jigsaws

I’ve got a puzzle going now, as usual. It’s a scene of a cathedral in Ireland with some brightly colored houses in the foreground. Sorry, no pictures! It’s pretty standard for a 1000 piece puzzle. The houses and cathedral were relatively easy but the sky isn’t. Shades of blue and gray and white. This particular brand of puzzle has pieces that are all essentially rectangular with either zero, one, two, three, or four ‘outies’. (One could say the same thing about ‘innies’.)

I’ve finished the easier part and now I’m working on the sky. I’ve got about 200 pieces left. I’ve found that I can segregate the pieces by number of outies (or innies) and make better progress on the puzzle. Yes, I know it’s about a process not a result. It’s still slow, but I have to feel I can find at least a few pieces every time I sit down.

Now the last puzzle I did was different. It was a forest scene: a stream surrounded by trees with varying foliage. Greens, reds, yellows, oranges, browns – lots of colors but not in any particular pattern. Oh, and blues, grays and blacks in the stream part. It was one of the hardest puzzles I’ve ever done but one of the most interesting. I think the reason why is that the pieces were not symmetrical like the one I have going now. They were all over the map. In fact, some of the pieces were rather bizarre looking. No pre-sorting these babies! No pictures of that one either.

It’s funny, some people will take their completed puzzle and put a backing on it and frame it. Not me. For me, it’s all about the process. I usually leave the completed puzzle on the table for a few days and admire the picture but then it’s back in the box and on to the next one. Most puzzles I’ll take to Mom or someone else who likes to do them. Failing that, it’s Goodwill time! Most of the time I’m not interested in doing a puzzle a second time.

The forest stream one I’m hanging on to. It will get another shot in a year or two.

the road home

Re-reading yesterday’s post made me realize I described details of my trip up but not of my trip back.

Part of why my visit was not so ‘transcendent’ was that even as I was marveling at the water pounding through the canyon I was thinking of the trip home. I knew I wanted to be home that night and I didn’t want to be so late as to have to deal with lots of Bay Area traffic.

I remembered my trip last year via Highway 88 and had decided ahead of time that I would go home that way. It was pretty, but it didn’t strike me as hard as it had before. Caples Lake was still mostly frozen over and Silver Lake, which so enchanted me last year, I missed entirely, presumably because it looked like a meadow covered with snow.

Here’s a picture from just below Carson Pass.

There was hardly anyone on the road, so that was nice.

Eventually I got down to Jackson, where I stopped to eat my sandwich at Kennedy Tailing Wheels Park. It’s the site of an old gold mine. From 1913 to 1942, tailings from the mine were sluiced across a valley and over a hill with the aid of 4 huge wheels. One has been restored and protected in a shed, two others are in varying states of disintegration. The fourth I found by accident and got this picture.

This one is smaller. The big one now in the shed is about 60 feet in diameter.

Below Jackson was familiar territory as it was the same road I had driven on Sunday coming home from Drytown. I didn’t stop any more until I got home to Pacifica about 2:30. Since the night before at 7 pm I had driven 440 miles.

return to Eagle Creek Falls

It wasn’t as transcendent as I’d hope it would be. I left Pacifica last night around 7 so I missed the bulk of the traffic. Still, it was a nearly 4 hour slog to the Lake. I had reserved a room at a funky motel just south of the Y.

I wanted to get up for the dawn so I didn’t take a sleeping pill. I finally got to sleep sometime after midnight. The second time I woke up it was almost 4:30 so I went ahead and got up, slugged down a caffeine pill and ate a Clif bar. I was almost out of gas, so I took care of that first, then headed out to Eagle Creek Falls.

As I drove out Highway 89 from the Y, past Camp Richardson, I remembered last July, going through that same stretch of road and seeing the sun lighting up the peaks above me. This time the sky was light but the sun was still below the peaks’ horizon.

At the falls, there were no hooligans, just 4 or 5 photographers with their cameras preset on tripods, waiting for dawn. As I expected, the creek was a mighty torrent. I went to the spot where I had been unable to get all of Zach’s tiny rocks to go over the edge. The water was churning and deep. There was no way to see below the surface. I feel sure that the water has scoured every bit of Zach over the edge and towards the lake.

As the moment of dawn approached, I watched the bright spot across the lake carefully. I had gotten a picture last year of the moment of first light. Today I did the same but the way the sun seemed to leap up from the mountain peaks seemed different. From the moment of the first edge showing to the full fiery ball in the sky seemed only seconds.

After a few minutes there, I headed across the road and up the trail. The falls up there where the bridge is has a post calling is ‘Eagle Falls’. I don’t know what that makes the falls below the road. Anyway, it was above the falls, at a spot labeled ‘Vista’ that I was most interested in. Ashley and Jeremy had brought saplings last year and planted them up there and I wanted to see if they survived.

Sadly, they did not. Or if they did, they are in a completely different spot. I took a lot of pictures of the area and will ask them if they remember exactly where they planted the saplings.

At first it made me sad that there were no special trees for Zach but after a while I remembered what I had said many times last spring. The whole of Lake Tahoe is where we will remember Zach’s final resting place. It was incredibly beautiful again this morning. Here’s the top of the falls a bit later in the morning.

Shannon Taylor speaks

Look what I started. I present here the sworn statement of Shannon Taylor, aged 25 years. Ms Taylor was the passenger in the Nissan pickup truck that killed Zach.

Driving up Lee Drive white truck on right side of truck would not stop from merging in the lane truck is extremely close. Bikers on side of road and crossed the street and was hit. The white truck speed extremly fast on side.

We were first at the red light in front. We went pass as the light turned green white truck speeding in right lane and pass the merge. This was very scary to have a person doing this even pass merge. We see some people one side and the person crosses

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

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.

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.

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.

Tim Wilson

I just read this article and tears are in my eyes. Tim and Deanne Wilson were good friends of ours during our time in San Francisco at the Opera. They were passionate, caring people then. The article clearly shows that that hasn’t changed.

When we went away, we didn’t stay in touch with Tim and Deanne. We really didn’t stay in touch with anybody at the Opera but that’s another story. I worked Opera in the Park a couple of times after I came back to SF and said hello to several members of the orchestra who knew me. In the brief conversations we had, no one mentioned Tim and I don’t remember asking.

Now he has glaucoma and other health issues that are serious enough to make him quit his job – again! What makes me sad is not just that Tim is ill or that I’ve ignored a friend for so many years. It’s that our society – our country – values music education so little that heroic efforts like this are needed.

OK. I’m resolving right here to get back in touch with Tim and Deanne. Meanwhile, I’ll put up one picture. It’s Tim, but you can’t tell. He’s showing Jeremy and Sarah how to make pizza from scratch. I’m pretty sure it was vegetarian, too.

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Category Archives: Life as we know it