Category Archives: Life as we know it

70

I turned 70 a couple of months ago. It’s completely freaky to be referring to myself as being that age. I suppose that because I still have hair, most people I tell are amazed. They say I am well preserved for that age. I tell them I’m rotten inside!

I was a freshman in high school when the Simon and Garfunkel record ‘Bookends’ came out. It had the hits Mrs. Robinson, At the Zoo and Hazy Shade of Winter on it but it also had some different tracks that didn’t make much impression on my 14 year old self: Save the Life of My Child was a strange story about someone’s child jumping off of a building. Voices of Old People was recordings of old people talking about nothing in particular – I thought. Then there was the Bookends Theme, with the line ‘ . . . how terribly strange to be 70.’

That line has been rolling around in my head for the past few months. I don’t know what Paul Simon – then not even 30 – was referring to specifically, but it sure resonates in me now.

I get to have lunch with a group of stagehand friends every couple of months. Everyone in the group is retired except for me. The first question I am asked when I see them is, ‘Are you retired yet?’

So far, the answer has been no but that will change this year. While the Symphony Stage Manager job is tremendously rewarding in some ways, it is very stressful and I decided that last years’ Christmas Holiday programming – always the hardest month of the year – would be my last. My friend and colleague Jim J. finally retired last fall at the age of 75. Many of us thought he should have gone sooner. Not because he couldn’t do his job but because we all recognized that sometimes the body doesn’t work the way it used to. And sometimes that happens with little warning. I’m ready to enjoy life a little before it’s too late!

I think about my friend and former band mate Tim I., dead from prostate cancer at the age of 59. I’ve had my PSA checked every year since then. So far, it’s still very low.

I had three surgeries last year under general anesthesia and one more (skin cancer) under local. It’s time to not take anything for granted.

Eight

Eight years today since we lost Zach.

It’s still early afternoon here in California as I write this. At this time on this day eight years ago, Zach was riding his bike around the LSU tailgate parties visiting with friends.

It’s a measure of how far I’ve come that I had to look up the date to make sure I had the right one. I get the 14th and 15th confused for some reason. Zach was killed on the evening of the 14th. November 14, 2015. Many of us got on an airplane the next day and were in Baton Rouge less than 24 hours after it happened.

I had a resolution for a long time that I would not mark Zach’s death date but instead focus on his birth date. On the whole, that hasn’t worked very well. This year is the first time I haven’t been counting down the days to November 14th. I will take that as a good thing.

I’ve averaged about one or two crying jags over Zach per year in the last 5 or so years. Sometimes a photo of him comes up on the screen saver and I have to catch my breath.

No one else in the family has mentioned it and, aside from this post, I’m not going to bring it up.

Sepi and I came down to Mom’s today. We usually come on Sundays but because of a quirk in my schedule, my only option this week was today, a Tuesday. All the way down here I kept thinking the traffic was weird for a Sunday. Somehow, my confusion over the exact date of Zach’s death seems related. My work is very stressful and I think of retirement often. I also know Zach would have something interesting and useful to say about my work situation.

Naïveté

Memories . . .

I remember a warm day, the smell of pine, sun on canvas. I was at Camp HIgh Sierra with my Boy Scout troop. I was a pre-teen, 11 or 12. I had never been anywhere without my family before.

So the memory that inspired this post was really not any of those things, although I am sure they were all there. It was going into my tent, probably after lunch since it was full day, and finding a nice neat turd on my sleeping bag.

I remember that there were three or four other boys there, laughing at my predicament. I remember wondering how it could have gotten there, what animal could it have been. I don’t remember much about the environs. Of course, it was the high Sierra, probably 4 or 5 thousand feet elevation, among the pines. Whether there were wild animals around was the subject of some debate but, regardless, something had gotten in and pooped on my sleeping bag.

I think I knew enough to know that it wasn’t a human turd but beyond that I was clueless. I think the best explanation seemed to be a that it was from a raccoon. That raccoons are night creatures was not known to me.

Of course the other boys in the tent thought it was hilarious. I remember thinking that maybe I could reach into the bag under the turd and fling it out of the tent. The sides were open and it seemed possible in my desperation. Why I didn’t go get a paper towel and pick it up remains a mystery. Maybe there were no paper towels in the bathrooms. I certainly remember a major aversion to touching it.

By now, gentle reader, you will have realized that it was a prank. The ‘turd’ was a bit of plastic. After 10 or 15 minutes of hilarity, it was revealed to me by the perpetrator. I don’t remember anything about him or any of the other boys who were there. There were no other incidents like that during my time at Camp High Sierra.

I was an introverted, bookish boy. I don’t remember why I joined the Boy Scouts, I remember the troop met at the church parish hall so there was some connection there. I went to Camp High Sierra twice, each time for a week, in the summer. It was the only time I did any serious work on merit badges. Merit badges, for those who don’t know, were the raison d’etre of the Boy Scouts. One started out as a Tenderfoot and rose through the ranks by earning merit badges. The really cool kids had a sash to put their badges on. The top of the heap was an Eagle Scout. I didn’t get enough merit badges to merit a sash.

At Camp High Sierra, somehow, I learned to do what we called ‘lanyards’. Lanyards were these long skinny multicolored plastic things that could be woven into shapes. Ironically, there were no merit badges for ‘lanyards’. Or perhaps that is telling that that is what I spent so much time on. Anyway, I made a kind of a key fob that I still have. It’s all that’s left besides memories.

Diaries and legacies

I’ve kept journals – diaries if you will – for many years. I remember writing some diary-type things even in high school. I don’t know if I digitized that writing I could go look but if I did that I wouldn’t write this post. I know I purged a lot of paper from that time when I moved in with Sepi.

When I was about to become a father, I started writing a journal more seriously. I suppose I thought it would be something that my children could go back to and find interesting. In fact, all of my kids did read the accounts of the day of their birth. We had some interesting discussions of that back in the day.

Originally, there was a journal for each child but it eventually devolved into general journals of my life. I’ve gone back and looked at some of them over the years. It can be troublesome emotionally but I am glad I have the option to revisit those times if I want to.

Zach, as readers of this blog know, kept a diary regularly during his time in Baton Rouge. I have read some of it with the range of emotions one might expect. A couple of entries I have shared here. I have tried to be sensitive to the privacy of the people mentioned so that is a significant limiting factor.

I know Mom has journals. The ones I’ve seen are travel journals but I suspect there may be other more personal diaries. The travel journals take up about 6 feet of shelf space. When will I – or anyone else – read those? I haven’t asked Mom about what purpose she felt in writing originally. I think it will be the same as me: it’s just something I do. If it has value to later generations, then that’s a plus.

I used to do a lot of photography with an SLR camera. Now that I carry a different camera with me all the time – we generally call it a ‘phone’ – I take pictures of this or that but don’t spend any time thinking about the longer term. Why did I take pictures before? Why did I haul that big camera with me everywhere? I took pictures of people gathering to memorialize the event but I also took ‘art’ pictures. Why? Now that everything is digital I’ve saved everything carefully in my hard drive. Mom has another 6 feet of shelf space dedicated to photo albums. With few exceptions, they are untouched. When she passes and her house is to be sold, who will take them? Who will take the journals? Do they have value to her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren? People outside the family?

Getting back to journals, I hope that my children and grandchildren read my writing and feel that they can know me in a new way.

When Zach was killed, we were faced with the issue of what to do with his things. More importantly, our relationships with Zach were no longer dynamic. Memory became the only relationships we had. I see his journals and this blog as a way to keep a person alive. Of course, it’s not the same but it’s all we have.

The Blue Angels part 2

Well, I went upon the roof yesterday to watch the Blue Angels. I didn’t have to be at work until 5 and the show was from 3 to 4. I thought it would be dumb to not use one of the benefits of living where we do. The weather has been warm – really warm, 85 in SF – but I thought  the breeze would come up and the fog would come in as it usually does at the end of the second hot day so I put on my work clothes instead of the shorts I had been wearing. Hot and still it was on the roof. Hmmm . . .

We got up there early and saw something called an ‘F35 demo’ which was one military jet flying around and doing some interesting things. I wondered if that was the same type of plane that went missing a couple of weeks ago after the pilot bailed out. Later, at work, someone told me the US has spent one Trillion dollars! on developing that airplane and it can’t even do some of the things its predecessor can do. It does a lot of things: it flies fast, it flies slow, it goes straight up, it hovers. Whatever.

Just before the BAs came, we saw the BA support plane fly by a few times. It’s a C-130. The C-130 is a four engine prop plane that’s been around forever. I built a plastic model of one when I was about 12 so I thought it was cool.

Oh, yeah, there was a flyby of a United 777. That’s a big airplane after looking at little military jets. No barrel rolls or flying straight up but it did some cool things. It was interesting how quiet it was compared to the war machines.

Eventually the Blue Angels appeared in the distance. There was a group of four plus two others who did kind of solo stuff. The main group came up from the bridge along the waterfront but suddenly one of the soloists came from behind Telegraph Hill. Right. Over. Our. Heads! Ho-lee shit!!

I tried to get some pictures but taking pictures with a cell phone in bright sunshine is highly problematic especially when your subject is traveling at 500 miles per hour.

So, the Blue Angels did all the things that I expected. The flying was amazing. After about ten minutes, I found myself in tears. I still don’t know exactly why. Maybe it’s that humans can do amazing things but it’s too bad so much has to be for the purpose of killing other humans.

We left early because the show had started late and we had to get to work. We went down the elevator to the roars of jets overhead.

The Blue Angels

The Blue Angels are back. They had told us that they would be practicing today for the Fleet Week air shows this weekend. We thought originally they might wait their practice time until after the Feinstein memorial was completed. But no doubt someone thought it would be cool to have them fly over City Hall during the ceremony so I thought they would combine that with their practicing. They were flying around for at least an hour. We figured, OK, maybe they didn’t want to disrupt rush hour traffic. Never mind. They’re back. It’s 4:30 now and they’ve been wailing over our condo for a half hour already.

We were watching the memorial on TV and it was interesting to see the (small) difference between us hearing them fly over our condo and the speakers having to pause as they flew over City Hall. It’s about two miles away. They move fast! And they are loud. I resisted the temptation to go up on the roof. We would have a fantastic view because we are so close to the waterfront and the flying is spectacular, but I am sure I would be left with the same feelings I’ve had in years past when watching them from the roof of Davies Hall.

They are war machines, designed and built to terrorize and kill people. The fact that so many people gloss over that fact to wallow in the thrill of loud noises bothers me deeply. What would it be like if this was another place and they were attacking my city? I’m terrified now when I know they are not armed. How would I feel if they were launching rockets and blowing up buildings with people in them? Perhaps friends, colleagues or family members? OMFG.

Mostly I keep my feelings to myself but today I decided to post this. RIP Dianne Feinstein. I know you would have loved the flyovers.

(I posted this to Facebook first. I don’t know why. I know very few people are reading this blog and more would see the FB post.)

Idyll

Sitting at Mom’s, recovering from hernia surgery. The air is a nice 73 degrees. It’s a bit breezy; a little cool in the shade in this late afternoon. Teresa is up in the orange tree trimming branches. Sepi is out watering with the hose making Mom nervous. She still has her dislocated shoulder in a sling and Mom is terrified she will fall again.

When I got off the freeway in Santa Clara yesterday I opened the car window and had a major deja vu moment. It took me right back to the many summer days spent here doing all the things that we kids did in the summer: riding bikes, playing baseball, walking in the creek throwing rocks at lizards.

Today we took Mom for a walk around the block. She didn’t want to go that far when we left but she went all the way around. It was .57 miles. Sepi likes to lean on me for safety. Mom had her wheeled walker.

The surgery was a week ago last Thursday. The first couple of days were rough but since then I’ve been able to do pretty much what I want to as long as it doesn’t involve heavy lifting. I have a little pain in my gut that surfaces when I make certain movements. The doc gave me Norco – which I call Vicodin (I’m not sure if it’s really the same) – but I haven’t had to take any. Ibuprofen and Tylenol are doing the trick.

Tim from work called me today and wanted to know how I was doing and if I was still planning on coming to work next Wednesday as scheduled. I’ts been really nice to not have to think about all that stuff. 

Now for the less than idyllic: Teresa needs more bags for the oranges she’s harvesting. I don’t have shoes on so Mom went in under the tree to deliver them and I was watching carefully. We don’t want her to fall either!

I’m not so good I can write well with distractions like that. It’s my first post in more than a year so I’ll be happy with this.

Bruce revisited

Bruce Johnson is dead. I just found out through a series of coincidences. Today in the mail I received a letter inviting me to a high school class reunion. My class had a reunion last year and had so much fun they decided to do it again this year.

Included with the letter were some links to video of last years reunion and some photos but also a power point memorializing those classmates now passed on. As I watched the presentation, about half the names were known to me. Not that they had died, but I remembered the people. A couple of them I was close to and knew about: Ken Hood and Karen Gudat. Ken was a neighborhood guy that I hung with for a while. His sister and my sister are close so I had heard of his death. I may write about Karen one day.

The presentation went on for a while. Most had pictures from the high school yearbook so they were easy to recognize. There must have been 30 or 40 pictures and as it went on I started thinking about Bruce and wondering if he would be in there.

He was. At the very end.

It makes me think of the times in PE when we were picked last for the teams – usually flag football, in my recollection. He called it ‘little or no ego satisfaction.’ Another nod to Frank Zappa.

it also makes me think of how he was not valued by the teachers and leadership at Cupertino High School. They saw him as a lazy under achiever, a dope smoker who would never amount to anything. Whatever Bruce turned out to be in conventional terms, he was a huge influence to the good for me and I loved him.

Bruce Johnson

It’s an ordinary name, not unlike Chris Wood. Put it in a search window and you get a lot of hits. Too many. How do I find the Bruce Johnson who was my best friend in high school? I suppose I could try going through classmates.com or some such. I don’t think Bruce is – I hope he still ‘is’ – that kind of guy. I mean, the kind of guy who would register with his old high school alumni group.

I’m more mainstream than him and I haven’t registered with anyone. I did go to the 30th reunion of my graduating class. (This is quite a few years ago now.) Bruce wasn’t there, of course. There were a few people there who I remembered and wanted to talk to. An even smaller number remembered Bruce but no one knew how to get in touch with him.

We lived in the same neighborhood. Like a lot of us, he hung out at the park across the street from my house. I imagine that’s where I met him. We didn’t share any classes at school. He was most definitely not taking the college prep curriculum. On the contrary, Bruce was sort of defiant about the arc of his life. And, in a way, that was what interested me. He had no interest in becoming highly educated although he was plenty smart. He turned me on to Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. He had a copy of their first album, which had a list of names of people that had influenced Frank. We pored over those names and tried to figure out who they were. About half we had no idea.

I still have the album. I don’t remember how it ended up with me. On it, I can still see the little ink dots Bruce put beside the names that he recognized. We pooled our meager knowledge but for the most part we were equally ignorant of the people Frank Zappa thought were important.

Frank was famously anti-school (‘Brown shoes / don’t make it! / Quit school / Don’t fake it!’) but not anti-education. While I was dutifully following the math and science path set out for me, Bruce was looking to further his education on his own terms. To that end, we went in together on a subscription to Rolling Stone magazine. We each paid half and the deal was that I got to keep the four books that were premiums and he got to keep the back issues. We both read everything. I remember the first issue we got had an advertisement for something called an Aquarian Music Faire in Woodstock, New York, with a lineup of bands that was staggering. We would have gone in a heartbeat if it wasn’t 3000 miles away!

We also listened to music incessantly. We were both trying to learn to play the guitar and the paradigm was to learn by listening. No guitar lessons for us! Eric Clapton never took lessons! Jerry Garcia never took lessons! So we thought.

Bruce had a knack for coming up with albums by bands I had never heard of who were really good.

I had a morning paper route and he had an afternoon one so every afternoon after school, I would go over to his house and sit with him while he folded his papers in his front yard. I don’t remember going around on his route with him but I may have. We rode bikes everywhere. The neighborhood was compact so it was no burden on me. I don’t remember ever having trouble doing homework and it certainly wasn’t anything Bruce was ever worried about.

He hung with a different crowd at school, of course, and brought back things that I never would have thought about. One time I remember him telling me that a girl he knew in our class was glad because her period came. It had never crossed my mind that people I knew in high school were having sex.

Bruce never got very good at the guitar. He played the harp (harmonica) pretty well. He sold me his Gibson Melody Maker which I played for a year or so until I started playing jazz at college.

This isn’t exactly the same kind of guitar but close. The picture is me at Norman’s Rare Guitars in LA in 2018.

Speaking of college, after we graduated high school, I went away to college but not far enough. I stayed in the band I already had and came home frequently to practice and play gigs. It certainly contributed to my quitting school after only six months. I also had the luxury of a high draft number which Bruce did not. He would have been drafted and sent to Vietnam except he took the option of enlisting. The deal was that if you enlisted, you got to have some say in where you went. And it was for three years instead of two.

It sounded like a million years to me and it probably did for Bruce as well but he took it and went to Germany in the Army. We exchanged a few letters but our relationship petered out.

A few years later I heard he was back in the area living with a girl named Gloria but we never got together again. There were no email addresses or cell phone numbers to go to. His parents had moved or perhaps I didn’t want to go through them. I don’t remember.

I like to think it was Bruce’s influence that I strayed from the straight and narrow science education path into music and theatre.

Thanks, Bruce! I hope you still have all those Rolling Stones.

(I went and dug out the album. There are a lot fewer dots than I remember. And interesting for who we didn’t know! Also note Frank’s comment for the first tune.)

Birthdays of dead people

Dad would have been 92 yesterday. I marked the day but didn’t think of making a post about it until too late in the day. His loss has receded into the general noise of the past.

I suppose it happens to everyone. It happened with Zach, too. The date of Zach’s death passed me by completely this year. I literally didn’t think about it at all until a day or two later. That’s a first. I did have an idea for a post on Zach’s birthday but the day slipped away from me. He would’ve been 33.

With Dad, I’ve been better able to recall the earlier times when he was his real, dynamic self. The last two years of his decline are what we have (mostly) forgotten.

The other day, Mom had me get out a walker that had been purchased for him. She wants to have it nearby for herself now. It led to some talk about Dad’s last days but in a fairly dispassionate tone. Maybe elegiac or wistful might describe it better. We talked about her and Mary getting him to Christmas Mass in the rain. It turned out to be his last time out.

Mom had told me she got emotional on Zach’s death date this year but the thought of Dad’s passing doesn’t have the raw emotion attached to it. His death date is coming up in about three weeks, tho’ . . .

I’m glad I’ve been able to change my focus to birthdays rather than death days. It’s part of looking forward, I believe.

So, Happy Birthday Dad and Zach! I miss you but I am working on bringing my memories of you to bear in a positive way.