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.

Dad’s birthday

Dad turned 87 today. Teresa hosted a party at her house. All the Bay Area Woods were there. Mary called and sang him ‘Happy Birthday ‘ over the phone. He couldn’t hear her with the handset so Paul got the speaker phone going and that was better.

After dessert of lemon meringue pie (his request) he opened the cards from his children. All contained heartfelt personal statements of love and admiration. He had trouble reading them because they were handwritten, though. Jane was sitting next to him and helped out. He was in good humor all evening and even made a couple of jokes but sometimes the conversation moves too fast for him and he checks out. Other times he makes self deprecating remarks that recognize his limitations.

I had tea and conversation with Tom V yesterday who I haven’t seen in nearly a year. He lost his mother in the spring of 2015 and many of his reactions to the loss were familiar to me. He’s still feeling the effects. All death is traumatic, even when one is older and has lived a long life. It just makes me treasure Dad and Mom all the more. One day they’ll be no more and all we’ll have left are memories.

computers

I’ve been a computer guy for a long time. I actually took a computer class in my first quarter in college in 1971. I was part of a group of stagehands who pooled money to buy a Radio Shack TRS-80 in 1982. I always had the ability to understand how to relate to the machine in such a way as to get productive work out of it. When other people had trouble, I was often the guy who was brought in to figure it out.

So, a couple of minutes ago, I was typing up a post when all the text disappeared. So many times I’ve been on the troubleshooting side and I ask, ‘What did you do?’ and the answer was. ‘I don’t know.’ I always was a little incredulous. How could you not know what you just did?

Well, I just found a key combination that erased 10 minutes of typing and I have no idea what it was. I couldn’t find any key combination that brought it back so I guess it wasn’t too important!

(If it wasn’t a key combination then my mental powers are greater than I thought. I wasn’t really happy with what I was writing. Now I’ve written this instead.)

puzzlement revisited

I made reference to my original ‘puzzlement‘ post today in an email and I thought of a comparison. Saying ‘Zach is dead’ is like saying ‘the Pacific Ocean is huge.’ Intellectually you know it is true but you really can’t grasp the real size of it.

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