I Feel Awful

As moving has drawn to a close, I am exhausted and muscle sore, but that's not really the awful that I'm thinking of.

Part of my move -- and perhaps it should be part of every move -- is the dismissal and disposal of stuff.  It's the stuff that you've gotten over the years and have clung to for tenuous and amorphous reasons: old paperback books, random desk items, toys from childhood.  Sure, some can be precious and full of meaning, but most are things you just cling to.

In my case, this is often books.  It has become my standing joke that I have to get past the feeling that I am a monk in the Dark Ages, clinging to the last copy of Aristotle while ignorant peasants outside demand the paper to use as kindling.  The fairly obscure, but still common, history books and science fiction books are being preserved elsewhere.  I am not the last bastion of knowledge and cultural memory.

However, this came home with a wrench as we finally got into the ancient garages where many of my books were stored.  It was a damp place, and a number of boxes were placed against an outside wall.  Put simply, the books were furry with mold.  This meant I couldn't just, with a bit of regret, send them off to Goodwill or the local library.  They had to go to the dumpster as garbage, lost forever to everyone.

That was tough, but it still wasn't the worst.

Further back in the garage were my father's books.  50 years of higher education, a personal library collected with care and interest.  Like my books, they are generally obscure and surely are in libraries elsewhere.  Indeed, after moving to Lexington, he made contact with both Stanford (where he got his MA and PhD) and the University of Virginia to see if they would be interested in his papers and library.  Both reacted impassively.  If an educational institution can shrug a collective "Meh," this is what they did.

So we carried his books and papers from house to house as we spiraled deeper into financial disaster, as we carried mine.  All his papers and speeches, articles and books.  There was a box of nothing but diplomas and certificates of appreciation, framed and mounted for display.  And of course, the books -- boxes and boxes and boxes of books -- the physical representation of a lifetime of work, all of it both meaningless and deeply meaningful to me.

They were meaningless in that, to be brutally frank, they held no interest.  Most all were obscure tomes on various aspects of college administration and history.  They were meaningful in that they were to him what my books are to me, a collective physical representation of the mind and soul.  Now, they were moist and rotting, destroyed by a damp garage, not even worthy of charity.

I died little deaths as each came out, the box blue with mold, constantly threatening to disintegrate.  I focused only on the hope that the rotting cardboard would hold together long enough to make it to the dumpster.  The frustrating image of twenty pounds of books spraying across the ground, forcing me to toss them one by one, at least gave me something more productive to focus on.

They're all gone now, along with many of my books, old papers, toys and furniture.  I tell myself it was good, the sort of purging self-help types stell us so often is necessary.

Yet the worry and regret remain.

No Time, No Time ...

I'm moving ... again.

It's chaotic, exhausting and endless ... again.

I'm beginning to panic, as I look at all the stuff remaining, and the shrinking number of days to get it out in ... again.

Perhaps, this is Purgatory: To constantly have no time, forever.

The Termite

by Ogden Nash

Some primal termite knocked on wood And tasted it, and found it good! And that is why your Cousin May Fell through the parlor floor today. Ogden Nash was born 19 August 1902.

Tribute

trib·ute - ˈtribyo͞ot

noun: tribute; plural noun: tributes  

1. an act, statement, or gift that is intended to show gratitude, respect, or admiration.

I just discovered, in one of the books that we had brought to my father over the time he was in nursing home care, a note.  The book was To Make Ourselves a Home, a collection of stories his father -- my grandfather -- would tell the family about his early childhood in northern Canada.  As he ailed, my father had him write them down to occupy himself while bedridden.  The handwritten manuscript traveled with my father and then me from house to house until, with time on his hands in retirement, my father sat down and edited it.  We then had it produced as a book by our publisher as a Christmas present to him.

The note was a little piece of paper, handwritten by volunteers from Hospice who sat with my father as the end approached. "On Tuesday, vigil volunteer Lu Dooley read pp 1-35 out loud to Dr. Young," it said.  "Then Ted B read pp 36-49 to him -- although he appeared to be asleep the whole time."

It was a nice image for me to take with me, that as he drifted away, it was hearing the stories he had been told by his father as a child.

At this moment, I'm left to wonder what to say.  People come up sympathetically, telling me how sorry they are for my loss.  I don't know what to tell them: that I've been bracing myself for this moment for years -- since my Mom first developed Alzheimer's, since she died in 2007, since my Dad first showed signs of dementia or when he went into full-time nursing care?  I really don't know how to be satisfactorily distraught, how to give them what they're searching for, but I want to play my role so that they can go on with their lives feeling they have done their part.

However, I also want to show my father the respect he never properly received in life.  As I said when announcing his death on Facebook (and what a modern and inadequate thing that statement is), "He was a successful and frankly rather important man."  He reached the highest levels of his profession and saved and earned his way to become, at least technically, a millionaire, thus achieving the goals he set himself as a child.  Once, when we visited the campus of a university where he had been Dean of Students, he pointed out that all of his contemporaries now had buildings named after them.  There was no Kenneth Young Hall, however.

He gave me a comfortable life, one in which I was free to pursue an offbeat profession and start a business without the concerns and anxieties he suffered in youth.  For me, that was a spectacular gift which I never adequately repaid.

So now he's gone, and I still don't know what to say (though I seem to have spun out a lot of text doing it).

It was my father who told me that, at the end of every funeral, there's always somebody who says, "What's for lunch?"  His point was that life goes on, no matter how tragic and central the loss. A resolutely logical man, I have no doubt that he, like I, would simply march on, going to work and getting the minutia of life handled.  When his father died after a long battle with heart valve problems at 48, I think he (then only in his 20s) acted similarly ... though oddly we never really talked about it.

He was and is a huge influence.  As shown above, I cite him regularly, and I hope never to forget the moments when I received the wisdom that I cite, but I also hope to always have the man close to mind, as if I had just spoken with him.

"As a day well spent brings blessed sleep,

So a life well lived brings a blessed death."

- Leonardo da Vinci

And now a word from our other blog ...

Because I'm awfully happy with this picture:

That's David Chaltas, who does a living history first-person interpretation of Robert E. Lee, speaking at a rally protesting the removal of Confederate battle flags from Lee Chapel, where the Southern leader is buried.

I put a lot more pics from the rally, and a bit of reporting, on the "phlog," Guy with a Leica.

"Life Is A Boat ... "

“Life is like stepping onto a boat which is about to sail out to sea and sink.”
― Shunryu Suzuki

I like this for a number of reasons.  I like the structure, like that of a good joke, where it seems to lead you down one path before revealing that you're somewhere totally unexpected.  I like how it gives you the optimism of adventure and new experience before slapping you in the face with reality.  Then comes the realization that this is indeed a Zen saying -- life is a struggle, death is just a transition.  I like how it mirrors one's maturing approach to life: eager at first for the experience, then caught up in the journey, and finally simply tired and ready for a rest.  And I like that it shows that everything changes.

Change.  Just last night I heard somebody say, "Nobody likes change."  Normally, I'd disagree, but right now I can't.

Sometimes, once we get things ticking along in a system, even if it's a system built to handle problems, one begins to wish that nothing would ever change.  The well working cycle could just keep ticking along -- the kids would always be kids, never growing older or sadder or more distant, the pets would always be there, purring in your lap and occasionally peeing in the corner, and your parents would always be there in the background, old and doddering perhaps, but still there.

My life is now in total flux, and all I can think of is that it was all under control just a minute ago.  And why can't it just stay that way, stressful and exhausting as it was?  Of course, it wasn't under control, and change -- though incremental -- was always underway.  And frankly the situation wasn't that great.  Now, however, I feel as though I thrown myself off of the precipice, and I can only hope that I, in the words of Ray Bradbury, can build my wings on the way down ...

Loose Stuff ...

Shall we start on the subject of Leicas?  It's not like I've talked about that before, is it?

I came across this piece (NSFW) on the internet today.  Frankly, his complaints about image quality are hard for me to see, even though I reflexively agree with him, but his rant at the end was an interesting new thought on my old digital vs. analog question.  Indeed, I have and regularly use Leicas that are 60 years old.  They work great, and it puts me in direct control of the image (no auto functions causing the camera to refuse to fire because it thinks I'm making a mistake, no weird artifacts added by some secondary processing function, and so on ...)

But how long will there be film -- nice, Kodak-made Tri-X, for example -- not to mention the chemistry and so on to process it?  I have said that one could take solace in the fact that there are photographers out there still making daguerreotypes and ambrotypes -- techniques from the very earliest days of photography -- but those are processes that use very basic chemicals that can be combined in essentially a home lab.  35 mm Tri-X is not something you can cobble together in your garage.

Back in December, Craig Mod contemplated about this subject in the New Yorker.  He told his story of transition from various film cameras, through digital to his positive impressions of pictures shot during one trip on an iPhone.  "Tracing the evolution from the Nikon 8008 to the Nikon D70 to the GX1, we see cameras transitioning into what they were bound to become: networked lenses," he wrote.  In other words, he sees the whole process of photography shifting as the value of the pictures themselves become increasingly measured by the ability of people to see them through the network.  I'm not sure I agree (per the Vivian Maier Test), but it is an interesting thought.

Vivian Maier

 Finally, there's this.  Spoiler alert: this is the final sentence: "No doubt, cameras capabilities will continue to improve and amaze, but I wonder as camera design evolves just how much joy will be left in the process of taking photos?"  However, the journey to that point is quick and interesting.