The Mandelbear's Musings

Busy week. That's probably a Good Thing. Less time for moping. Three walks, only one short guitar practice session, but also four medical appointments (one in person), several phone calls (GAAK), and two remote document signings. One of which was the purchase agreement for our new house in Den Haag. Closing is September 20th. EEEP!

I think I may be getting old. It sucks. August is National Make a Will Month, but I haven't done that yet. Soon.

OTOH, I've at least gotten used to the idea of being mortal. The alternative isn't worth contemplating, because Graham's number.

My daughter Amethyst would have been 34 years old today. Our cat, Desti, died a year ago Tuesday. I should fed the cats and go to bed.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Not a great week for memories, even though they don't hurt much these days. Memories of Amethyst and Colleen get tangled up somewhat. At least I didn't go down the Hiroshima rabbit hole this year. So far. But also Nichelle Nichols.

I've been up on Whidbey Island for about two weeks now, modulo a quick round trip to Tacoma to take E home. I like being here; the prospect of downsizing and moving is daunting. And I've let the yard go to weeds; it'll probably cost a small fortune to fix it. And possibly a large herd of goats. (Except that some of it is bamboo, so I may need pandas.) And it means making phone calls and getting bids and hiring people, which is...

I have done a little singing and guitar practice. Not really enough, but I'm trying to ramp up. Similarly a little "exercising" -- really just stretches, but they make my back and hips hurt less so I'm not complaining. Small steps.

( Notes & links, as usual )

I'm going to have to update that line in "Eyes Like the Morning". It started out "Fifteen years together"... Then I changed it to "Half our lives" (on Dec 24, 2000, via git-bisect(1)). I guess "Fifty years" will have to be the last update.

sigh!

We met sometime in the summer of 1969, the year I started grad school at Stanford. I sat down at a table in the coffeehouse and struck up a conversation with three young women who turned out to be 17-year-old high school students, in their senior year at Palo Alto High. Afterwards, one of them -- the one with the Cheshire-cat grin and the beautiful grey eyes -- turned to her friends and said "That's the man I'm going to marry."

Five years later her two friends were the bridesmaids at our wedding.

I would later tell people that she stalked me for five years, but in fact she simply became my best friend. I've never met anyone who made friends as easily. We used to go for long walks around Palo Alto, and talk for hours over dinner at Hsi Nan, the Szechuan restaurant just off campus on Embarcadero Road. She invited me to an SCA event, telling me that I'd be sure to meet some women there. Did I mention that she was sneaky? That's about when she suggested that we become best friends with benefits.

Then she asked me to marry her. I said I'd think about it, and in any case couldn't possibly give her an answer when I didn't know whether I could support her (PARC having gotten rid of their contractors a few weeks before). I kept thinking about it, uncertain whether I was really in love with her, whether I had any idea what love really meant, and whether I had any idea what I was doing. I finally decided that living with my best friend for the rest of my life would work well enough. (According to Merriam-Webster the acronym "BFF" first appeared in 1987.)

I fell in love with her several times over the following 45 years.

She was also the toughest woman I've ever met. She earned the nickname "Turbo Snail" in rehab, pushing herself to walk again after the surgery that damaged her spinal cord. After that she had her hair dyed purple so that people would see her as "the lady with the purple hair" and not as an old woman in a wheelchair.

The night our daughter Amethyst was stillborn, 31 years ago today, she had sent me home to get some sleep. She did the same the night her mother died. And again the night before her last surgery, which we both knew was going to be incredibly risky, expecting that I'd get back to the hospital before the afternoon when it was scheduled. She called at 11am to say that the surgery had been rescheduled, on an emergency basis. The last thing I said to her was "I will always love you."

I went home that evening, knowing it was what she would have told me to do, but when her doctor called at 10:30 to say she was fading I went back. I figured she didn't get a vote that time. She died at 4:30am; we had been married 45 years, 6 months, 8 days, and 11 hours.

A few days shy of thirty years ago our second child, Amethyst Rose, was stillborn. It wasn't until a dozen years later that I wrote a song "For Amy" ([ogg] [mp3]); you'll find the lyrics and audio at the link, and in the set of memorial songs I posted last November on Día de Muertos, which fell on Saturday that year.

I think part of the reason it took me so long to write "For Amy" was that I'd already written something that worked for me -- a setting of Yeats's poem "The Stolen Child" -- sometime in Augusong st of 1990. I'd heard at least one other version; I've heard several more since. I latched onto the poem at once -- it was really too obvious for me not to have noticed. But the tunes I'd heard had a problem: they were too delicate and cheerful. I suppose the faeries would think so.

So I wrote my own, mostly in D minor. (Am capo 5, to be precise -- that was the only set of chord shapes that had the right combination of minor and suspended chords within easy reach.) The first three lines of the chorus, though, are in D major. What child wouldn't want to walk away "with a faery hand in hand"?

The only recording I could find of my version of "The Stolen Child" is one of a set of scratch tracks for what was meant to be my second CD, Amethyst Rose, and which I apparently abandoned some time in 2010. I suppose I ought to get back to that sometime. Sometime soon, preferably. But I'm not making any promises -- I know better.

The other reason it took me so long to write "For Amy" may be that I was already well into my series of prose poems posted on Usenet, and later LJ and DW. In particular, the one from 1991, which already includes the central images I would later use for the song.

( lyrics, if you don't want to click through: )

Look for another post on Tuesday, August 4th.

I'm not sure whether to lead with the back-story, or the song. I think the song. One of the songs. For some of the back-stories.

Today's song is Janis Ian's "Welcome to Acousticville" (Lyrics). It's on her album, Hunger. Go and listen. I'll wait.

Back-story - the song

I first heard "Welcome to Acousticville" the one time I heard Janis perform live, at a little Mexican restaurant called Don Quixote in Felton, CA. (You might want to look at my post, though it doesn't say very much.) "Welcome to Acousticville" was one of my two favorite songs from that concert; the other was "The Last Train" (lyrics. I've sung that one quite a few times, though not recently. Never had the guts to try "Welcome to Acousticville".

Janis Ian is a science fiction fan; I find it interesting but not surprising that my two favorite songs of hers are fantasy; neither would be out of place at a filksing.

Back-story - the title

This post grew out of comments by me and technoshaman on bairnsidhe's poem, "No Simple Highway". I've already posted a Songs for Saturday about "Ripple"; what brought this one on was the later discussion of my purple rose icon (which you can see on this post) in connection with psychopompery. (I know it isn't officially a word, but it's what psychopomps do, and I'm not the first one to use it.)

Back-story - the icon

The rose icon started out as a gif that somebody posted on Usenet; I took out the background and adjusted the color balance until it looked right. I created it in 1990, in honor of my daughter Amethyst Rose. I first used it as an icon on LJ in 2003; it appears to have been the second icon I uploaded, after the fractal that I still use as a default.

Since then, I've been using it as my standard icon not only for the Amethyst Rose posts, but for most posts and comments about grieving. Most people use a candle.

A pretty good day. I ran through the entire Conflikt set in the morning (doing only a verse+chorus of the ones I already know well), took a 2-mile walk at lunchtime, re-posted the party announcement, paid some bills, and determined the sex of my netbook. (Female, in case it wasn't obvious. Consider the informal name of her pointing device.)

I also ordered a couple of psych books that have been recommended in comments recently.

It was lovely weather for walking; a little warmer than the day before, meaning I could leave my jacket behind. Details were looking sharper even before the new glasses; it makes me wonder whether my glasses affect my mood -- one of the things I notice when a depression is lifting is detail in the landscape, as if things were in better focus.

Several good links in the notes, and a very short dialog with Ame.

Kind of a mixed couple of days -- a memorial service and a post that gets me all teary-eyed can do that. So can a defunct disk drive. On the other hand, I have a final determination on my current job title: Sr. Software Architect.

"Architect" makes me happy and comfortable, both because I consider programming to be one of the Useful Arts, like architecture, rather than an engineering discipline like civil engineering or a scientific ones like physics or materials science. Also, because I'm not really all that good a programmer anymore. I don't think I ever was. Sure, I can get programs written, but lots of other people are faster and more accurate at it. What I'm really good at, IMNSHO, is designing software systems in the first place, stringing existing programs together Unix-fashion with scripts and makefiles, and debugging (especially debugging other people's code).

The memorial service? Paul Metz (kshandra says it better than I could). The article that made me tear up? DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #44: How You Get Unstuck.

As an experiment, I'm putting the notes at the bottom so that if you follow a link directly to the post, you won't have them at the top of the page. Let me know what you think of that.

A rather unproductive day, especially at work, where everyone was recovering from the stress leading up to a major demo in Japan (which went off successfully).

A little more information on work's DNS fiasco: apparently this isn't the first time this particular ex-employee has gone about holding his employer's domain name for ransom. I suspect he's not going to enjoy the next several years.

I did manage to take a 3-mile walk, just before driving home from work (since I'd gone to a brown-bag talk on pricing at lunchtime). And had an interesting conversation via IM with Naomi and Ame.

OK, and did some work on Ame's web page, my IJ profile (which I don't use, but it's paid for), and my "quick reference home page" which is the page full of links I start my browsers on.

So... ok.

A man walks into a bar; a bearded, bespectacled geek in his mid-60s; and puts a pair of dollar coins on the bar. This being Callahan's, he is shadowed by a blueish aura, a fractal that looks vaguely like an alien bear with a heart-shaped head and branching antennae. It suits him.

"The usual Genever for me, Mike, and..." he glances at the young woman beside him, her arm around his waist. "Cranberry martini for you, I think?" She nods shyly. "A little light on the gin".

She is an inch or so taller, but clearly his daughter, with dark, slightly wavy hair like his must have been forty years ago, the same nose and face... She has her mother's eyes, though: grey like the sky just before sunrise, with golden highlights. Her skin, also, is like her mother's, pale with a sprinkle of freckles. Very pale.

"I don't have to ask, do I?" the bartender says gently. "And I'm pretty sure they don't have ID where you come from. But I know you turned 21 today -- your drinks are on the house." The man smiles and leaves the coin on the bar -- he knows he'll be wanting another drink tonight.

She is slightly transparent, and vanishes like the Bear's aura when they pass briefly under the light that shows only reality. He deftly takes her glass and hands it back on the other side. They sit for a while, sip their drinks, and chat; more like old friends with years of catching up to do than a father and daughter.

Finally she nods, and they walk over to the chalk line in front of the fireplace, where they stand with her left hand on his shoulder, his arm around her waist.

"Friends," the Bear says, "Allow me to introduce my daughter, Amethyst Rose. She was stillborn twenty-one years ago today, and we've only recently started to get re-acquainted. She prefers to be called Ame now."

He looks at her with what he hopes is an encouraging smile. She laughs lightly. "Silly Daddy. I don't know how often I'll get here; it's a long trip. But I'm glad I'm here."

They raise their mostly-empty glasses. "To coming out!" she says, and looks sternly at him. "Don't say it!"

"To Ame!" They throw their glasses into the fireplace, where they crash and mingle their shards in a cascade of blue flame.

They hug tightly, until she finally lets go and says, "I guess I'd better be going."

"Keep in touch?"

"Of course, silly! You know how to reach me." She turns and walks toward an X-window on the wall.

It shows a twilit clearing among tall trees made of stone; a single rosebush with jade leaves, obsidian thorns, and a single purple blossom stands near the far left edge. She walks through it and the surface ripples like water. The blossom opens as she walks past it into the darkness.

The man stares after her for a moment, blinks, and goes back to the bar. "I think I could use that second drink now," he says.

Not a terribly eventful or productive day, but not a bad one. A good, long walk (for once), and I found and fixed a particularly stupid bug in one of the programs I'd been working on a few months ago. It was a compile-time configuration decision, to take out a feature that we weren't using at the time but that later turned out to be necessary -- by which time the original decision had been long forgotten.

I could have fixed it any time, had the coworker I've been having a hard time communicating with ever given me a coherent bug report instead of going down yet another rabbit hole of increasingly wacko work-arounds.

The really good thing about the whole episode was my success in not giving myself the label "dumb bear", the way I usually do. I did title the email I sent about it "Egg on my face", but that was a calculated gambit, in hopes of encouraging said coworker, who finally seems to be headed toward the design I've been trying for months to get him to follow. I have to talk to him tomorrow and find out what it was that finally made things click for him.

A couple of links up in the links. I'm still exploring Clothing, Sex, Safety, and Power by Laurie Toby Edison