email from Jeremy

This came in my email today:

**I apologize if you’re receiving this message through more than one channel. In an effort to reach a lot of people, I’m sending it to as many contacts on Facebook and email as I can think of. I’m sorry if I accidentally doubled up and spammed you.**

Dear family and friends,

I hope this finds you all well. I first and foremost want to thank all of you who have reached out to my family and I to offer support and condolences in the year since we lost our beloved brother, son, uncle, cousin and friend Zach. I’m deeply appreciative for all those who’ve been able to offer support through their own grief. I’m continually amazed at the impact of Zach’s life on so many disparate people.

I’m writing to let you know of a project that’s been in the works for a long time, and am happy to announce it’s finally happening. As most of you know, Zach was a camp counselor at YMCA Camp Greenville in North Carolina for one summer; while the demands of school and life precluded him from returning to work there, the experience impacted him profoundly and he often spoke warmly of his memories there. Last fall, one of Camp Greenville’s backcountry camping shelters was destroyed by a falling tree. With the invaluable assistance of longtime camp director Greg McKee, we’ve arranged to “pick up the slack for Zach” by holding a service weekend at camp in Zach’s memory, with the primary goal of rebuilding the shelter and renaming it “Zeke’s and Zach’s” (the original name of the shelter was Zeke’s Place).

The project will take place the weekend of May 5th through 7th (Friday–Sunday) at Camp Greenville. The very tentative schedule is to rendezvous at camp Friday night, work all day Saturday and hold a remembrance chapel at sunrise Sunday morning at the Pretty Place chapel before we part. We will stay in cabins at camp on Friday and Saturday nights.

I live in Atlanta, and will coordinate travel from there to camp and back for as many people as necessary. Likewise, we will do everything we can to accommodate folks who come from out of town and need a place to stay for an extra night.

I understand that the travel will be untenable for many of you. If you would like to help but cannot make it that weekend, we also need to raise approximately $2,000 for the building materials for the project. Any extra money we raise will be donated to camp’s scholarship fund in Zach’s name.

Please let me know as soon as possible if you will be able to come, or if you’d like to help with a donation. I very much look forward to remembering Zach for a weekend with you. Please contact me at (404)895-5325 or jeremy.wood.820@gmail.com. Also, please forward this message to anyone who I don’t know who would like to participate in Zach’s memory.

Much love,

Jeremy Wood

(not Pretty Place but in the Smokies – 2008)

power outage

Last night I picked up a Papa Murphy’s pizza on my way home. It was about half way through cooking when the power went out. Unlike the last few days when I’ve lost power for an eyeblink – just enough to require the electronic clocks to be reset – this time the power stayed off.

After about 10 minutes, I took the pizza out of the cooling oven and ate it. It wasn’t really done but it was good enough, particularly considering the alternatives. The pizza and the bottle of wine I cracked were to celebrate some news that I am not yet allowed to tell.

I had flashlights but no candles. Rose, of course, had some candles and brought some over so we sat in their flickering light and drank wine. When the bottle was finished and the lights hadn’t come back on, she went home and I went to bed.

The weird thing about last night’s power outage was that some of the lights were still lit. Any incandescent on a switch I tried came on dimly, about 30%. My one incandescent light that is on a resistance dimmer would not come on at all. A night light that is LED glowed at about 30%. The apartment out my back window (where the big TV is) had outside lights that were flashing as if they were trying to strike but couldn’t. The TV was dark. I thought about measuring the actual voltage but didn’t. I didn’t care that much!

I did go around and unplug the computer so the weird voltage wouldn’t damage it. I threw the breakers to the oven in case it came back on with the power and I was sleeping.

PG&E actually called my phone to tell me my power was out and that only 113 homes were affected. Up the hill out the kitchen window all the houses had lights on. I guess I am kind of curious as to why such a small number of buildings were affected and what was going on with the leakage. Maybe with all the solar panels and other local power sources these days there was some voltage trickling around backwards. There are supposed to be interlocks to prevent that but perhaps some are wildcatted in without interlocks. Be careful out there, PG&E guys!

It’s all good now. The sun is shining and the breeze is moderate. I hope to be given permission to share my good news soon.

music

In recent years, when people have asked me about what I might do with my time when I retire, one of the answers I usually give is, ‘Play music.’

For those who don’t know, I was consumed by music as a teenager. I learned to play guitar and played in a band in high school. My local JC, DeAnza College, had a very good jazz program and, rather by accident, I ended up there for three years. My last year was primarily to take advantage of the opportunity I had to play bass with the #1 band. It was a hot band and I was stretched to the max. Many of the musicians in that band went on to careers in music but I decided to work in the theatre and have the freedom to ‘play’ music when and where I wanted.

As it worked out, I played very little music for the ensuing 25 years. Work and family took precedence.

About a dozen years ago I started to come out again, mostly playing rock and roll with Tom Kent and his bands. When I got back to the Bay Area, I enrolled in the jazz band at the local JC, Skyline College. I played bass for two years then guitar the third year.

Then . . . then I had jobs keep coming up on Monday nights so I quit. But last fall I started again. On guitar, on the theory that a missing guitar player in a big band is no loss whereas a missing bass player is more serious.

I needn’t have worried. They had three bass players and another guitar player; they hardly noticed when I’m there.

Actually, everyone was very nice and welcomed me back. Many of the current band members were there for my first go ’round but my contributions this time were minimal.

But what I noticed was that I wasn’t practicing the material. I looked at it and worked at it long enough to get through it, but I didn’t work it to get any better. In fact, the second half of last semester I don’t think I picked up the guitar at all except on Monday night for rehearsal.

I decided to write about this when today, with no need to go to work, I got up and did my laundry and the dishes, then wrote a nice blog post, then . . . farted around the house: read some, tried to take a nap, ate lunch, read some more, did a crossword, had a cup of tea.

Now I’m writing this. Why don’t I play the guitar? Or the bass? They’re all here, hanging on the wall, begging to be played. I don’t know.I’ve got tons of resources: books, music, backing tracks. It’s making me reassess my stated retirement plans. And wonder about all my motivations.

Well, I signed up for another semester of band so I’ll keep trying. It starts in a couple of weeks.

Rosalie’s gifts

I had one gift in mind when I wrote that title since the two items came in one box. After I wrote it, though, I thought of the larger sense of it. Rosalie’s gifts are many!

But today I am speaking of two gifts that came in one box about a week ago. A coffee (or, in my case, tea) mug and a little ‘Z’, also ceramic.

The mug has ‘I ♥ Grandpa’ worked into it. The base color is white but there are colors spread around on it by a young hand. In fact, the hand itself is well represented on the side opposite the slogan. On the bottom are the letters ‘AR’. What? Well, Jeremy told me that they asked Rosalie to write her name on the bottom. That would be tough for anyone using a finger full of paint. She managed the R and the A. OK!

The ‘Z’ I thought was commercial but Jeremy told me she decorated it as well. It is black with red polka dots. It’s from the same font as the ‘Z’s on magnetic paper that Mary Beth first came up with (and the logo for this blog).

My first thought was to hang it up in my apartment so I could see it someplace where there wasn’t already a magnetic ‘Z’. But before I got to that it was sitting on my table or on the kitchen counter and I liked the feel of it as I moved it about.

So I gave up on the hanging idea and now leave it in places where I will see it every day. I pick it up and roll it in my hand and think of Zach and Rosalie.

Thank you, Rosalie!

one year

It’s way past the real anniversaries, but I was thinking the other day about how different my table looks now compared to a year ago. Then it was covered with sympathy cards. Now it has Christmas cards.

Most recognize my loss but they are essentially a message of joy rather than sadness. That’s a big improvement. Thank you everyone for the cards and support! I hope you are all reading this! I don’t think I’ll be sending out any kid of newsy Christmas letters for a while. Here is where you get my news.

Speaking of news, I saw Cubby last night at the union meeting. Cubby lost his wife last Easter Sunday morning and went into a tailspin for several months. He couldn’t work but now he’s back and looks good. We had a good long hug. Solidarity.

backpacks

I carry a backpack almost every day. I guess it’s like a woman’s purse. It’s got a lot of stuff in it that I might need: energy bars, ibuprofen, toothpicks, pens, Kleenexes, notepads . . . lots of odds and ends. Each day I add stuff to it that I might need that particular day: tools, lunch, a water bottle, whatever. The one I’ve been using I got at Big 5 about 5 years ago for $12.

Honest, $12 for a new backpack. It’s a little on the small side. That was a feature that I wanted. I had had the experience of having a larger backpack and putting so much stuff into it that I could hardly lift it. Many times during the previous 5 years I had to carry something outside of it or not take it at all.

That was all good, but it was wearing out. Meanwhile, one of the items I inherited from Zach was a nice North Face backpack. It’s really nice – better in almost every way. But I didn’t want to use it.

I had two of Zach’s jackets. I wore them a few times but eventually I gave them to Jeremy, who may or may not keep them. His computer I had for a while and gave to Jeremy. I still have his iPad but I don’t use it. Come to think of it I still have his phone. I still think I’ll get all of his texts off of it someday. I have one of his belts that I use now and then.

I have his dressers – which were mine originally. I’ll keep those. I’ll keep Hobbes. A few other small mementos. And I guess I’ll keep his backpack. I put it into service today. I dumped out everything from mine and put it into Zach’s. As I was apportioning my junk, I found one of Zach’s pens in the backpack. That’ll stay right there. Then later I found another one in a different pocket. That’ll stay there too. But I’ll use the backpack. It should be good for 10 or 15 years at least. My Z . . .

neighbors

I’ve noticed this since last fall when it started getting darker earlier. When I look out my bedroom window, as I usually do when I raise the shade in the morning or drop it in the evening, I don’t see the ocean in the distance so much as the flickering glow of my neighbor’s TV set. Directly in the line of sight with the tiny piece of ocean I can see is a rather tall and narrow window set into the lower part of the next door apartment about a hundred feet away. For six years I put my shade down and up and never gave much thought to what was through that window – it’s really not big enough to see anything and I’m not interested in my neighbor’s furnishings.

But now I can see this huge TV set flickering away at all hours of the day and night. Really. I’ve been up (for various reasons) at 2, 3, 4 in the morning; I think there was one time in the last three or four months the window was dark. I haven’t made a study of it and it’s harder to see in the daylight so I won’t try to attest to how much it’s on during the day but it’s on a lot.

I’m actually a little curious. Does this guy ever sleep? Does he leave it on when he’s not there?

Not enough to go over and ask him, though. Just enough to post this little rant.

ADDENDUM: Today, not even 24 hours after I wrote this, I came home about 5:45 in the evening. It was nearly full dark. I went into my room to drop the shade and . . . the TV was off!

Maybe he wasn’t home from work yet.

Actually, now as I write this, it’s 8 pm and it’s still off. I hope he’s alright.

(OK, not another word.)

feelings

There’s a James Taylor lyric that’s been running around my brain lately. I keep hearing it because it describes my feeling pretty well. It’s from his song Shed a Little Light.

There is a feeling like the clenching of a fist
There is a hunger in the center of the chest
There is a passage through the darkness and the mist
And though the body sleeps the heart will never rest

The last week or so I’ve had this feeling. To me, it’s a prelude to having a good cry but it hasn’t happened yet. As in times before, the triggers are quirky and impossible to predict. Yesterday I was watching a football game and someone got seriously hurt. How seriously? They actually broke away for two commercials interspersed with showing the poor guy lying motionless on the field surrounded by anxious medical people. For some reason I got all choked up watching that.

But it still didn’t trigger the good cry. I guess it’ll come one of these days.

T-shirts

Laundry day today. Every time I fold my T-shirts I think about when and where they came from. At this point about half of my non-V-neck T-shirts are still from my days as a stagehand at Arco Arena in Sacramento. There it was common for a show to hand out T-shirts to the crew at the end of the load out. Occasionally they would be used to establish crews, with different colors indicating whether you were, for example, in sound, or carps, or backline, or lighting. More often they were all the same.

One I saw today I was particularly proud of. It was from a show called Walking with Dinosaurs. Walking with Dinosaurs was supposed to be a TV show and the show we did at Arco was an arena tour version of it. I say supposed to be because I had no direct knowledge of it.

I worked the shows on truss spot, which is sitting in a seat about 30′ in the air and aiming a small spot light at various people. I say people even though the stars of the show were these huge mechanized dinosaurs that slid across a special floor and acted out a story narrated by a guy walking amongst them. As the show ran several days I brought a small camera up to my perch on the third or fourth day and snapped some pictures when my light wasn’t being used. They’re not very good. This one is the best at conveying the size of the dinosaurs. You can see the Arco audience in the background. The shadows in the foreground are one of the speaker stacks and the frame holding my light.

But back to the T-shirts. For the load in and load out of this show, I was assigned a fork lift. I spent a whole day driving around to large trucks and lifting pieces of these dinosaurs off and taking them into the building. Fork lifts were a common accessory for the shows that came to Arco but it was rare that I got to operate one. I never considered myself an expert but I did ok. I ran a fork lift perhaps a half a dozen times at Arco. This show taxed my skills to the limit because the dinosaurs were not only heavy but bulky. It was important to maintain a low center of gravity while moving them. Some were unloaded in the parking lot and driven inside up and down ramps.

So, my T-shirt was the same color everyone else got but mine said ‘Fork Lift’ on it. I think there were probably three of us on that show so that was a pretty exclusive group.

The show was in 2008 and the T-shirt is showing signs of age. I’ll probably put it in the Goodwill pile before it’s completely trashed. Somebody might like it.

2016

OK, I’m going to vent here. All these people – most of them friends of mine – who moan about how 2016 is a terrible year because Carrie Fischer died, or George Michael, or Prince, or some other celebrity or pop star that I forget right now: get a grip!!

That is all.

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