Fantastic Voyage

Years ago I had a favorite T-shirt that had the following words printed on the front “sixty hours till Monday, thirty-eight dollars and change.” This cryptic message comes back to me from time to time and reminds me of the many different ways I have spent my weekends over the past twenty-five years. A lot has changed in those twenty-five years but I do still love the T-shirt.

Most weekends in our house are centered on activities that allow us to wind down from the week. We often have our extended family members visit on Friday night so sometimes the wind down period is actually quite hectic. Members of my wife’s family will come to visit bringing along their children and our house is filled with the sounds and dietary demands of children ranging in age from six-months to nine and a half years old. Last night, with the addition of my wife’s mother, the age range in our house was six-months to seventy-nine years old. Our boys played games with their grandmother (electronic Battleship and Dominoes), the younger children seemed to play with something different every five minutes or otherwise follow the older children, and the infant child just watched in amazement as all of the activity buzzed about. I would join the scene for brief moments to get something from the kitchen or to eat dinner, but for me quieter pursuits bring me more pleasure on a Friday night. Besides, I had a book that I was determined to finish.

After I finished reading my book I was really too tired to do much more. It had been a long week. Retreating to my office in our home (this really is just a space where I both work and relax) I found that it was far enough from the activity to give me peace, and yet close enough that I could still check in from time to time. I decided that I was not going to do anything that resembled work this evening, no writing, no thinking, not even checking email (I did check before going to bed).

I have a small television in my office, just a thirteen inch model that gets basic cable. This means that I can watch the “lower” range of stations on cable, most of which include such channels as the local television stations, ESPN and American Movie Classics or Turner Classic Television. These channels tend to show the old movies and I enjoy watching them when I have the time. Last night the classic movie that was on one of the channels was “Fantastic Voyage.” Fantastic Voyage was filmed in 1966 and while thought to be based on the novel by Isaac Asimov, was actually written by Jerome Bixby. I will come back to Asimov a bit later.

Fantastic Voyage is a movie that I enjoyed as a young child. The premise of the movie is best described by one of the tag lines from the movie “A Fantastic and Spectacular Voyage...Through The Human Body...Into The Brain.” In truth the movie is neither fantastic nor spectacular. One of the stars of the movie is Raquel Welch, and there are a couple of fantastic shots of her in the movie, but that is not relevant to this story.

While I was watching the movie I was joined by my son, Max. Since I was sitting in my favorite chair, Max took a seat at my desk. I have this tendency to multi-task so while watching the movie I was reading yet another book. There are so many commercial breaks in old movies that I can get a fair amount of reading in. Max was multi-tasking also. He sat at my desk and was writing a story (observe how what we do influences our children) about how his cousin (a six year old girl who at that moment was down stairs screaming in the kitchen) sometimes annoys him. He said, “I really like seeing her but sometimes she gets on my nerves.” I suggested that he should write his story about that while trying to find the humor in the situation. I don’t think that he actually finished his story last night, but then we all know how that works. During one point when both Max and I were watching the movie I was reminiscing about how I had watched the movie when I was about his age. Max’s response was “you mean they had televisions back then?”

When my children ask me questions about the past sometimes it reminds me of how old I really am. But Max’s question sparked a flood of memories about life back in the sixties that I remember fondly. Yes, we did have television then. We also had something else, the Drive In Theater. Back when I was a child our Friday nights were spent at the Drive In Theater. Drive Ins had everything a young kid could want on a Friday night. We would all climb into our family station wagon and head there as soon as my stepfather came home from work. In the summer, that meant that we would arrive early enough to enjoy the playground, play catch, and my sisters would jump rope. Our family would always bring food from home because it was far too expensive to eat the food from the snack bar. Still, mom would allow us to get a treat from the snack bar during the intermission. There was an intermission because usually there were two or three movies playing every night. The progression as I can recall it was a kid friendly movie first, then ending with something that the adults would enjoy watching when the kids would finally fall asleep. I remember that I first saw “Blazing Saddles” at the Drive In. The cost was sometimes just one dollar per carload. We would go to the theater with as many as eight people in our car. We could do that then because there were no car seats, and seat belt use was not then the law of the land.

Cars were really big in the sixties. Of course by today’s standards of the SUV that my family drives perhaps this is not so different. Back then we fed our gas guzzler with “Hi-Test” which only cost nineteen point nine cents per gallon. I still can’t figure out how they worked the point nine part since you always paid with cash. How exactly would you have covered the point nine tenths of a cent if you filled up at that precise point? I am going to have to research that one. Any way, the car had roll-up windows. Not the electric one touch type my kids have come to expect. We also had just an AM radio. Except for the advent of radio Disney, it is likely that my children would even know about AM or FM radio.

During our summer vacations in the sixties our family could not afford to go away for any length of time. So, our summers included “day trips.” That was a trip where you would leave in the morning and return to your home at some point within the next eighteen hours, and usually included a stretch were my dad would fall asleep in the car. Growing up in Philadelphia, this meant that we could travel to New York City, Washington D.C., Harrisburg Pennsylvania, and the New Jersey shore. We liked the shore the best. One of our favorite destination was Atlantic City long before casino gambling. We would pack up the car and our bathing suits and head for the beach. The favorite all day beach was Wild Wood, New Jersey. There the beach included a day in the sand and then off to the board walk at night. Our family car was the central rendezvous location. During the day we would go back to the car to get more food, change clothes (you just lived with the sand in your underpants) and even have a nap as the day wore on. The night was filled with riding the rides on the board walk and eating waffles and ice cream, corn dogs, and lemonade. By the end of the day we were always sick from a toxic combination of food, an excess of sun, sand, and sugar.

As Max and I sat in our respective places multi-tasking I could not help but have the flood of memories from my youth. The sixties have marked my life and my point of view in so many ways. Some of those memories are profound, some sad, but most were of happy times just being a ten year old and playing whenever I could.

Before I forget let’s get back to Isaac Asimov. My son Max really enjoyed the recent movie I-Robot starring Will Smith. This movie is based on the Science Fiction novel that unlike Fantastic Voyage was actually written by Isaac Asimov. This morning I found it pretty amazing how I could be sitting in my chair in 2005 with a child born in the nineties (my own son), and could be linked to the memories of a child born in the fifties while watching together a movie from the sixties. After all of these years I do still enjoy my Friday nights. No period of my life has been better, and Friday is still my favorite day of the week this has really been a fantastic voyage.