Letter to Elizabeth, 

I was thinking of the book you're reading on quantum physics and postulating how particle physics could relate to the social world, when I remembered you jokingly saying you don't want your molecules intermingling with certain people. I understand and trust me, in a very real sense we never touch anything. Everything we touch when reduced to the quantum level is electromagnetic repulsion. Surrounding every nucleus of every atom or molecule in our body is a sphere of negatively charged electrons orbiting at near light speed. Since they're orbiting so fast around such an extraordinarily small space, the electrons create an impenetrable sphere, sort of like an elite bodyguard of soldiers that will never allow another electron to touch or pass through. 

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AuthorRobert Ankony

Maturity takes time:

Mine started twelve time zones away in the triple-canopied jungles of Vietnam.  Southeast Asia is such a lovely, lush green wonderland, but it was 1968, the peak of the war. There were 540,000 Americans in South Vietnam and more than a million enemy soldiers, each young man determined to kill the other. As the 19th century Prussian General, Carl von Clausewitz said, "War is the continuation of politics by other means."

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AuthorRobert Ankony
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Friday, November 9, 1962, was sunny and mild—a perfect day for skipping school. (Of course, even bad days were a fine time to ditch classes at Wilson Junior High.) I was 14 and had already failed seventh grade. I had plenty of friends in southwest Detroit, and Wilson had lots of kids just like me. It took only a minute to find my friend Ron, and we took off walking from Detroit to Dearborn to see the Ford Rotunda.

 

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AuthorRobert Ankony

It was a beautiful summer day, and I had just spent most of it in the 22nd District Court of Michigan, in the city of Inkster, a notoriously high-crime suburb west of Detroit. I was there because, three months before, on Thursday, March 4, 1976, a drunk ran a stop sign and slammed into my shiny black ’73 Ford LTD on Michigan Avenue in Inkster. I was still in uniform after finishing my shift in the scout car and making six arrests. So Jackie Wayne Giles, 36, became my seventh arrest that day.

On Tuesday, September 13, 1977, I walked into your office and saw you for the first time. That afternoon I called and asked you out. 

Just days before we met Voyager I and II were launched. Voyager I has now crossed the point where it is the first man-made object to reach interstellar space, the area where most atoms are not from here but formed from other stars.

 

Posted
AuthorRobert Ankony

Since 1979, my wife, Cathy, and I lived in our lovely quad-level home on Grosse Ile, a small island town twenty miles south of Detroit. Our house was paid off and was always a source of pride—to me after growing up in Detroit, and to my wife, who was raised in the government projects of Norwayne (later the city of Westland). We raised our daughter and two sons, and in April 2014, after spending the winter in balmy Huntington Beach, California, far from the snows and subzero temperatures of Michigan, we decided it was time to move. Two of our children had been living out of state for years, our youngest son was in college, and all of our kids hoped to end up in California.

On average, I run 2,800 miles a year, so in the forty-six years since I returned from the jungles of Vietnam, I’ve logged 129,000 miles. That’s more than five times around the Earth, and more than half the distance to the moon. I love running long-range. Going the distance is an Army Ranger tradition, and running whenever and wherever I choose, in good weather or bad, I’m free to think and dream and still live the brotherhood as part of the troop