53 in a 35

I think about this often when I’m out driving. The 53 is a guess. I think of it as too fuckin’ fast. I used the phrase earlier today when responding to a poster on TDPRI who I thought was kind of a jerk. He responded calmly that he, too, had lost a son.

The TDPRI thread had to do with automated driving, with many posters stating that they enjoyed driving and would never willingly give up their hands on the steering wheel. Others said that the number of deaths and injuries by automobile were too many to be ignored and that the government would step in when the technology was ready. Most thought that would be less than 10 years.

At one time I was going to post here all of the statements made by the witnesses of Zach’s death. I haven’t looked at any of that stuff for many months now. I’ve had more than one therapist tell me not to look anymore. The one I can’t remember very well is the statement of the passenger, Shawn R Allen’s girlfriend. It wasn’t as lame as his but it was pretty lame. I guess they’ve gone on with their lives.

I talked to Micah at the work weekend. He said he was living in a different house in Baton Rouge, which I had not been aware of. He went on to tell me Jake moved to Las Vegas and sold the house. Well, now I don’t have to worry about being invited to stay there if I ever were to go back. Going back is unlikely but some days I do have a fantasy of walking from the corner to see exactly what the distance is and really watching the speed of the traffic.

Life and headaches

Now my laundry is under way and I am thinking about headaches in the light of what I wrote earlier today. I will say that I had fewer headaches last week than the week before. I know that there is a significant tension component to my headaches. In general, when I am busier I get fewer headaches. After my episodes of a couple of weeks ago, I am quicker to take a Maxalt now along with my usual ibuprofens. At that point, I was worried that my three month prescription would run out in a month. Once I was able to go several days without having to take one, I relaxed about it. I also realized that I could get more if I really needed them and that was better than being miserable.

The other side of the coin is the feeling I had yesterday and the day before of not having enough time to remember who myself was. The graduation speaker yesterday was excellent. I don’t remember his name, but he is the (I believe current) Surgeon General of the US. Speaking to newly minted doctors, he spoke of the diastole and systole of the heart’s rhythm. He noted that the systole is the ‘relaxing’ part of the cycle and is just important to the health of the person as the energetic part. As with all things, finding the balance is tricky.

<Edit: I went back and looked at my posts. The bad headache episode was more than a month ago. Time flies . . .>

Life

I keep saying I want to cut back but I keep failing. Last week was the return from the work weekend Monday. I was so tired when I got home I couldn’t go to band that night. Tuesday I got my laundry done and napped but had work that evening. Wednesday and Thursday I took classes for professional development in Hayward. By the end of the second day I was wondering why I bothered. The new big Yamaha mixer is interesting but the likelihood of me driving one for a job are slim to none.

Friday morning was our first graduation of the year at Davies. I stayed down there to work the evening shift. Saturday, Rose’s sister Leigh had a gathering at her house in Antioch to celebrate the life of her husband, John. Saturday traffic was an abomination. 2+ hours each way.

Sunday morning up early for the Youth Orchestra in Davies until 5 pm then a dash down to Santa Clara for Mother’s Day dinner. In addition to that, we celebrated Jane and Julian’s birthdays. Julian is 21!

Yesterday an early call (6 am) for another graduation then concert dress rehearsal for the jazz band in the evening. I did lay down and try to nap in the afternoon.

Today I am waiting for the laundry room to become free. I have a couple of errands to run but they can wait until tomorrow if it comes to that. The rehearsal showed me that I need to practice the guitar more, although I really already knew that, so I’ve done some of that already. I finished the jigsaw puzzle I’ve been picking away at for almost a month. It’s one of the hardest I’ve ever done so that is satisfying.

Tomorrow night, work returns. Thursday I signed on with Hal to be part of the sound crew for the Disney/Pixar movie presentation at Davies. It’s going to be an 8 am to midnight (at least) day plus I agreed to do the graduation at 7 the next morning. And the house head job in the evening . . .

All this to clear my weekend for personal things. Saturday afternoon in San Francisco Sarah’s quartet is hosting a benefit that I will attend before heading back to San Bruno in the evening for the jazz band concert. Sunday up to Rose’s brother Steve’s house in Plymouth and another chance to play with Allen Frank and his Doghouse Blues band at the Drytown Club.

Monday I think I’ll collapse but Monday evening is another jazz band rehearsal, this time for the school graduation. I really want to go up to Eagle Creek Falls before the summer madness starts so right now it looks like Tuesday or Wednesday will be my best options before Memorial Day.

I have Sarah’s next quartet concert on my calendar for Friday the 26th but yesterday realized it overlapped the Skyline graduation. Hmmm, I may have to weasel out of that one.

Rosalie

A couple of quick stories about Rosalie.

Last weekend, I was at Camp Greenville, flailing away at tree rounds with a ten pound (estimated) maul. About one swing in twenty resulted in a satisfying separation of the round into fireplace-ready pieces. The rest of the time, the maul either stuck in the wood, requiring enormous effort to remove it, or bouncd crazily away. Luckily, no one was harmed although later in the day I started discovering muscles I had forgotten about.

Well, anyway, at one point while I was flailing, Rosalie came over to watch. Her comment: ‘Try harder, Grandpa!’

Then yesterday, Ashley posted this gem on Facebook. I’ve already shared it amongst my co-workers at Davies.

Rosalie’s Answers (Almost 4.5 years old)
1. What is your happiest memory?
You!
2. Why do you like being a kid?
Because I just like being a kid. I DON’T like being a kid, actually.
3. One word to describe you would be?
Nothing. I’m not going to tell you anymore words.
4. What advice would you give your parents?
What did I say I was not going to do?

Here she is last Saturday explaining to an adult what Noah is doing down in his hole.

work weekend

Well, we had it last weekend. The work weekend, where we picked up the slack for Zach. Quite a few people came: family members, LSU people, Greenville YMCA people. All in all there were over 25 people involved.

I took the red-eye out of SFO Thursday night, arriving in Atlanta around 7 in the morning having slept only a couple of hours at most. Sarah had come in the night before, so she was there. A group from Baton Rouge led by Micah and Julie came about noon. Ashley got home from work about 3:30 and by 4 we were on the road to South Carolina.

Despite promises being made, no one was at the camp when we arrived. The cabins were open and the lights worked but otherwise it was deserted. There was no cell service up on the mountain so reaching people was tough.

Jeremy persevered, though, and after about an hour he got through to someone who told us the director had a family emergency and had to leave. We got the info on where to sleep so we got settled before dark. Ally arrived about 9 with Noah, having done all the driving from Cincinnati. He came into the kids cabin just in time to interrupt Rosalie from getting to sleep. They were glad to see each other.

After that, Jeremy got a campfire started and more people I didn’t know started showing up in the darkness. Soon, stories of Zach were being told. I had the foresight of bringing my little hand held recorder and I let it run for a solid 45 minutes while stories were told around the campfire.I gave up around midnight. There were a few hardy souls still there.

The next morning after breakfast, everyone headed out to ‘Zeke’s Place’ to see what we were up against. Here’s what we found:

Before we started work, Jeremy got everyone in a circle and we all spoke briefly of our relationship to Zach. Ashley used her lovely phrase, ‘Brother-in-love,’ to refer to Zach. One of the Greenville people – I don’t remember who, but male – said they had a crush on Zach. That was after one of the women said the same thing, to knowing nods all around.

Then, to work. Noah jumped in and helped as much as he could.

We broke for lunch and returned to an afternoon of rain showers but the work continued steadily. We weren’t quite done when it was time to go to dinner, but some elves left quickly after dinner and went back to finish the roof before the light faded.

The next morning, almost everyone reconvened at the site for a celebratory picture. I never heard who Zeke was but heretofore, it will be known as ‘Zach and Zeke’s Place.’

Before that, on Saturday, there was an important other celebration to have. It was Noah’s birthday! Ashley had made a cake and someone – I never found out who – went into Brevard for Dolly’s ice cream. Gifts were given and songs were sung; cake and ice cream was eaten.

YMCA Camp Greenville has a chapel called ‘Pretty Place’. It’s where Jeremy and Ashley had gotten married nearly ten years ago. I never felt that ‘pretty’ was the best word for the spot. It’s much better than pretty. Anyway, Jeremy had encouraged everyone to come out to Pretty Place for the sunrise Sunday. I had heard 6:45 but when I got there about that time, the sun was already up and many people were already there. After the rain the day before, Sunday had dawned clear and warm, but pockets of fog were in the valleys below.

After snapping a couple of pictures, I sat down next to Sarah and took in the fabulous view and thought of the wonderful people that were there with me, giving some extra for Zach. I completely broke down.

cleanliness

For many years, I thought that if only everyone in the world could get a hot shower every morning, we would have world peace. For myself, a shower in the morning was a given before just about anything.

Recently, I’ve come to the realization that there might be another way. It started when I was visiting Sarah in Amsterdam in 2013. She had a room in a house and one of the other roomers very graciously found another place to stay for the week or so that I was there. It was winter and, although we rode bikes everywhere, I wasn’t doing much sweating in the cold weather.

Europe, in my experience, is much more attuned to the need to cherish our limited resources. The extensive train system is well known. In Holland, there are many thousands of bikes in use on dedicated bike paths. The houses are smaller in every way, except perhaps the ceilings as the Dutch are tall.

So I didn’t shower every day and I found that I didn’t get all itchy. Or, rather, my skin passed through the itchy stage into a comfortable stasis.

When I got home, it took a while to really learn this lesson. As the drought worsened in California, I eventually remembered my Holland experience and resolved to shower less to save water. I found that showering every other day, or sometimes every third day, was sufficient to keep me clean and not smelly.

I do wash my hands often as that is a disease vector, and I keep my face clean. I have a filter on my shower head that is supposed to be good for 10,000 gallons. The paperwork that comes with it says it should be changed ‘with normal use’ every six months. I did a calculation. If I use 15 gallons of water in a 5 or 6 minute shower, I can shower 667 times before changing the filter. At, say, 200 showers a year, that’s 3 1/2 years of use!

Norman Mailer

Many people reading this are aware that I have an interest in the 1960s era Apollo space program. I probably have 25 or 30 books on the subject and have read an equal number more. One of them that I own is Norman Mailer’s Of A Fire On the Moon. It’s in paperback, of course.

A month or so ago I was in a bookstore and saw a book called Moonfire credited to Norman Mailer. It turned out that some people took a selection of Mailer’s words from the earlier book and added a bunch of pictures. What hooked me wasn’t the writing – I already had that – but the pictures. Many of them have not been seen before, even by aficionados such as me. So now I’m reading Mailer again.

Mailer’s writing is like nothing else I’ve read on the moon program. He is intensely interested in the astronauts as men but not in the sense of what so many were writing in the newspapers and magazines of the day. The pictures give a reminder of that, as many of them are staged shots done for Life Magazine whose mission it was to make heroes of the astronauts. See Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff for more on that. Mailer is interested in drilling down to the core of their being.

One of his paragraphs struck me as funny given that my career has been dealing with amplified sound in theaters. Check this out:

. . . They are in a modern movie theater with orange seats and a dark furrowed ceiling overhead, much like marcelled waves in a head of hair, a plastic ceiling built doubtless to the plans of one of the best sound engineers in the country. Sound is considerably ahead of smell as a fit province for scientific work, but since the excellence of acoustics in large and small concert chambers seem to bear more relation to old wood and the blessings of monarchs and bishops than to the latest development of the technical art, the sound system in this movie theater (seats 600) is dependably intolerable most of the time. The public address system squeals and squeaks (it is apparently easier to have communication with men one quarter of a million miles away) and one never gets a fair test of the aural accommodations, and so far as one can tell, the tone is a hint sepulchral, then brightened electronically, finally harsh and punishing to that unnamed fine nerve that runs from the anus to the eardrum. As the sound engineers became more developed, the plastic materials provided for their practice by corporations grew acoustically more precise and spiritually more flattening – it was the law of the century. One was forever adjusting to public voices through the subtlest vale of pain.

Perhaps ironic is a better word than funny, because sound systems have improved a great deal in the intervening time, while space travel has stagnated in Low Earth Orbit.

Dune

Recently someone posted something on FaceBook about the Litany of Fear. Subsequent comments showed that several people were aware of its origin in the Frank Herbert novel Dune.

I read Dune in high school although the paperback copy I have has a printing date of 1975. The original copyright date is 1965. For a science fiction novel, it’s stood the test of time. Perhaps most interesting from our current perspective is Herbert’s use of Arab traditions and language in the story. The only knowledge I had at that time was pretty much that the Arabs were the bad guys during the Crusades and they kept alive Western knowledge during the Dark Ages. And they invented algebra.

Many of the terms and traditions that Herbert gives the heroic Fremen of Dune are straight out of the Arab world. His vision of the Fremen’s world Arrakis is the Arab’s desert writ large.

I met Mr Herbert once. In the spring of 1976 I saw a small notice in the newspaper that he would be appearing at a local bookstore to sign copies of his new book, Children of Dune. I had read not only Dune, but the sequel, Dune Messiah, several times and was excited to find out what was in store next so I went.

As I entered the bookstore, I saw Mr Herbert sitting there next to a stack of Children of Dune books. They were all hardcover! I never bought hardcover! My paperback copy of the original Dune had been $1.95! I couldn’t even imagine what these cost. I had been working my steady job at Mervyn’s since the previous fall so I had some money but I never thought I should spend it on hardcover books when the paperbacks were cheaper and had the same words in them.

With the bravado of youth I walked up to the author and asked him where I could find the paperbacks. He gently told me that the hardcovers were the only ones available. So I gulped and bought one. $8.95!! He asked me my name and inscribed it to me with the date. There was no one else in the bookstore. He was sitting there with a glass of wine. He offered one to me and invited me to sit down and chat but I was so flustered and anxious to start reading the book, I declined both and left almost immediately.

Before leaving, I did ask him if the story had been plotted from the beginning as a trilogy and he said yes. Of course, once the series became successful, other sequels were written and after his death, Herbert’s son wrote some more. Who can blame them?

I still have that hardcover book.

Zach and Sarah

I’ve made much of the special relationship between Zach and Jeremy. His relationship with Sarah was no less special. It was strained in recent years because of their divergent opinions on what kind of relationship they each should have with their mother but the deep love never went away.

Even at an early age, Sarah showed that she had a talent for leadership. I remember noting once that when she got Jeremy to try cutting her hair it was Jeremy who had to shoulder the blame. He was, after all, older and should have known better. He might have been 5 and she was 3.

With Zach it was more of a traditional older/younger relationship. Sarah was brimming with ideas and Zach was happy to be included in the fun. Sometimes it was with one or more of Sarah’s friends but most often it was just the two of them doing drawings, writing plays, or goofing around with the cassette recorder.

Here are a few fun pix from the archives:

In 2014, Zach made what was to be his last trip to California. I don’t remember for sure, but I think both he and Sarah stayed at my apartment for a couple of days. One morning they sat at the breakfast table for a couple of hours and just talked quietly. I stayed out of the way but I did take this one picture.

quotes

Zach did a lot of reading. When he read something that he thought was worthwhile, he made a note of the quote. A year ago I could have told you where his quote files were but now I’d have to look around a bit.

I do have a sheet of paper on my wall with some quotes on it. I don’t remember how it came to be printed. Was it in his effects or did I find it in a file and print it here? It doesn’t have his name on it but I know it came from him. In front of the paper, tacked on the wall, are two photos, taken on the same day. Here is one:

To see the other one you’ll have to go here.

Anyway, here are the quotes. Only one is attributed.

A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold them together.
— Goethe

We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.

The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.

We’re not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television and let its pandering idiocy liquify our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery – it recharges by running . . . A playful mind is inquisitive, and learning is fun. If you indulge your natural curiosity and retain a sense of fun in new experience, I think you’ll find it functions as a sort of shock absorber for the bumpy road ahead.

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

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