City, we went out, and when we got back to her house we were standing in the driveway. I could not believe my eyes when I noticed that there were fireflies lit up, encircling us, with their peaceful glow. The beginning of our journeys as Gen Xers began with memories of fireflies, and our visit ended with fireflies as well. The fireflies left us as quickly as they came - they were on their way somewhere, they stopped and encircled us briefly and then left.  It was just like how Jennifer and I probably crossed each other's paths on Route 66 as kids - only briefly, and on the way to somewhere else.

I never really thought that I would call someone in this life a soul mate, as I had never really found anyone who can operate on the same wavelength as I do, who can see the human experience the way I do. Until I found Jennifer, I had never found anyone who can hold humor, and tragedy, the presence of God, and the weight of the pain of a generation all in one moment, yet she can, she is Jennifer.   

Thank you, Jennifer, for letting me come see you, for letting me be in your presence. After all these years of reading your writing, it was so good to hear your storytelling in person, and to hear your infectious laugh. After all these years of exchanging digital words, it was so good to give you a hug, and to break bread with you, and to sip coffee from your shamrock-green Fiestaware cup. You are kind, generous, and full of profound beauty. You are Jen X. You are encircled with Light.

Photo Credit: Jennifer McCollum

If you follow this blog because you love reading about Generation X, you will love Jennifer's blog even more: Are you there, God? It's me Generation X

(c) 2015 - Chloe Koffas - all rights reserved 

The New Mexico Sky and Why You Can't Go Home Again

All the thunderstorms of summer stood back and paused as I went back to New Mexico for the first time in many years - the land where I was born and came of age. On my way to my 20th high school reunion, I was thinking about the people I needed so much to see and the way they had become a part of me, and I was thinking about the land - the way it had always left its mark on my soul - the mountains, the bright blue skies, the way the clouds would lay down their heavy shadows on the ground. 

These images that I captured on my camera from the window of the plane as we flew toward Albuquerque were so familiar. As a child, I would fly across the Southwest by myself - the shadows would cover the ground, and patches of light would come through, and I would feel these sparks from within even the deepest of my sorrow - these shards of infinite peace in the most center part of myself - in spite of all the problems that I had left on the ground - even if just for a couple of hours. 

Looking down on the ground was where I was nearer to the clouds, in between time zones, even outside of time, was where I could merge with God.  

I had a lot of unfinished business to take care of on this recent trip, messages that  I needed to convey, reconnecting that need to happen, places I needed to visit, things that needed closure.... 

There were people I needed to embrace, people I needed to say thank you to, things that had been left unsaid that needed to be said. 

The shadow of our plane moved across the desert ground on this land where I was born as our plane descended. I thought about how our souls come into our bodies when we first come into this world - if we come from some outer stretch of the universe and descend, then our soul merges with our cells, our bones, and our DNA in the way a plane merges with the earth when it touches down on a runway. I wondered if maybe this is how my soul first descended toward earth - over this desert landscape, with the dark blue of mountains on the horizon, and the light blue of the sky.   

This was that quintessential epic journey for me - the one where you go out in the world and become who you were meant to be in spite of your upbringing, or maybe because of it, and then you go and stand where you once stood and choose to make peace with everything you were ever at war with when you were young. 

   

This land is rich with Native American culture, it permeated our lives in a way that we didn't always realize - in a way that was often implicit.  It was in the rhythms that we could feel below our feet when we walked barefoot on the desert sand.  It was in the movement of the brown swelling water of the Rio Grande. In the early mornings and late afternoons of my youth, the all covering Father Sky would stretch over me every day I was alive like it was the only thing always willing to embrace me.  

In the distance is the mountain line that will always be a part of my memories of my youth.  That distinct line has become part of the landscape of my own soul.  

There is a life that some people create for themselves in this city - a life of sipping wine and spending hours on the golf course, and living in the right neighborhood.  Meanwhile, there are parts of this city where poverty means dirt floors and not enough to eat, and moments or even lifetimes of hopelessness. 

In making some kind of peace with this place, there were a few roads I needed to travel on, a few places I needed to stop by.  Heading up this road makes me think of a birthday party I had in elementary school at a house I lived in that was up this road - and how I keep a photo of that party tucked away, out of the light, in a photo box in the room in which I now sit and write, and how half the girls at that party are no longer alive on this earth. To the right of this road is a sidewalk though it's hidden almost entirely by the green plants that sprung up from the rains of July monsoon season - this is where I at one time walked with each of those girls who I have since lost, to go to the nearby park, or to go buy magazines with our allowance money at a nearby store... This road holds so much sorrow for me.  Clouds began to build in the distance with the promise of more rain, just like they always did. Just like I remember. 

It's a city where too many people die too young, a city full of secrets kept for far too long, and a city with far too many addictions. There is a darkness that falls on the ground each night in a way that is relentless, in a way that makes you wonder if the light will even come again in the morning. Darkness fell on the city just like I remember. 

Albuquerque. Pink and lavender light bounce off the clouds in the foreground, while yellow and orange light covers the sky in the distance. Captured in this shot in the light of dusk, are hospitals, and churches, and a vintage motels, and it's hard to say which of these buildings have held the most weight from the stories of the human situation.    

I don't know what it is about this city, but its edges spill over with dichotomy, with juxtaposition.  It holds within it a light-drenched hope on the horizon and an enormous overbearing sorrow in it's dark alleys. Maybe that can be said of any city.

I took these sunset photos from a posh roof-top hotel bar as I sat next to a table of movie stars and crew working on a local film. Even in the cool breezes of the evening and the flicker of city lights slowly emerging, it was hard to stop thinking about how this renovated building was originally a mental hospital and how I remember going in it to visit a distant relative when I was a child.  

Even if you spend the whole second half of your life trying to take care of unfinished business, it seems there will always be something left undone, something that cannot be repaired in this lifetime, and for those situations that I may never be able to fix, I can only hope for grace.  

More fluorescent pink bounces off the lavender clouds and a pale blue sky. If you look close enough, you can see the shape of a flying dove in the middle of the sky in pink. Maybe it was a fleeting image of the grace that hangs over this city.  When I was a child I would pretend that the ground was the ocean and the lights, as they began to come on, were the boats floating on the water. In spite of wishing I was someplace far from the desert as I grew up, I also knew that a profound beauty existed all around me, and that this was only the beginning - that there were many more places I belonged, and that I would soon enough no longer belong here.

"Child, child, have patience and belief, for life is many days, and each present hour will pass away. Son, son, you have been...furious and wild, filled with hatred and despair, and all the dark confusions of the soul - but so have we...You have stumbled on in darkness, you have been pulled in opposite directions, you have faltered, you have missed the way, but, child, this is the chronicle of the earth. And now...you will grow desperate again before you come to evening, we who have stormed the ramparts of the furious earth and been hurled back, we who have been maddened by the unknowable and bitter mystery of love, we who have hungered after fame and savored all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us..."

-Thomas Wolfe You Can't Go Home Again

(c) 2015 Writing and photography by Chloe Koffas - all rights reserved