Book Review - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Powell's Books · Barnes & Noble

Douglas Adams ©1979

I read this book because it's one of those novels that is woven into our culture, and it bothers me when I catch myself nodding along with references, parallels, or jokes that I don't get. Or worse, when I have to ask for clarification and the words “Oh, you've never read it?” float over, complete with sympathetic head tilt.

Grrr, gimme that thing.

With my usual dubious feeling towards all things revered I cracked the cover. After reading the opening page, all my doubts vaporized, and soon afterwards so did our planet—in the story...

Arthur Dent is a normal English Joe, who fancies a cup of tea in the morning and a pint in the afternoon. He is dragged away from his house, which is about to be bulldozed to make room for a highway interchange, by his friend, Ford Prefect.

Ford is a galactic hitchhiking alien who's been stranded on Earth for the last fifteen years, while doing research for the title book, “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

Ford could care less about Arthur's house, as he's just intercepted a signal from a Vogon Constructor Ship, which he knows are tasked with destroying planets to clear a routes for new hyper-spatial expressways. Progress, you know. He's brought Arthur to the pub in attempt to tank him up to ease the inherent discomfort of riding in a matter transference beam.

Ford and Arthur stowaway on the Vogon ship, and therein begins the adventure in which they learn the origins of our planet, for whom it was created, and why. Along the way we meet the two headed, AWOL, galactic president/hippie, Zaphod Beeblebrox, Trillium, who is the other remaining earthling, and a manically depressed robot named Marvin.

And then there's The Guide, with a cover stating, "DON'T PANIC", and subjects illuminating readers on nearly infinite topics, including the necessity for hitchhikers to possess a clean towel at all times.


The author, Douglas Adams, takes gorgeous colors from physics, math, social parallels, humor, and pure originality, and swirls them in a bucket of flippant genius; then he crunches up a spaceship and dips it in. Shaking it out, and hung on the line to dry is this book.

The product is slightly psychedelic, loaded with wildly imaginative ideas that swirled before my mind's eyes before shifting into something else fascinating and original.  For example, the guide informs us that the “..beautiful planet Bethselamin is now so worried about cumulative erosion by ten billion visiting tourists a year that any net imbalance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete while on the planet is surgically removed from your body weight when you leave: so every time you go to the lavatory it is vitally important to get a receipt.” Or there's the improbable inventor of the golden Infinite Improbability generator, “which could generate the infinite improbability field needed to flip a spaceship across the mind-paralyzing distances between the farthest stars” without all that “tedious mucking about in hyperspace”, who was a student rather than a self-exalted physicist.  He ended up being lynched by an angry mob of physicists who just can't stand a smart ass.

With all these potential story threads flying around, there's me wondering what to make of it, and hoping he'll go in deep with one or two of my favorites. Then the book ends when the characters decide it's time for lunch.

Just like that.

Huh? Wha? You mean this isn't going to go on until every original idea is put in a mortar and ground into dust by a pestle wielding author? You want me to think about these things, and make what I will of them? How weird. How lovely. How trippy. Wheee!

I’m in! Just let me go pack my towel.

A Virus Descends

(Originally written, September 25, 2013)

Like the turn of the seasons to an aged farmer, I can feel it in my bones when a sickness is about to descend upon our household. Generally the weather is still nice, but a mom sense tingle tells me something is coming. Then perhaps there’s a friend over who comments, “My throat feels a little scratchy,” or there’s that kid in the park with a runny nose. (I'm not judging, my kids have been that kid before.)  Unbidden, visions of sleepless nights, endless coughing, my house littered with wet tissues, confinement to our home, and money pouring through my fingers, flit through my mind, raising the hair on the back of my neck as my flight reflex urges me to scoop up my kids and head for the hold and batten down the hatch, while the waves of viruses wash over the deck of our family ship.

I hold onto something and breathe to deliver oxygen to the logic centers in my brain. The serenity prayer flows through my mind reminding me to accept the things I cannot change.  If there are children around with outward signs of infection, the virus is most likely already at work inside my little ones, insidiously hiding in their bodies, replicating themselves again and again, waiting for their numbers to grow substantial enough to launch an attack on my child's cells. Then their immune system responds in kind, and their eyes take on that lackluster look, the mucous appears, and the deep harrrooof, harrrooof sound comes from their tiny throats as they try in vain to expel the invader from their body.

Mama, I don't feel good.

I remind myself to take each day as it comes. We have survived these viruses countless times before, and we will persevere once again. I wonder how long this one will last. Maybe it will just be a three day cold. That has happened before—once. More likely it will start in her head, then settle in her chest for a one to two month stay. Coughing fits keeping her up late, and waking her—and everyone else—for hours. Then morning arrives and I rise to send my little red-nosed, dark eyed, zombie off to school. The littlest one tethers me to our house, and my eyes lose focus as I start pacing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

And so it has been for the last six weeks in our home.

Two trips to the doctor later we find that Danielle's cold has become bronchitis. Not only does she have fluid in her lungs, but both ears are so stopped up that the doctor thinks she has a hearing loss of forty decibels. This is not news to us as “huh?” has been her response to anything we have said for weeks now. Including doctor visits, tissues, remedies and prescriptions, we easily have three hundred dollars invested in this cold. We have lost countless hours of sleep; one child wakes up to have a coughing fit, which wakes up the other child before falling back to sleep, who has a coughing fit and wakes up the other before falling back to sleep, who has a coughing fit who wakes up the other… And so we go bouncing from child to child, torn by our bodies’ need for sleep and our children's need for comfort.

For. Six. Weeks. And counting…

Before having children, I blissfully unaware of the toll it takes on you as a person—beyond seasonal illnesses—everything. But I'm always grateful this hardship is mine, and Charley's too, of course. I know the trials we endure parenting our girls are forging us into better people. Being in a forge is not particularly fun, it's pretty hot, and you get smacked around with big hammers a lot, but I think we'll come out as something new, still composed of the same basic elements, but perhaps wiser, stronger, and more useful. Besides, being quenched in buckets of “Mama, I love you”, hugs that dry tears, and saturated with the magic of childhood innocence feels pretty damn great. 

I wouldn't trade my spot in the forge for anything.

Gotta go, I need to run to the store for more orange juice and Kleenex.

Transcendent Leaves

“The trees have a lot of leaves this year, Mama. The leaf pile is going to be humongous!” Boots says. “When will they fall?”

It's August, and the leaves are still green, but Boots is filled with anticipation.

“Not until fall,” is my reply.

Boots says, “That’s why fall is called 'fall', cause the leaves fall off the trees!”

*Thinks for a moment.*

“How much longer until fall?”

It goes on like this for quite some time. Finally, the colors start to change, and Boots gets really excited. She starts peppering me with questions, inspiring this post: The Trees are All Naked Mama!  Although Berzo gets the credit for naming it... 

After the colors changed, Boots began checking the backyard daily. When the leaves finally started to drop, there's about twelve, she asked for a rake. She piled them all up, and she and Berzo did a test jump.

“We need more leaves,” she declared.

Fall, as Defined by Boots, is Here!
Finally the leaves start to fall in earnest. Boots and Berzo rake them up, (Boots rakes—Berzo holds a rake and moves it around a bit) and they spend the next hour, jumping, burying, throwing, re-raking, and moving the pile.

Thanks to the unseasonably dry, late October and November, we got quite a bit of mileage out of our leaf pile. It was the plaything of choice when Boots' friend, Madi, came over to play. They raked up all the new fallen leaves, all the while arguing about who got which rake, into an even bigger heap. Unsatisfied, they eyed the leaves still hanging on the branches. With upturned rakes, they attempt to add the leaves that hadn't seen fit to grace their leaf pile yet.  Still unsatisfied, Madi, climbed up the tree, stood on a branch and bounced her legs, causing the branch to wave, bringing more leaves down.

When the girls tired of piling, jumping, throwing and burying, they loaded the leaves up on a snow sled and dragged them over to the play structure. At the foot of the slide, they made a pile of leaves and pushed some part of the way up. Then they hauled the sled up into the play structure and tobogganed down the slide to land in a big poof of flying leaves. Once the plastic toboggan broke they took turns sliding normally, that was deemed too boring, so they got out our flexible disc sled and gave that a whirl—much to their satisfaction.  I wish I'd gotten a video, it was really something.

For a week or two this went on, Madi knocked on our front door, Boots dashed up to answer it, and instead of saying, hello, she shouted, “Let’s go in my backyard and play in the leaves!!”

Then they'd go running through the house to the backdoor, wrestle with the kinda-broken screen door, yell for my help, then they'd launch themselves into the backyard. Berzo would usually try to follow, but unfortunately, it was usually a no-little-sisters-allowed sort of event, so she and I'd find something else to occupy ourselves.

What is it—Really—About Leaf Piles?
Leaf pile diving is among those quintessential kid activities that transcends generations and culture differences; much like carpet lava with couch cushion stepping stones, and rolling down grassy hills.

It's in Our DNA
I'm fairly certain that prehistoric kids took up bare branches, and raked up piles of fallen leaves.  Then with joined hands, they sprinted and launched themselves into the pile. Laughing, they’d flop backwards, then one would get up and bury the other. The bury-er, likely a big brother, would run into the cave dragging Mom away from the fire pit, where she was frying up mammoth steaks on hot rocks, claiming that a cave lion dragged away his little sister. Mom would eye the rustling leaf pile, feign panic, then little sister would burst out of the pile, to everyone's delight. Then Mom would remember the steaks, and tell her cave kids to get this mess cleaned up before the hunters returned. They'd start raking again, only to feel the magnetic pull of the leaf pile…

A Hypothesis
Yes, the magnetic energy of the leaf pile is indefatigable.  The more massive the the leaf pile the greater the magnetic attraction, and the wider the field.  A large pile can hurl children towards itself from anywhere in our neighborhood; until the leaves are scattered substantially enough to dissipate the attractive force of the pile.

The selective nature of this attraction is interesting, in that it only works on young kids, as older adolescent kids seem to exhibit repellent forces.  ("Awww- do I have to rake the leaves???")  I posit that the chemical/hormone changes endured during puberty sufficiently alters a child's molecular structure, or perhaps redistributes magnetic elements, such that it effectively reverses the child's leaf magnetism polarity.   Further study in this area is necessary...

I must admit that I took a couple experimental dives myself, but since my polarity is that of an adult's, sadly, it had no pull.  Watching those girls play though, was even better than anything I remember from my leaf diving days—it was pure magic.