Tunein’

Prologue by Andrew Spooling It started, for me, in an airport in Des Moines, Iowa, some 50 years ago, on a Sunday evening in mid-September. All flights were delayed by some heroic weather that was threatening tornadoes, and was accompanied by the fiercest thundering and lightning exhibitions I had ever experienced. No one was going out in this weather, and it was to be awhile before the planes would be flying. The passengers on my flight were given the choice of a hotel nearby for the night, or exchanging their coach seats for first class on the first available flight. Most of them chose the hotel, but a few of us decided on the upgrade to first class. I’d slept in airports before; it wasn’t the most comfortable thing, but it was only for one night. Besides, by the time we were all herded into a bus and transported to the hotel, half the night would be gone anyway. On the bright side, I had a lot of work to get done, and this would give me the time I needed to do some catching up. I’m an architect, and was currently working on the plans for a major project, for which I was the lead guy. The airport had installed a very helpful wireless network, with several work stations throughout, and I proceeded to take advantage of them. I opened my laptop and booted it. It made a few loops, and shut down. Several more times I tried, with the same result each time. Frustrated, I banged my hand on the side of my seat, and angrily shut the cover on the laptop. “Can I help?” said a voice a couple of seats down from me. “Do you know anything about computers?” I replied, to the young man who had the appearance of a typical Iowa farm boy. “Not really, but I may be able to solve your problem” he said confidently. Well, I really didn’t know what was wrong, but I was desperate to get back to work, so I handed the lap top over to him. The fool didn’t even open the laptop. He turned it over, still running, put his ear to it and listened with great interest. Then, with his index fingers, he tapped the bottom of the case several times with a definite rhythm, handed it back to me and said, “I think this is ok now.” What a joke! He never even opened the case – how could he possibly know it was fixed. Laughing, I opened the case, booted it, and instantly my program opened before me, faster than it ever had before. I was convinced that jostling the computer back and forth fixed whatever was wrong, and that this guys tapping had absolutely nothing to do with it. But…..wait a minute! This thing is running like it has never run before. Every screen appeared instantly as I called it up, and I moved from application to application with no hesitation. It didn’t run like this when it was new. “What did you do to this computer?” I asked. He replied that he just had a knack for fixing things, and left it at that. I lost interest in my work at this point, and wanted to talk to this young man. He was 20 years old, and had a quiet, comfortable maturity that was very impressive, and I was convinced that he had, indeed, miraculously restored my computer to a state that was beyond its’ original capacity and I wanted to find out why. He said his name was Rod Harris, and he was the oldest of 4 children. We seemed to warm to each other quickly, and in the conversation that followed, he revealed that his dad was a drunk and completely unreliable, and his mother was dying of cancer. “What kind of things do you fix?” I asked, and he replied that he didn’t like to talk about it very much. Being in the business world, where everyone is stepping on everyone else, trying to move ahead in their profession, I was not accustomed to such genuine humility. I must say it was very refreshing. I was getting pretty hungry, so I offered to buy supper for my new friend. He refused, until I told him it was more than worth it for the help he gave me on the laptop. There was a Taco Bell in the airport, and we went there for a quick meal. As it turned out, the tacos were not selling like hotcakes that night as the place was nearly empty, so we stayed there and talked for over 4 hours. I found out that we would be sharing an American Eagle flight to Dallas, where his mother lay in a cancer center at the Medical City Dallas Radiation Oncology Center. She was considered terminal, and he was flying to Dallas to see her one last time before she succumbed to stage 4 lung cancer. His father was out of the picture, and the other kids were staying with his mom’s sister, who lived in Kansas. After a couple of hours, Rod began to loosen up a bit and tell me a little about this “knack” of his. He had always sensed there was something unusual about him, but the first evidence of the nature of this difference came when he was about eight years old. He and his father had gone to town, about 20 miles from the farm, to get some supplies. On the return home, in a major storm accompanied by tornados, the old Ford truck died and they were stranded in the middle of open fields with no shelter. His father was under the hood trying to find the problem, when Rod climbed out of the truck and asked his dad to get in the truck and try to start it. For some reason, his dad did not ridicule Rod the way he usually did, perhaps because of the desperate circumstance. Rod listened closely to the grinding of the starter, and then started to tap on the flathead 6 cylinder engine with his two index fingers. The truck started immediately. Rod put the hood down, got in the truck and they drove home, reaching there just before the storm hit with full force. Rod’s father did not mention the incident again, but he sensed a measure of interest and possibly respect that wasn’t there before.