Category Archives: Life as we know it

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.

I survived Christmas

Last year didn’t count. The vaccine had just been announced and no one was having any kind of gatherings. Two years ago, though, Christmas was not a very fin time for me. A large group of family were all at Mom’s house in Santa Clara. When the gift giving started, it quickly devolved into a frenzy of packages being passed back and forth around the living room and everyone seemingly talking at once.

I found it bewildering and confusing. I felt old. I didn’t want to have to experience that again.

This year, gatherings are more acceptable. Everyone who was going to be at Mom’s has been vaccinated. Most if not all have had the booster. Most tested before setting out so once we were there, we could relax without distancing or mask requirements. Of course, omicron, with its ability to ride on vaccinated people, is lurking.

But we set it all aside yesterday and had a good time: an even dozen of us. The gift giving was spread out a little due to Sarah and Mary arriving late in the day so it wasn’t so hectic.

I survived.

Today we’re back at home. It’s still raining. I’d like to get out a little but it’s unlikely with the rain. I don’t have work for a few days. There is a rumor that the New Years Eve show might be canceled. And I’ve written just my second post in nearly a year.

The dream

The dream came again tonight. That’s the fourth time in about two weeks. It’s usually in the morning but tonight it is late. I decided to wrote about it instead of chewing it over while trying to find untroubled sleep.

It’s pretty much the same every time: the viewpoint is right along the truck as Zach’s head hits the windshield and his body – for i hope it’s his body already and he’s not conscious any more because the next thing is his body flies through the air and hits the ground in front of the truck as it’s slowing but it hasn’t slowed enough so the right front wheel rolls over Zach, completing the job.

I don’t see Zach’s face; even the body is sort of a blur. I don’t see the bike or the other truck or the people in the trucks. It’s probably over in about the time it actually happened: 15 or 20 seconds from the first thud to silence. I know there was Micah’s running steps and the driver saying, ‘You can’t pin this on me!’ But that’s not part of the dream.

it’s not the anniversary, nothing obvious has happened to me on the road lately. They’re just coming.

We took a walk today with a friend of ours who recently lost her husband of over 40 years very suddenly. Like Zach, he went from seemingly perfectly healthy to dead within seconds. She’s completely bereft and I tried to comfort her today by talking about losing Zach. I don’t think it helped as much as just getting out and getting some exercise.

vistas

We have a nice view from our house on the north side of San Bruno Mountain. Actually, ‘nice’ is relative. When I was living in Pacifica, one of my near-daily treasures was looking out over the Pacific Ocean, usually on my way home from work when I went over the hill from Daly City on Highway 1. I liked to call it ‘the mighty Pacific Ocean’. I did a calculation once about how much of the Pacific a person could see from the coast on a clear day. It seemed like a lot but it was only something like one tenth of one percent. It’s a big ocean!

The only water in our view now is a bit of the San Francisco Bay. The view we notice is dominated by the San Francisco skyline which in turn is dominated by the SalesForce tower. I have to say that as weird as that building seemed when it was going up – the best sobriquet I heard was ‘the butt plug’ – it catches the light at sunrise and sunset in interesting ways. I started leaving my camera out so that I could snap a picture now and again to document the variety.

I’m going to include a few here with the warning that they might not look like much; they’re better splashed across a big computer screen. Nevertheless, here they are:

Yes, this one is shaken. I’ve got a tripod now.

And here’s a reference photo in normal daylight:

James Gleick again

I’ve been trying to read James Gleick’s latest book Time Travel: A History. I say trying because I’ve had great difficulty in recent months focusing on books. (I’ve had great difficulty focusing on almost everything since the lockdown, but that’s another story. Pandemic brain.)

I take a book from the library and then don’t read it. Sometimes I read a few pages and put it down and never come back to it. I’ve done better with Gleick for some reason but I still haven’t finished it and I am afraid the library is going to repossess it soon.

One problem is that Gleick, like Stephenson, is such a deep thinker that he requires good concentration to extract value from the book.

Stephenson’s novels it’s a lot easier because there is a plot. Gleick is a science writer. One reason I liked his book Chaos so much was that it had a narrative. Time Travel, perhaps deliberately, does not.

Gleick shows that time is a concept that humans both understand and do not understand. Even the measurement of time, which we in Western civilization like to think is straightforward, is dependent on consciousness, which leads to memory, which for me today leads to Zach. Nowadays, I think of Zach as being in the past but his memory is with me in the present. In a way he is as alive in my memory as he ever was before when I was not in his presence.

The future we tend to take on faith. After Zach was killed I remember telling people in grief sessions that I had to rewrite my future without him. There was a hole where I had expected him to be. So the future we expect is not assured. This is hardly profound but Gleick presents it engagingly.

I haven’t finished the book yet but I think there is some humor in reviewing a book about time before finishing it. Gleick even comments on how books are time machines themselves in that the reader can go back and forth through the pages if s/he desires.

Of course, the memory of Zach is not the same as having Zach alive in our now world. I can experience Zach by reading his journals and getting wisdom from them, but experiencing his living presence would generate different wisdom. So, I am sad to not be able to experience Zach’s different wisdom in my now. I take comfort in doing my little part in transmitting his now static wisdom into the future.