It’s November twenty-second, and strangely enough there’s a long string of connections. “The problem here is that you will reach a point where it might be difficult to decide which are reality and which are nightmare.”
It all started in 1961, when a dancer named Liz Powell was hospitalized for exhaustion. She’d been experiencing a recurrent nightmare and wasn’t sleeping. In the hospital, though, it got worse. As she described the dream, it was always the same. In bed, she would drop a glass of water, shattering it, then follow the sound of footsteps out into the hall. In the hospital, the dream lengthened — in the hallway there was a nurse, who Powell followed into the basement. They ended up in the morgue: room 22.
Powell was discharged after a few days, and to travel to her next booking, she went to the airport. Finding that she would be on Flight 22 made her a bit nervous, but she continued. By accident, as she was approaching a corridor leading to the plane, she knocked over a glass of water, shattering it. Then, at the top of the stairs into the plane, Powell was suddenly face to face with a flight attendant — the same person who was the nurse in her dream.
Powell completely lost her composure, and was assisted back to the terminal. As the staff are trying to help her calm down, out the window Powell saw Flight 22 crash and burn on takeoff. Coincidence? Maybe, but November 22 has a lot to do with transportation — for some reason. For instance, November 22, 1869 was the date the famous clipper ship “Cutty Sark” was launched in Scotland. It was one of the fastest clipper ships ever built, but some misfortune always seemed to doom her chances of being the “first to port,” which carried a bonus payment ships competed for. She was also just about the last clipper ships ever built, because steamships were just starting to work well enough to compete, and the Suez Canal opened the same year.
The history of transportation is a constant quest for more speed, and the next iteration after steamships was air travel. On November 22, 1935, the flying boat named the China Clipper took off from San Francisco Bay on the first flight of the trans-pacific airmail service instituted by Pan Am. The flight almost ended in disaster right away — the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was under construction at the time, and the flight plan was for the Clipper to fly over it. But after takeoff the pilot realized he’d never be able to climb high enough in time, so he flew under instead, just barely making it.
The China Clipper managed to avoid disaster after that until 1945, when it crashed trying to land for refueling at Puerto Rico. Flying boats and refueling had both been engineered out of the picture by November 22, 1977, when the supersonic Concorde made its first transatlantic passenger trip. The Concordes feature some interesting trivia: they were the longest-range supersonic aircraft at the time, they were all painted white because at their cruising speed, the whole plane heated up to as much as 250°, and dealing with all that heat was difficult. The white paint was a way to try to keep the surfaces as cool as possible. The Concordes also cruised at an unusually high altitude, where there’s more radiation, so each plane had a radiometer installed. If the reading reached a high enough level — because of a solar flare, for example — the plane would descend to a safer altitude.
But for the most part, it’s the lower altitudes that are more dangerous for airplanes. One of the Concordes crashed on takeoff in 2000, and in 2003 — on November 22, of course — a DHL cargo plane was hit on takeoff by a surface-to-air missile in Baghdad. It landed safely. But that wasn’t the fate of Wiley Post, the famous pilot who was born November 22, 1898. He was the first pilot to fly solo around the world, but in 1935 — with Will Rogers aboard — his plane crashed on takeoff, killing both Post and Rogers.
Twenty-two doesn’t just connect to transportation, either. In another odd coincidence, it turns out to be a popular title for songs and albums, and there are twenty-two of those. They include the song 22 Twos by Jay-Z, which rhymes “to,” “too,” and “two” twenty-two times in the first verse. Also traditional decks of Tarot contain 22 cards. If you want to take this to extremes (and why not), the Hebrew alphabet has 22 characters. Oh, and speaking of alphabets, today is Alphabet Day in Albania, because it was November 22, 1908 that the Albanian Alphabet was established by the “Congress of Manastir”.
I don’t know what that is any more than the “Sefirot.” That’s some kind of mystical — er, something — in the Kabbalah, and it has 22 paths. It’s one of those things that even reading an explanation doesn’t help. Here’s a sample: “Kabbalah repeatedly stresses the need to avoid all corporeal interpretation. Through this, the sefirot are related to the structure of the body and are reformed into personas. Underlying the structural purpose of each sefirah is a hidden motivational force…” It goes on for pages and pages. Nightmare stuff, if you ask me. Of course that’s exactly where we started, isn’t it?
That initial story, by the way, is from Twenty-Two, the 1961 Twilight Zone episode all about Liz Powell. It aired in February (the second month of the year) in season 2. Huh, how about that; another 22!
