The Mandelbear's Musings

Today is my daughter Amethyst's thirty-third birthday. (I'm not sure why I decided to use present tense this time instead of past conditional; it just seems right. Maybe it's connected in some weird way to the fact that I'm also (still) working on Desti's memorial page and post. Grief has its own agenda, I suppose; I'm not going to try to second-guess it.)

Where was I? In a fantasy, presumably.

I'm picturing Ame and Colleen each with a cat in their lap, sipping gin-and-tonic as they sit on the grass and watch the Viking warriors on the field between the Rainbow Bridge and Valhalla. It's a lot like the SCA. Curio would be in Colleen's lap, as usual, and Desti in Amethyst's. They're both purring contentedly. Bast is probably over at the other end of the field rolling in catnip with Freya's chariot-cats.

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.