Zach’s journals

I had this idea the other day that I could go through Zach’s journals and make list of all the dates he wrote in them. Then on a particular date, I could put his writing for that day on the blog. I was feeling that perhaps enough time has passed that I could read them somewhat dispassionately.

I forgot how much he wrote.

I just spent almost two hours going through two years of journals – his so-called Statistical Appendices from 2012 and 2013. He had another set of journals under a folder called Corleone. I believe the Corleone files are more work related while the SAs are more personal. basically, all I did tonight was go through each month’s file and make notes of the dates he wrote. I wasn’t trying to read but a few things caught my attention and I did read them.

My current thinking is that if I do something like this, I will only publish excerpts. There are two reasons. One is the sheer volume of material. It’s not uncommon for him to write 3 or 4 pages on a particular day. I’ve done my best to keep the original files unchanged in case someone, someday wants to get a look at Zach unfiltered but for the purposes of this blog I’ll probably do a lot of cutting.

The other reason is that he’s pretty unsparing of feelings. He’s not writing for publication, he’s writing to, well, I don’t know if he even knows. I did see some comments about why he writes as I was blasting through tonight but my goal was to collect dates, not to read critically.

I have two more years of SAs that I will try to get to this week. Then I will compile all the dates into one list. Then, one day when I am thinking about writing, I may look up his entry for that day and work on that instead. I will still write about other things that are on my mind that may or may not be about Zach.

As luck would have it, neither the 2012 nor the 2013 journals have any entries for the 10th or 11th of September. I’ll wait until I’m done then review.

drivers

I was thinking today that this is one of those things that I think about a lot while I’m driving, but tend to not focus on when I’m not. People take really insane risks when they are driving. They endanger not only themselves but others.

I know this isn’t really news and I know that I have a special reason to be upset about it. I also know that nothing is likely to change as long as humans are in charge of driving vehicles. (Motorcycle riders are, if anything, worse. Lane splitting at 50 mph . . .)

Just take a chill pill, folks. You’ll get there at the speed limit.

band pictures

Looking back, I see I’ve posted a bit about the Skyline College Jazz Band. Zack Bruno, the director, sent out some pictures yesterday from our May concert. This is the one I was pretty steamed at the other guitar player for playing on every number when he was supposed to take turns with me.

Since I’m playing here, he should be just watching . . . but he isn’t. I’ll get over it someday. Actually I was over it until I saw these pictures.

Here’s a picture of the whole band from the same concert.

This semester I’m playing bass at Zack’s request. There’s really no option for multiple bass players. So far the three of us have all taken turns nicely.

dates

Yesterday the weather was cooler, but I stayed indoors most of the day. I wrote a couple of posts, one of which had to do with the bereavement group, The Compassionate Friends, that meets the first Tuesday of every month in Santa Clara.

I said it didn’t ‘hold appeal’ for me. One of the reasons is that they have a kind of a ceremony they do at the start of every meeting. They light candles and recite first the birth dates and then the death dates of those now gone for that month. When I stopped going to my original bereavement support group early this year, I felt that there was too much emphasis on sorrow and not enough on looking forward. I told my Rosalie story to them . . .

( I just went and looked. I was sure I had posted my Rosalie story but I can’t find it. Essentially, it’s the fact that she knows about Zach and what happened but she doesn’t let it interfere with the business of living life to the fullest.)

. . . and it didn’t seem to have any effect. Well, why should it? Perhaps I should have given it more time, Perhaps grieving is different for everyone and that’s not their style.

At The Compassionate Friends, I found a group that fit my mindset a little better. Their stories were all stark, like mine, of lives ended before their potential could be reached.

But the dates thing has bugged me. So far, neither of Zach’s dates have come up but I’ve found myself wondering what I would do when they did. Would I skip those months? I know early on, anniversaries were important to me. Now, the loss of Zach has all settled into a kind of dull ache that flares up every so often. Plenty of things remind me of Zach without adding reminders of his death date.

On the other hand, there was a moment last spring at the Compassionate Friends when I thought I could see myself as a kind of elder who could support those whose grief was fresher. Looking ahead to my schedule for the rest of the year, all the first Tuesday evenings are impacted one way or another. I don’t think I’m invested enough to make a heroic effort to get down there. Pace Virginia and Don.

All the bereavement support groups meetings will stay on my schedule so it’s possible I will go to another one this fall.

more on goals

My follow up session with Linda was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon so I’ve been trying to focus on the idea of ‘goals’ again. All in all I feel pretty good about how the summer went: Jeremy’s move and the Germany trip. The last two weeks I’ve worked a standard 8-5 M-F schedule which is draining in a way but I felt I handled it pretty well.

Now that I’m back, it’s the turn of the other two principals at Davies to get holidays. Arno is leaving Tuesday for his usual driving trip to the Midwest. He’ll be gone five weeks. Jim, after shocking us all last year by cutting his schedule down to a ‘normal’ 40 hour week, announced he’ll be taking the month of October off completely. There are others who can and will step up to help with the shift coverage, but at the moment, it looks like the bulk of it will fall to me.

So I decided my ‘price’ will be a couple of weeks off in November. I will always want to visit Jeremy and Ashley and Rosalie but I also have an unfulfilled promise to visit Peter and Nanci in Spokane. And I like to stop in on my cousins Dan and Nettie also in Spokane.

Is this a goal worthy of discussion? Honestly, I don’t know how Linda would respond to this. I emailed her the other day that I was cancelling the session since I had been scheduled for work at that time. She hasn’t responded. The bereavement group that seemed so promising a few months ago doesn’t hold appeal.

Since I’ve been back I’ve had one day where I had a lot of time to do things and I didn’t and I felt bad about it. All the old thoughts about how I should use my time better and what those uses should be came and went. Then the next day I went to work.

I feel good that I’ve been posting pretty regularly since I got back. I feel good about being in the Skyline band again. (At the request of Zack I’m playing bass this semester.) I feel good that I have a handle on how much work I have in the weeks ahead. It’s more than I would like but if the payoff is two weeks off in November I’ll take it. Jeremy tried unsuccessfully to call me this week two times when I said I was available so I felt bad about that. Then we had a nice Skype session Friday night so I felt better. He’s having a tough time getting a decent job. Ashley is very happy with her new teaching setup but that cuts both ways with Jeremy. I don’t have a magic wand to make it all great. That would cut both ways too, I guess.

eclipse

I finally got to the library the other day. I got two books on German history, a book on the airline industry and Seeing In The Dark, by Timothy Ferris.

I thought I had read it before, but I took it home anyway. After I got into a bit, I started remembering the stories of how amateur astronomers have contributed to humankind’s knowledge of the cosmos. The subtitle is How Backyard Stargazers Are Probing Deep Space and Guarding Earth from Interplanetary Peril.

Ferris tells of his visits to a number of pretty much regular folks who like to look through telescopes on their own time. Each one has a special interest that he or she has parlayed into some notoriety amongst the sky-viewing cognoscenti. Interspersed with those stories are concise lessons on our current understanding of various astronomic objects. It’s interesting.

Since the total eclipse of the sun was news here recently, I offer this quote about witnessing a total eclipse:

Suddenly the sky collapsed into darkness and a dozen bright stars appeared. In their midst hung an awful, black ball, rimmed in ruby red and surrounded by the doomsday glow of the gray corona. No photograph can do justice to this appalling sight: The dynamic range from bright to dark is too great, and the colors are literally unearthly.

I had a copy of Ferris’ The Whole Shebang, but I went in to look for it just now and it isn’t there. I guess I’ve loaned it to someone and I’ll probably never get it back. It had a great chapter about the existence of God. I do have another one by Ferris called The Mind’s Sky that I found used. It’s OK, but it didn’t grab me like The Whole Shebang did.

Speaking of the Sun, I was headed to work today about 7:15 am. The Sun rises late over Pacifica so I wasn’t surprised at the gray morning light. I put my headlights on. What did surprise me was the Sun well over the horizon when I came up over the hill in Daly City. It was blood red and baleful through the smoke that has lain over the Bay Area for two days now. As I write this, the Sun has gone down, but it’s doing a nice job of lighting up the few wispy clouds in the western sky.

Not high art, perhaps, but hopefully a harbinger of cooling breezes by tomorrow. There were no clouds of any kind yesterday. It’s been over 100º F in San Francisco the last two days. Out here on the coast where it’s usually much cooler, it was over 90 in my apartment when I got home. With the front door open and the fan blowing at maximum for the last two hours, it’s down to 88. Outside it’s 85. No one in Pacifica has air conditioning.

end of the trip

The trip was great but by the time we got home from the Sistergold concert and Heidelberg, we were toasted. We mostly laid low at Wilfried and Elisabeth’s house for a day and a half. Mary was interested in the casinos in Baden Baden but when we looked into the details it turned out they had a dress code and a high buy in and the games didn’t start until late in the day – or evening in one case.

No one else was as interested as Mary so that didn’t happen. We were getting ready to go over there Monday and at least walk around a bit but Wilfried and Elisabeth had an unexpected visitor, an elderly man with a shock of white hair. Naturally, beers were brought out and we Americans were amused at his torrent of conversation. I don’t remember what all he was talking about, but he was sure passionate. Wilfried explained later that he’s some kind of artist and collector.

Mercedes has a factory in Rastatt, so after our visitor left we went to take a tour there, then Wilfried took us around the Zentrum. Of course, there’s a schloss.We ate ice cream. Later, we walked over to Schloss Favorite, which is literally 5 minutes from Wilfried’s front door. This place has lovely grounds to go along with the structure.

Tuesday we had to leave at noon, but in the morning we went out for a walk through the neighborhood. The open field at the back of Wilfried and Elisabeth’s house has been set up for development: streets and utilities but no houses yet. In a half an hour leisurely walking, we walked around the whole village. The village is called Förch and one of several small villages tied administratively into the larger town of Rastatt.Perhaps I should mention that Elisabeth was unable to accompany us on most of our touring around because she had an operation on her foot and could not walk. She always had something good for us when we came back to her house. Danke schön, Elisabeth!

At noon, we loaded our bags into Wilfried’s car, hugged Elisabeth and headed north. Deutsche Bahn had a major problem in Rastatt where the ground below some train tracks sank on Sunday, stranding thousands of people. Wilfried wasn’t sure how possible it would be for us to get a train to Frankfurt from Rastatt so he drove us to the Karlsruhe Hbf.

There finally we had to say auf wiedersehen to our tour guide, cousin and friend Wilfried. Words can not express my gratitude for everything you did for Mary and me this past two weeks. His only request: that we come back and stay longer! Mit viel Vergnügen!

Heidelberg

On our way back to Rastatt on Sunday, we stopped at Heidelberg. It was another place I had been to in 1982 and also in 1976 with the Blue Saints.

The AltStadt along the Neckar River with the huge castle dominating above is a natural for tourists, and we did all the usual things. We parked, walked along the river to the Alte Brücke . . .

. . . and thence into the Old Town.

From there it was up more stairs – Mary never let us forget how many steps there were at the Cologne Cathedral: 533! – to the Schloss. We walked around the lovely gardens and toured the interior.

The interior featured a German Pharmacy museum and the world’s largest wine cask. After descending we had lunch at Vetter im Schoneck. Established 1987. Really. I checked the coaster twice. Vetter’s is the home of the world’s strongest beer: 33% alcohol! Actually, Wilfried told us that figure is from an intermediate stage. The finished brew is 10.5%, strong enough for me to take a miss. We had Bavarian meatloaf which was more like Spam than not.

On our way home, we passed the entrance to the tunnel Deutsche Bahn is building for the IC trains under Rastatt. More on that in my next post.

Sistergold

Very high on Mary’s list of things she wanted to do was to see the German saxophone group Sistergold. Wilfried had helped her to contact them and got tickets for thier concert in a little town called Homberg.

Homberg is about a three hour drive north of Baden Baden, where we were at about 3:30 Saturday afternoon. Wilfried had taken us to a tour of the Baden Baden Festspielhaus (Opera House). It was supposed to be only 75 minutes but it had dragged on and at the end there was a little scene with a man who had had to go to the rest room and lost track of the rest of the group. He was pissed that he’d gotten left and was having it out with the tour guide. The rest of us were left standing around in the lobby. Wilfried took action and started trying doors to get us out. This succeeded and we were off.

We were originally hoping to get to Homberg in time for dinner but that was going a-glimmering. Luckily, Wilfried had had the foresight to bring some rolls and sausages which we ate at a rest stop. In the end, we got to Homberg in time to get settled in our hotel and arrive at the Stadthalle by around 7:30. Dinner would have to wait.

We had a glass of wine while the audience filled in. The Stadthalle was small, like a jr high school MP room. There was a stage. We were seated on plastic chairs around tables with little decorations. Pretty small time, but everyone was nice. Beer and wine and snacks were for sale. Maybe 100 in attendance.

Here’s a view out back of the Stadthalle. The Ohm River is actually beneath the line of trees in the foreground.

Sistergold is 4 women playing soprano, alto, tenor and baritone saxophones. They started the concert by walking in from the back of the hall. They played jazz, funk, classical, and pop styles with little dance moves and good audience engagement. They were great! They did three encores and didn’t stop until a quarter to 11 (8 o’clock start).

Afterwards, they came out to talk and sign autographs (and sell CDs) and Mary jumped in. Three of the four spoke English pretty well. They chatted with us for a good half an hour. Towards the end, the people who ran the building were trying to close up. We took a picture and reluctantly said good night.

Then it was, what are we going to do for dinner? It was nearly 11:30. Wilfried asked some locals what was likely to be open for dinner that late in town and was met by blank looks. Hmmm.

We cruised the town. There was something like a night club open but no food. We stopped at a gas station. The attendant there was closing but suggested fast food at the autobahn about 5 miles away. Failing that (we all said no), perhaps Marburg. Thirty minutes away.

Wilfried set out following his GPS (I guess, I was in the back seat, resigned to my fate). Along country roads and through villages in the darkness we went. Suddenly there was a blast of light. An American ’50’s style diner in the middle of the German countryside! What? About 50 neon signs and the front end of a ’57 Buick with its headlights on adorned the front. Best of all, the kitchen was still open!

We had burgers and fries. I had a Corona (with lime). It was great! We got back to the hotel at 1:30. Wilfried’s key didn’t work and he had to break the door open. No one with the hotel was awake.

Mary is going to try to figure out how to bring Sistergold to the US. They are willing but won’t do it for free so she has some fundraising to do.

Schwartzwald and dinner

We left Friedrichshafen Friday afternoon about 1 pm. Our train went west along the Bodensee, curved south around the northwestern arm, called Überlingen See, to Radolfzell, then west again to Singen, where we changed trains to one bound north through the Schwarzwald.

Schwarzwald, the Black Forest of Hansel and Gretl and many other fearsome tales of our childhood. My notes of this first part of the journey are more concerned with the lady whose dog got loose in the Singen train station than with any fearsome fables. It wasn’t until I noticed the upcoming stop at Donaueschingen that I started paying closer attention to the world outside my window. Donau!!?? That’s the German word for what we Americans call the Danube. I always associated that river with Austria and points east. What’s it doing in southern Germany?

Well, it turns out that Donaueschingen is known as the source of the Danube. The whole time we went through Donaueschingen, I was watching carefully for a river of any size. Nothing. After we got out of the town, we went along a nice valley that had a little stream in it that seemed little more than a canal that toy boats could sail in.

Later I came to find out that the Danube is formed from two rivers coming together at Donaueschingen. They are named Breg and Brigach. Brigach was the one we were passing along. Well. The countryside was beautiful though and some hills were starting to show.

Within 15 minutes we were at St George (Sankt Georgen) amongst some serious forest. We left the river course then for some tunnels and steep valleys. Good stuff!

St. George, Triberg, Hornberg, Hausach, Haslach, Biberach. All set in what my map tells me is Naturpark Schwarzwald Nord/Mitte. I would like to come back here.

Around Biberach we noticed that this train had a stop scheduled in Rastatt. Why didn’t Wilfried tell us to go there instead of Baden Baden? Frantic texts, emails, attempts to phone ensued. Finally Mary got through and found out that the Baden Baden Hbf is closer to their house than the one in Rastatt. OK.

The last few stops before Baden Baden were approximately 30 seconds each with the train accelerating to around 90 mph for only 4 or 5 minutes in between. And very smooth.

Wilfried had mentioned earlier in the week that he and Elisabeth had a social engagement Friday night that they couldn’t get out of: a dinner at their neighbor’s. Mary and I thought they would go and leave us at their house. When we got to Wilfried’s, it was 5 pm and Elisabeth had the table all set with 4 giant pieces of cream cake and wine. We hadn’t eaten a proper lunch again so we fell to with gusto. After a while, someone said, what time are we expected at the neighbors? Answer, 6 pm. I looked at my phone: 5 minutes til 6.

So now it develops that we were expected all along to join them so get your coat on, we’re going. Never mind that I felt like I would never eat again. I should have known.

We had a lovely dinner at Felix and Yolanda’s. Neither spoke much English but we got along. The food was great: Felix barbequed sausages and chicken kabobs outside in the rain while the rest of us sat around the table and talked and drank.

Back at Wilfried’s about 10 pm, he brought out a special 16 year old Spätlese Reisling and we sat around and talked some more until past midnight. What a day!

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