Friend #19 - Charley

Charley has always been good at figuring things out.

He was once traveling to Roswell, New Mexico.  His flight landed after the sun had set.  He rented a car and while driving down the long, narrow road into Roswell, he saw a mysterious glow in the sky that seemed to be following him.  Anyone that knows anything about Roswell, New Mexico might think that Charley was experiencing a U.F.O.  But Charley doesn’t believe in such things.  He kept studying the eerie orb from his vantage point behind the steering wheel, wondering what exactly it could be.  When he finally reached the town, itself, he realized the glow was actually the city’s lights being reflected off the low-hanging mist.  The slight curvature of road he was traveling gave the impression that the lights were following him.  I asked him if he believed that this may have been the cause of a lot of U.F.O. sightings in the Roswell area.  And he said, ‘yes’.

While in Roswell, he happened to meet the son of the neighbor of the farmer who originally found an object that fell from the sky.  The man told Charley no one thought much of it until the newspapers got involved.  Charley believes this is where the propaganda and conspiracies about U.F.O.’s started.  Instead of factual accuracy, there were a few who profited off of the idea of aliens landing on earth based on a singular event which could have been cause by something very simple.

Charley has figured other things out, as well.  He once had a woman tell him that while she was in Canada, she and a friend had a spiritual experience close to a frozen lake.  They were walking towards the lake when a force that she could only describe as sound waves, physically pushed them out onto it.  Charley sighed, knowing there had to be an explanation.  He began asking questions about what the woman saw and heard in the moments before this spiritual experience, and the woman told him she did hear a loud rumbling immediately before the event.  It was Charley who deduced that on the other side of the mountain behind her, there must have been an avalanche just out of eyesight.  The force of the tumbling snow caused the powerful sound waves that pushed her out onto the lake.  And the mystery was solved.

Charley enjoys these real life brain teasers.  He likes the way the laws of nature have absolute certainty.  And yet, there is one mystery in his life that constantly challenges his ordered existence.  His thirteen-year-old son has Asperger’s Disease. 

Charley can study the disease.  He can study its symptoms.  He can study medications and treatments.  But he cannot control the devastating irregularities of the actions of his son.  I asked him if he had wanted more children but he said he and his wife could barely keep up with the child they had.  He described his young son like three children all in one. 

And so, for all the order and tidiness in Charley’s life, there is this one little thing that will never make sense in an otherwise orderly universe, a peculiar irregularity that can never be solved.