R and J in the USA

We stumbled upon the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Radio Telescope in West Virginia. It is the largest steerable radio telescope in the United States and it is located inside the National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ) which is a large area of land in the United States designated as a radio quiet zone, in which radio transmissions are restricted by law to facilitate scientific research and the gathering of military intelligence. About half of the zone is located in the Allegheny Mountains of east-central West Virginia. It was a neat and enchanting place to stumble upon accidentally and ended up being a pleasant surprise in more ways than one.

We had so much fun wandering through the science center displays and enjoying studying the mysteries of the universe that they were teaching us about.

There was one exhibit that particularly caught Julie’s fancy. While she stopped to enjoy the exhibit, Ryan caught Julie having a conversation with someone she appeared to be quite taken with.

To educate the public about the mysteries of light and electromagnetic waves and how they shape reality by the various amplitudes and frequencies that make them up, the science center had a number of fun house mirrors. One such mirror was the kind that caused the object to be reflected in a vertically stretched manner – but not in one of those super wonky stretched out ways, just stretched out a little bit to add about 4 inches or so.

The person Julie had encountered that she was clearly quite happy to be talking with – was a 5’4” version of herself.

Anyone that knows Julie knows one thing for sure – she is short. You don’t even need to know her to know this. If you have seen even one picture, you will probably notice it fairly quickly. And she is not just on the shorter side, she is, “does a human adult really wear shoes of this size?” short. And Julie is comfortable in her own skin and happy to be whatever size or shape that she happens to be. She likes being short and it is just part of her life that, for the most part, fades into the background as neither a good nor a bad thing. Like everything in life, it has its advantages and its disadvantages, evening out to be nothing more than just a descriptive quality at the end of the day.

HOWEVER, if you know Julie well, you have probably heard her say at one point or another, if the topic happens to arise, that she doesn’t FEEL short on the inside. Not because being short necessarily has a specific feeling, but it is just a feeling she has always had. One way she knows she doesn’t feel as short as she is because, everytime she sees a picture of herself, she is, for just a moment, surprised. Even after decades of being 5 feet tall, every time she sees herself in the mirror, there is this little place where her own short size takes her aback for the teeniest of moments. It is strange because it is the only reflection she has ever had in the mirror, but it is just cause it doesn’t match the feeling she has on the inside. Anytime we see pictures of us in groups and Julie is extremely noticeably the valley in a sea of mountains towering above her, it always seems surprising to her. But, alas, it is the nature of things and she embraces her small stature for the benefits that come with it and that it is just the way things are.

If you know her really, really well, you may have sometimes heard her say, I may be 5 feet on the outside, but on the inside, I feel 5’4” – specifically. It’s a strange and very precise thing to say and a strange thing to feel, but it is how she feels. 5’4” is not tall by any standards, but, to Julie, it’s huge – and, regardless, it is just the height that she feels on the inside, whacky as it may sound. She has attributed the incongruence of this feeling to stories that her parents tell her about an unexpected period in her infancy when her growth stunted while her parents moved from Cleveland, OH where she was born to Rochester, NY where she grew up. The pediatrician had assured her parents at the time that there was nothing wrong and that she would eventually begin growing again at a normal pace, but that, for whatever reason, she was finding the move stressful and would not start growing again until the move was done. And that is what happened. We all know that moving is stressful, but most infants don’t concern themselves with it all that much.

To this day, Julie holds that her temporary infantile and futile protest at relocation is where she lost the extra four inches that she feels inside of her.

Strange story…but true.

Well, in this particular science center, Julie was pretty excited, for the first time in her life, to get to meet the 5’4” Julie she had long known inside. As the Pointer Sisters once so eloquently put, she was so excited and she just couldn’t hide it. She couldn’t get enough of seeing herself on the outside the way she felt on the inside.

And Ryan caught her in admiration of this 5’4” Julie with whom she was in deep and sincere conversation.

Julie definitely lingered in front of that mirror longer than might be natural if someone was not in the midst of an encounter they didn’t want to say goodbye to.

Julie exchanged a few complimentary words with the girl in the mirror before bidding her adieu for good – at least on the outside. And thanks to this very explainable, but still every bit as magic display of science, for the first time, Julie got to see her true inside self reflected back to her in the world.