It Must Be That Time

A few leaves on one of the bigleaf maples outside my window have gone yellow, and the black cottonwoods are starting to look tattered and worn. Scarecrow is starting to whine about having to sweep the leaves off the deck. We've had an amazing summer, but it won't last forever. It must be that time. Fall is on the way.

Juvenile dispersal is a big deal to biologists. Where juveniles go affects population growth, resource utilization, the genetic structure of the population, all kinds of stuff.

It must be that time. Tuffy went off to Japan. One of her friends is in the military, stationed in Hawaii (that should count as dispersal, since she's from Seattle, and in the service there's no telling where she'll wind up.) A friend's son just left for a year in France. In a few days my oldest nephew, Arkman, is leaving for 18 months in Bahrain. They'll all be doing interesting things, in interesting places. I'm looking forward to sharing their adventures; it's one of the advantages of belonging to a relentlessly verbal family.

I recently discovered that Tuffy's relentless verbosity is all Scarecrow's doing. A couple of weeks ago, pretty much by accident, I stumbled across a couple of things written by Scarecrow's fourth great-granduncle, Walter Bates. One was a narrative concerning, among other things, the early days of the revolution, "with some account of the sufferings of the loyalists." I knew that Walter's brother, William (Scarecrow's fourth great-grandfather), was a sergeant in the Queen's Rangers during the Revolutionary war. After the war, being less than welcome in the newly United States, William went to Nova Scotia, and eventually settled in Ontario. I didn't know anything about Walter, who apparently became High Sheriff of Kingston, Nova Scotia, in which capacity he wrote the concisely titled The mysterious stranger; or, Memoirs of Henry More Smith, alias Henry Frederick Moon, alias William Newman, who is now confined in Simsbury mines, in Connecticut, for the crime of of burglary: containing an acount of his confinement in the gaol of King's county, province of New-Brunswick, where he was under sentence of death : with a statement of his succeeding conduct before and since his confinement in Newgate. He also wrote some really bad poetry. Who knew? Judging from his narrative, he was a man of strongly-held opinions; another trait he seems to have bequeathed to his descendants.

Family history explains so much.

A Year in Japan

One year ago today we were up early in the morning to take Tuffy to the airport, where she met up with other Seattle JETs, and boarded a flight to Tokyo.

Doesn't seem like it's been that long.

Seems like it's been forever.

She loves Japan. She loves her job (teaching English to Japanese high school students). She took part in some Japanese festivals, attended a couple of k-pop concerts, and did a little traveling around Japan. She had an ATM machine eat her bank book, and managed to do what was required to get it back. She had her bicycle stolen, found, turned in to the police, and eventually returned. Instead of MMA, which absorbed pretty much all her free time when she was here, she's doing judo. She found a dojo where she feels accepted and welcome, even though she's gaijin, and a girl.

Her sensei speaks no English, so she says they communicate using a patchwork of rudimentary Japanese, their common understanding of wrestling, and, when necessary, 'point and grunt'.

She extended her contract for a second year.

I had hoped her blog posts would motivate me to post here more often. That didn't happen. Apparently I can enjoy reading about her life in Japan, without feeling obliged to find something interesting enough about my very ordinary routine to reciprocate. If something exciting happens, I'll blog about it. Or if I feel like it. Whatever.

I'm looking forward to reading about another year in Japan.

Father's Day

Dad with his 1949 Hudson.

It still seems weird not to call and wish him happy Father's Day.

He was not always an easy guy to get along with, but he was who he was, and if you didn't like it, it was your loss. It was a lesson I'm still trying to learn.

Scarecrow is planning to spend Father's Day preparing burnt offerings on the grill. He started a couple of batches of beer a few weeks ago, which should be about ready to drink. I expect a good time will be had by all.

For all the fathers out there, it's a tough job; thanks for doing it.

Sunny-Side-Up in Seattle

Looks like we get eggs this weekend.

The "sunshine" icon on my desktop always makes me think of a sunny-side-up egg.

Crazy. On Monday morning, when I started this post, it was snowing.

wtf?

It was just the occasional flake and it didn't last long, but still, wtf? No snow all winter, and we get snow on the third day of spring? Does that seem right to you? OK, an hour later there was even a little blue sky and you could almost call it sunshine, like, oh wait, spring, yeah, sorry, my mistake, I'm with the program now…

Who knew that whining could exercise that much control over the weather? I'll have to remember that.

When it's supposed to be sunny the "sunshine" weather icon still looks to me like somebody's trying to fry an egg on my desktop. I think the association is left over from life in rural Michigan, long ago and far away. We had a big garden, and when we canned tomatoes we'd throw the tomato skins to the chickens, who seemed to enjoy them very much. A few days later, the hens, juiced to the gills on carotenoids, began laying eggs with the most amazing florescent orange yolks. Kind of like the sunshine icon, only maybe sunnier. It took some getting used to, but even now, dog's years later, I still think grocery store eggs look hopelessly pallid and a little sad.

Tuffy has been posting pictures on Facebook (even some videos, because even though she forgot her camera, she had her iPhone and holy crap I love modern technology!) of a sumo tournament in Osaka. Another case where it would be nice to have some words to go along with the pictures.

Last week, in the course of stalking Scarecrow's grandfather, I found out he was an inventor. His Abrasive Mounting for Grinding Devices was patented on August 30, 1932.

Scarecrow didn't know anything about it, and thought it was pretty cool. And I got to send the patent to Scarecrow's brother, Tinman, the engineer, who, as it happens, makes grinding devices himself. So that was fun. And technical drawings are all done on computer these days, but back then it was paper and ink and a straight edge, and the result was a work of art. So that was fun, too.

You never know what's going to turn up. I was just trying to find out when PD Bates died. Which, by the way, I still don't know.

Brothers in Arms

Brothers in Arms. Literally. Or at least as literally as you're likely to get with something like that. During World War II, my dad and his brother, my uncle Willie, were both in the Army.

On July 14, 1944, Willie was someplace in the Pacific. He was 25 years old, and had been in the Army for a year and a half. My dad was 23. He had just finished basic training at Camp McCain, Mississippi, and would shortly be deployed to Germany.

This is the v-mail, complete with censor's stamp, that Willie sent to my dad. My brother found it 67 years later, when he was cleaning my dad's office after he died.

Dear Ez,
As I sit here, with my pen in one hand and the other busily engaged in warding off all manner of insect life, I wonder: If you and I will ever do any of those many things we planned to do. If our interests and desires will still be as similar as they always were. If you will be able to wear my clothes and I yours. If I will still remain in the category of the "wolf of all wolves." If Gordon will still be as cynical and disgusted with mankind. If Red will continue to collect the classics and make music his heart's ease in life. If that girl from the flower shop will be as appealing as ever. If the Trianon will still be a hangout on Wednesday night for the Spevaks'. If this damned war will cease and I can give up letter writing and my thoughts see their answers. As all bad things, so this – it ceases.
Your brud,
Wilfred

It's Working

If a picture is worth 1000 words, Tuffy’s latest photo essay put her 17,000 words ahead of me, blog-wise, so I guess I’d better get cracking. Not that we’re competitive or anything.

Nothing much going on around here lately, as far as I know. Not that anyone would tell me if there was.

I’ve been using some really cool online utilities to tidy up my family history database, a long-term project which is both extremely tedious, and very satisfying, in an OCD kind of way. And last weekend Scarecrow helped me scan some of the documents my brother unearthed in my mom and dad’s house, so I finally get to look at them. A few answers, and a lot of new questions.

I saw the video the library put together from the stuff they recorded the other day. It’s not as horrible as I had feared. Scarecrow looks presentable, and the whippets are pretty darned cute.

Rogue's Gallery

Finally.

This was one of those projects that just took forever. OK, not forever, maybe, but 13 years. At least. Depending on when you start counting. Getting things hung on the wall doesn’t sound like a big project, but we just never seemed to get it together.

It’s not art, really. Photos, mostly. Family photos, although neither my family nor Scarecrow’s is what you’d consider particularly decorative. Some of them are just snapshots, and not particularly good snapshots, at that. Still, coming up with stuff to hang was the easy part.

You think, just by chance, that the occasional image would be a standard size 4 x 6, 5 x 7, or 8 x 10, but no. Custom mats and frames can be expensive. In fact, standard size mats and frames can add up pretty quickly. And there are so many choices! Too many.

But what the heck. This is not art. It’s not a museum. Let’s just do it.

I scavenged eBay for frames unloaded at estate sales, and got about what you'd expect. Nothing matches anything else. Well, a couple do, but that was purely by accident. Scarecrow loaded the frames with our stuff (in some cases replacing pictures of people who are far more decorative than our relatives, but hanging pictures of people we don't know just wouldn’t be the same, would it?) and hung them on the wall.

My dad's family, mostly.

My mom's family.

Products of the Milburn Wagon Works in Toledo Ohio, where my gggrandfather, ggrandfather, and ggrand uncle worked.

Scarecrow's family. The empty frame is a placeholder for a picture of Scarecrow's mom in her wedding dress. He keeps promising to ask his brother, Tin Man, about it

It’s been 13 years, but it’s finally starting to look like we’ve moved in.

PFM

The other morning I was chatting with Tuffy online. It's not like we've never done that before. When she was still living at home, it wasn't unusual to get an IM from the next room down the hall. And I know when we're on the phone or on Skype we're doing the same thing at the same time. But for some reason it just struck me as extremely cool that I'm in Seattle and she's in Japan and we're typing back-and-forth. I don't know why. It just did. The wonders of technology. PFM.

Anyway, she said her birthday/solstice present was on her desk when she got to work on Monday. As I may have confessed before, on festive occasions, my family is resigned to receiving gifts that I want myself. Tuffy tumbled to this early. She must've been four the year Stellaluna was published. I read it to her several times when we were in the library or at a bookstore. It's a charming story, the illustrations are wonderful, and I really like bats. So, come solstice, I got her a copy. "Mom!" she said, when she opened it. "Stellaluna! Your favorite!"

Busted.

I've still got it, too. Right there on the bookshelf, next to Sheep in a Jeep. And Sheep in a Shop. And Sheep on a Ship.

Where was I?

Oh yeah. Using holidays as an excuse to inflict stuff I want on members of my family. Like the year Scarecrow got a grill for Father's Day. And the time he got an espresso machine for his birthday, even though he doesn't really drink coffee. (Hey, he's a guy, right? It plugs in, and it's got buttons and knobs, and it makes noise. What's not to like?) So Tuffy probably wasn't particularly surprised to find that I got her a camera. It's true that she'd been whining about the crummy picture quality from her iPhone, but the real reason for the camera is that I want to see pictures of Japan.

I haven't seen any output from the new camera yet. What's the holdup, I wonder? Anyway, she took this with her phone; I stole it off her Facebook page. We haven't had any snow in Seattle yet this year, but apparently it has snowed a couple of times in Nagahama. Tuffy is still enough of a Seattle kid to run outside with her camera (or, apparently, her phone) every time it snows. We left Michigan when she was five, so I guess she doesn't remember what it's like for snow to be a regular deal.

Because Japan

Just about this time 23 years ago, I met my daughter for the first time. In some ways she was immediately familiar. The shape of her head, her pointy little elbows, her feet, were as recognizable from the outside as they had become on the inside. That was reassuring, because I was still trying to accept the fact that my life  had just changed in a way that I could never undo. You'd think that would've happened sometime in the previous nine months, but no. It wasn't until I was confronted with the physical reality of her that I realized I was no longer me. I was us.

I don't know how much influence I might've had on the person she eventually became. It didn't surprise me that she was relentlessly verbal, or that she was a reader from the time she could hold a book. What choice did she have? We had no TV. For fun, we went to the library.

She grew up in a house full of dogs; her earliest reflex was pushing a big black nose out of her face. But she doesn't love dogs. I don't think she even likes them all that much. She never once asked for a pony. She didn't collect bugs, or small animals. She never wanted to be a vet. Or a biologist. That was a surprise. Not a disappointment – but a surprise.

Scarecrow wrestled in his youth, but gender aside, it never occurred to me that this child would be a wrestler. This was totally unlike anything I ever did; I could barely stand to watch. In eight years, it never got any easier.

Why Japan? I don't know where she came by her fascination with things Asian. She started taking Mandarin Chinese in high school, but really, there weren't that many choices. When she needed another year of foreign language in college, she switched to Japanese because it fit into her schedule better. Once she heard about the JET Programme, the prospect of going to Japan was never far from her mind. The application process took almost a year. Still, somehow, it was a surprise to watch her drag her bag through the door of the airport on her way to Japan. It was totally unlike anything I ever did.

In the past five months, she has been learning about life in a place I will never go. For all her facility with words, sometimes there's just no way to describe her adventures in a way I can understand. "Because Japan," she says. There's no explanation. That's just the way it is.

I get that.

Happy birthday, Tuffy. Happy birthday!

Lucky Me

Sparky left this morning. It was a good visit. He's a good guy, and I always enjoy his company. The dogs accepted him as a member of the pack (as long as he didn't wear his hat – Bareit didn't like the hat). They pretty much abandoned Scarecrow and me, preferring to hang with Sparky. They even slept on his bed most of the night (well, he could've shut the door, couldn't he?). They're moping around by the front door now, waiting for him to come back. I guess if you're looking for a devoted, one-man dog, you wouldn't choose a whippet anyway.

Although I'm sorry to see him go, I can't wait to dig into the pile of stuff he excavated from the sediment that had accumulated on the floor of my dad's office over the years.

Shuffling through it once, quickly, with Sparky, I saw some pretty cool stuff:

• a receipt for ladies lingerie, which my dad sold door-to-door after he graduated from high school; 
• the invoice for my dad's first car, a used Studebaker, for which he paid $75 and put $5 down; 
• v-mail between my dad and his brother when they were in the service during WWII; 
• a picture of my aunt and uncle at their wedding, with a guy who I'm pretty sure is my grandfather; 
• a copy of an application my dad submitted for a fellowship, with a whole bunch of information on it that I didn't know.

And Sparky says there's more where that came from.

This will keep me busy for now.

Family Matters

My very favorite brother is coming up tomorrow from Southern California for a visit. Sparky is my only brother – my only sibling, for that matter – but even if that were not the case I'm pretty sure he would still be my favorite. He's a good guy. I'm looking forward to spending some time with him.

It should be easier to get him up here, now that his oldest son (Arkman) recently took a job in our neck of the woods. Fortunately, Arkman still has zero furniture, so Sparky will be staying with us, this time at least.  It'll be fun!

Sparky has agreed to fill any empty space in his luggage with family papers or photos or whatever other detritus he might have run across in his excavations of the house where mom and dad lived (apparently without ever throwing anything away) for almost 60 years. Who knows what kind of stuff might turn up?

You never know what you'll find. After trying, off and on for a couple of years, to find out when my paternal grandmother arrived in this country, I had pretty much given up. I knew she came from a shtetl near Bobruisk in what was then the Russian Empire, and that she was traveling with at least one sister. I knew she was born sometime around 1890, although my dad always said she lied about her age. I knew her surname was common in the area she came from – the local equivalent of "Smith" – and that it could be spelled about 8,967 different ways. I knew (I thought) the girls' given names, although it turned out I really didn't. I thought she came here before 1906, because my father said she would call my grandfather a greenhorn because she had been here longer than he had. I looked every place I could think of, or at least every place I could find on the Internet, but couldn't find documentation of any of this. So I pretty much gave up and went on to other things. Then, a month or so ago, out of the blue, I ran across this:

It is the passenger manifest of the S.S. Lituania, sailing from Libau in Russia on 26 October, 1911. On line 12 is Riwe Gorelik. It says she's 21 years old, so she would have been born around 1890. On line 13 is Sore Gorelik, age 23. Both young women gave their occupation as tailoress. They said they were unable to read or write. They were Jews, from a Russian town called Pariczi in Minsk. Their nearest relative was their mother, Liebe Gorelik, in Pariczi. Their final destination was Chicago, Illinois.

Riwe Gorelik is my grandmother, Eva. Sore Gorelik is my great-aunt Sophie.

So you never know what might turn up, or where you might find it. I just wish I could show this to my dad. He spent a lot of time looking for it, and would've been happy to finally see it. I'll show it to Sparky and he'll think it's cool, but it won't be the same.

This is the three of us, captured in my mother's inimitable photographic style, sometime around 1954.

One more thing: On line 15 of the manifest is Basse Gorelik, a 19-year-old from Kcsedrin, which is a village near Pariczi. No relation, I don't think. Gorelik was a really common name in those parts.

Remembering My Dad

Dad

27 November 1920 –26 August 2011

This picture of my dad must've been taken sometime around 1947. I think it says a lot about him. For one thing, he could be a total doof. It was not something he ever grew out of. He enjoyed being funny, and he liked to laugh.

He could do that thing with his eyebrow. In fact, he could do it with either eyebrow, at will. He could wiggle his ears, too, which my brother and I used to think was absolutely hysterical, but you can't tell that from the picture.

He wore a mustache. I'm not sure I ever saw him without one. He let it grow out some in later years, but it was always there. I don't know why. It never occurred to me to ask.

He was fit at 27, or whenever this was taken, and kept fit all his life. Never much for team sports – he was too little for most of them anyway – he did some wrestling and Golden Gloves boxing in his youth. After he retired from his day job, he'd leash up the dog early most mornings and go for a long walk. Usually multiple miles, at a pace that I found challenging even when I was mobile. On his 90th birthday he walked down to the beach, a jaunt of over a mile, going down and coming back up a serious hill. Just to see if he could do it. That's the kind of guy he was.

My mother must've taken this picture. Like every other picture she took in the 60-some years they spent together, she cut off the top of his head.

Empty-ish Nest

Tuffy lived at home while she was going to University of Washington, so this is our first holiday with an empty nest and her first holiday as a fledgling. She'll be sharing a Thanksgiving potluck with other JETs in Nagahama. The organizer assembled the contributions into the following menu:

Suzie: mac and cheese
Sandy: a pre-made meat of some sort that you will buy at Heiwado because I know you don't cook
Kayla: roasted root vegetables, pumpkin soup, maybe hummus
Amy & John: roast chicken
Melissa: eggplant side dish
Michael: mashed potatoes
Leslie: drinks, paper plates and cups
Tuffy: okonomiyaki
Caitlin: disposible utensils, and..
Willie: drinks, maybe a side
James: chocolate
Ellen: pie, & stuffing maybe

Tuffy was not much of a cook before she left for Japan. Now, she not only has to feed herself, she has to do it with unfamiliar ingredients, in a kitchen that has a stovetop and broiler, toaster oven (with no temperature control), and microwave. Like many Japanese kitchens, hers does not have a large oven. The one thing she says she can reliably pull off is okonomiyaki. Her Thanksgiving grocery shopping list (from creepy stalking on Facebook):

☆キャベツ
☆天ぷら flakes
☆たまご
☆肉
☆マヨネーズ
☆かつお節
☆green onion

Basically, ingredients for okonomiyaki.

Scarecrow's Thanksgiving menu is somewhat more traditional, although he's planning to roast a small-ish turkey on the grill rather than in the oven. Not as far from the beaten path as a potluck in Nagahama, but adventurous in its own way. Our nephew, Sparky's son Arkman, will be having dinner with us. This will be the first time we've seen him since he moved up to Bremerton from southern California a month or so ago for a new job. I don't expect he'll make an appearance until after the football games are over. Scarecrow warned him that we don't have a TV.

So it'll be different for all of us, but we'll all be celebrating the holiday with good food, family, and friends. I hope all my blogger buddies in the US have as much to be thankful for. Happy Thanksgiving!

Set Me a Good Example

Somehow, I expected Tuffy to be diligent about posting on her blog, and somehow I expected that would motivate me to post on my own. (Not that I'm competitive or anything.)

It's not working.

I suppose I should be glad that she's too busy having real life adventures to sit down and write about them, and I am glad. I am. I don't want to be the needy, nosy parent, and I know she's busy and she has a lot of stuff going on and all that, and that's all good, really. Really really. Neither of us have ever been much for chatting on the phone. There is Skype and it's a fine thing and we've done that a couple of times but I should probably let her know that if she ever wants to, you know, talk, that would be OK. In the meantime, I have to admit that Facebook status updates and photos are a lot more than my parents ever got from me when I was her age.

Scarecrow went out and got a mess of Indian food for my birthday. Not much else planned by way of celebration. But birthdays? Sure, I'll take as many of 'em as the powers-that-be see fit to send my way, and happy to do it.

Fair's Fair

It occurred to me that my previous post might have left the impression that my mother served in the military during World War II, and my father didn't. That's not true.

This was my father's main contribution to the war effort:

Between 1941 and 1945, Willys-Overland Motors in Toledo, Ohio, built a small four-wheel drive utility vehicle called the Willys MB. Production of this vehicle, popularly known as the Jeep, was considered essential to the war effort. It was so essential that, as a machinist employed by Willys-Overland, my father
was granted three deferments from military service.

He was finally drafted in 1944, and served in the Army Corps of Engineers. It was not a good fit. Fortunately the war ended in 1945, and the Army spat him back into civilian life. He went to the University of Toledo on the G.I. Bill, where he met my mother, and on to grad school at Caltech, which is how I came to be born in California. You knew this would eventually turn out to be about me, didn't you?

When my cousin was here for a visit earlier this year, he told me that our grandfather moved from Chicago to the Detroit area to work for Ford Motors. The story goes that Ford was not hiring Jews, so he went to work for Willys-Overland. This must've been before May 1914, because that was when my uncle was born in Toledo. (If you're not from around here, Toledo, Ohio is very close to Detroit, Michigan.) My grandfather was a cabinetmaker, and at the time, much of a car's chassis and frame was made of wood. My dad said my granddad was proud of the fact that he worked on the showroom models, the ones that had to be perfect. I don't know how long he worked there. In 1915 and 1916, the Toledo city directory gives his occupation as woodworker. By 1920, when my father was born, he had opened a grocery store. So this has nothing to do with my dad's military service, and it's not like my dad and my grandfather worked shoulder to shoulder on the production line or anything. They just worked for the same car company, 25 years apart.

Another digression: From 1926 to 1931, without help from anyone in my family, Willys-Overland produced a small car called the Whippet:

This also has nothing to do with my dad's military service. It doesn't really have anything to do with whippets either, but there it is.

My mom's family worked in the auto industry in Toledo, too, but that's a story I'll inflict on you another day.

Veterans Day

Marie Helen Couturier Spevak

13 September 1921 – 13 January 2012

photo c1945, U.S. Navy WAVES 

(Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service)

Thanks, Mom.

Hang Time

It's almost a straight shot from the kitchen, through the living room, and down the hall. At first you just hear the thunder of whippet feet as they rip through the kitchen, then the frantic skratchel of their nails (whippets are hell on hardwood floors) as they accelerate towards the bedroom and gather themselves to leap…
…
……
………

After an improbably long silence they fly from the middle of the hall, through the door, across the bedroom, and 70-some pounds of whippets thump onto the bed. (For whippets, gravity isn't really a law. It's more of a guideline.) If you happen to be in the bed when they do this, particularly if you're asleep, it can be very exciting.

Where was I going with this?

I last posted not quite a year ago. In some ways, it's been a very eventful time. My mom died last January, in June Tuffy graduated from University of Washington, in July she left for Japan, to teach English to high school students, and Scarecrow and I became empty-nesters. In other ways, it seems like nothing much has changed at all. We still have two whippets. They are still thieving, cowardly, and disrespectful (as much as I would like to take credit for this wonderful if painfully accurate description, I got it from Terry Darlington, from whom I also appropriated the term "narrow dog". I am not clever. I admit it. I just steal from clever people). I still have MS. I still have an unhealthy obsession with stalking dead people.

So why now? Tuffy started a blog to record her adventures in Japan. I thought that would be motivation for me to start Howling again (not that we're competitive or anything), but it wasn't. Why now? Beats heck out of me. Really. It does.

Maybe it was because I came across an interesting article, and the only way I could think of to share it was to resurrect my blog. Who knows? An awful lot of bloggers don't have a reason, or seem to need one. Why should I be any different?

Where was I going with this?

Typhoid Tuffy

Tuffy came down sick last weekend. I mean sore throat, goopy chest, nasty cough, staying-home-from-the-gym sick. Bad sign. For this kid to stay home from the gym, she has to have one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. She says she's feeling some better, but still sounds terrible. She's got kind of cough that hangs on forever.

Scarecrow came down sick a couple of days later. He took off work for a couple of days, and Scarecrow never takes off work. He took off work, even though he's been working from home. That's how sick he was. Even thought about getting somebody in to take care of me, he was that sick.

Me? I'm feeling like an opossum in the middle of the road, trying to ignore the headlights.

Questions I Should Have Asked

I ran across a list of questions I've been meaning to ask my dad the next time we spoke. Nothing of world-shaking importance, no grand questions about life-lessons learned. Truth be told, my dad and I did not often agree on the message to be taken from those life lessons. I didn't expect him to impart great wisdom from the perspective of one who has lived  a long and eventful life. They were mostly just questions that came up when I was rustling around in the family shrub. Why did your dad never tell you what his name was before he came to the United States? What year did you buy the house you live in now? What was the first car you ever bought? I kept putting it off.

Dad died August 26.

It wasn't a tragic sendoff, as these things go. It was not unexpected. He was almost 91 years old. He finally accepted some drugs, so he wasn't in pain. He was home, with his family, the way he wanted. It was time. He was ready. Everybody should be so lucky.

Like most of us, I suppose, he didn't finish everything he meant to do. He was always going to write down what he remembered about his family, but he kept putting it off. He'd get distracted by trying to pin down exactly when the family moved from one house to another, when plus or minus 5 years would have been plenty close enough. He'd go chasing off after details, or get frustrated because he was such a crummy typist, and he never got around to telling the whole story.

Family history is all about the stories, isn't it? I'm not much interested in genealogy. My lineage is not so illustrious that proving it beyond all shadow of a doubt makes any difference to anybody. I don't need three original sources to confirm every detail. I don't agonize over getting every source citation exactly right. I don't really care all that much. I'm just in it for the stories. It's all about stories. It's history, the way it happened to one family. It's getting a sense of ordinary lives, the way ordinary people lived them.

Knowing that Louis Badaillac dit Laplante was born in Sorel, Québec in March of 1680 and died in Detroit in 1703 doesn't really say much about who this guy was, except that he was only 23 when he died. Finding that he accompanied Antoine de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac, when he went off to found the city of Detroit, one might be tempted to imagine a rather heroic figure. Finding that between that convoy and his eventual demise he was busted a couple of times for "fait la traite de l'eau de vie avec les iroquois" and for "causé un bruit public", he starts to look a little grubbier. Not pretty, maybe, but more like a real person. (Did you know, by the way, that Cadillac had a really big nose? He was nicknamed the Falcon, and often compared — presumably behind his back – to Cyrano de Bergerac. Hey, I read it on the web, so it must be true.) See what I mean? It's all about the stories.

I need to write down what I remember about my dad. As best I can, I need to tell his story. I'm not religious. In the metaphysical sense, I have no idea where he went, or what he's doing now, besides a literal, obvious fact – he donated his body to science. He made arrangements for that years ago. Some med students at UCLA will get a skinny old white male cadaver. They will get to know my dad in considerable detail. In a different sense, he's here as long as someone remembers him. Those stories he told over and over? I should know them well enough by now to be able to inflict them on someone who never got a chance to hear them from the source.

I've been wondering whether this blog is the right place to do that. I initially set it up as a place to dump MS-related stuff. Going off on a family history tangent seems pretty seriously off-topic. I even got as far as setting up a template for a new blog, called "Out on a Limb" (get it? Am I witty, or what?). Then I decided it was a pretty stupid idea. If I had two blogs, I would post even less often on either of them than I do on this one now. Besides, the topic of this blog is whatever I want it to be. Whippets don't have anything to do with MS, as far as I know, and I write about them all the time. So I'll be stalking dead people, and I'll be doing it here. It's too bad, though. The new blog was looking pretty cool.

There's a barbecue/potluck/celebration of my dad's life/excuse to put away large amounts of tequila planned for this weekend at the old home place. I won't be able to make it down for the festivities, but here's the story I would tell if I were there:

So many times when I was a kid we'd ask, "Dad, do you have a ____ <fill in the blank with the most bizarre item you can possibly imagine>?" He'd think for a minute, disappear into his garage, rustle around for a while, and reappear holding said bizarre item.

I thought everybody's dad could do that.

A Moment of Silence

Dad 

27 November 1920 — 26 August 2011

I'm not sure how a moment of silence would work on the Internet, but my dad was not a religious guy and I'm not sure how else one might mark his passing. I'm also not sure how long a moment would last, on the Internet, but I guess we'll find out!