March 5, 2020

Dear Daddy—

When did I last write? I don’t know. Months. Not good months. No one is to blame. Life gets too busy to handle. One person’s anxieties clash with another person’s anxieties. Changing life situations catch us by surprise and make the ground beneath our feet seem unstable. We take it out on each other.

There has been little to no progress on the house since I last wrote. I take that back. Christian has organized the tools. Ethan and Christian have cleaned up the basement, actually trying to reclaim it as usable space. Ethan unearthed two lab cabinets that you have bought decades ago. I remember carrying them into the room I think of as the “lab” room. It contains the water tank, the darkroom, the electrical panels and phone interface. It also has your workbench that you built in the 1960s with your own hands. It has the bloody (literally, as I recall) steel lab bench with the transite top that we bought from Sacred Heart Hospital. And it has lots, and lots and lots of oscilloscopes. And one last b-52 gunsite. Oh, and, yes, one more missile.

April 2, 2019

Dear Daddy–

So much has happened in the last six weeks, it’s been hard to keep up. Mother was in the hospital… Jim Heller died… Christian got a car… Tax season hit…

I already talked about Jim. That was a blow, and really got me thinking about my career and what I want out of it. Still thinking, so I won’t say a lot about that.

Mother’s hospital visit and aftermath… I wrote about her homecoming already. Since she’s been home, things have been stable, but our lives have changed a bit. Mother’s more forgetful than she was before. A severe urinary tract infection can do that to someone who’s 92 years old. They affect the brain, sometimes permanently. Mother is very aware of her short-term memory loss, and very frustrated by it. She asked me the other day why she had lost the ability to focus on something like doing her taxes. “I always did our taxes,” she said. “Your Daddy never did. Why can’t I do them anymore? I try, and it just frustrates me. I get exhausted just looking at them.”

I explained to her that the human short-term memory is like a table. When you’re young, the tabletop is big enough to hold, say, three rows of five index cards. Everything you can write on those cards, you can think about, all at the same time. As we get older, the available space shrinks–the tabletop has to hold our pills and our eyeglasses and our hearing aids. And photos of our grandchildren and the parents we lost a few years ago. After a while, maybe there’s only room for three index cards, and that’s all you can think about at once. If it takes seven index cards worth of information to do your taxes, well, you don’t have space for that anymore. You need to put them on another table, namely someone else’s brain.

March 6, 2019

Dear Daddy–

A friend asked me recently, “You’re under a lot of stress, right? Like, all the time?”

I had to say, “Yes.”

I am under a lot of stress all the time. Maybe it’s been that way my whole life. Maybe I do it to myself. I used to ask Ethan, when he was little, “What’s the going rate on trouble?” To which he would respond with a blank look in his little, blue eyes. And then I would explain, “Because you’re borrowing a lot of it.”

My little future economist would not then ask me to explain usury, because, of course, he knew it inside-out by the age of two. He would, however, ask me what it meant to “borrow trouble.” It’s a high art form for a lot of us, imagining all that can go wrong, stressing over it, planning for how we’ll handle it. It’s the natural state of a lot of science fiction writers, of which group I am (quite) nominally a member. It can be a valuable skill, anticipating what could go wrong, so you can prevent it from doing so. It can also drive you batty.

I also used to tell Ethan the tale of the three Sillies, the fairy tale about the man who went out in the world to see if he could find three examples of people stupider than his fiance and future in-laws. The deal was that, if he found those three, he would marry into a family of idiots.

February 21, 2019

Dear Daddy–

It snowed yesterday, and pretty much everything shut down. I suppose, if you could plan a snowstorm, this one would count as being pretty well-planned. It started before rush hour, on a day just cold enough to keep the snow from melting. Roads had been salted, but snow accumulation out-paced the chemically induced melting, and my street, which is normally kept plowed clear throughout a storm, was snow-covered for most of the day. Because of the timing–we were expecting the snow as early as 1:00 in the morning–schools and offices had already decided to close the night before. And now, the day after, the roads are clear, and, at 36 degrees with an expected high of 51, the snow is melting.

I realize that having to close costs businesses money. Full-time employees still have to be paid, and no revenue is coming in. Howard County must lay out about 1.5 Million for those eight lost hours, but having the decision made and having it all over with in a day seems pretty low impact. Even the trash was picked up on time.

Of course, some people still have to go to work. The staff at Mother’s nursing care facility all came to work. All of my colleagues in the Fire service came to work. The Emergency Operations Center was activated for the County, and everyone who supported it was working. Also of course, having every location connected to the Internet, as we certainly do in Central Maryland, means you can go to work without going to work. I wound up working five hours yesterday. Were you able to work from home? I don’t recall you ever doing it while I was growing up. You had an office, and all manner of papers and equipment around, but I don’t recall you working.

Dear Daddy —

I wrote this entry in a time of turmoil. Your house was suddenly ours. Mother was still in the nursing home. My employer was still settling into a new office building and adjusting to a new leader. There were frustrating family issues. As I publish this, a good friend is in the hospital, dying, there are still work frustrations and family frustrations. There are still bills that I’m trying to figure out how to pay. In all of this, a friend of mine wrote today, it might be best to “go full Vulcan.” That is, to turn off our feelings, like Mr. Spock could on Star Trek, and just make all the right intellectual choices. I think you would have considered that an attractive option. Well I wrote this response to you seven months ago, and I still think it stands.  

February 20th, 2019

I remember you, red in the face, angry at me about something, demanding “What’s so damned wonderful about having feelings?” I was probably 15 or so. I didn’t know what to say at the time. Now I do.

January 23, 2019

Dear Daddy —

We’ve come to a crossroads. Is that the right turn? Maybe it’s a fork? Anyway, we’ve decisively chosen a path.

The document begins, ” – Witnesseth – That for an in consideration of the sum…”

It continues on to say a lot of other things, including, “Beginning for the same at a nail now set in the center of a thirty-foot-wide right-of-way of the county road known as Simpson Road… “–a description of the landmarks and boundaries that define the 13 acres that you bought 53 years ago, we believe for sum of $18,000.

In short, it says that Renee and I, as of yesterday, own the house on Simpson Road, with Mother as holder of a life estate, meaning that she enjoys the use of the property until her death. Well, sometimes perhaps “enjoy” is too strong a word…

January 2nd, 2019

Dear Daddy —

Our first full year without you has come to an end. 2018 was, well, an adventure, I suppose, as every year is. It’s become popular on social media to declare an entire year a “fail,” or an “epic fail,” meaning that that year is somehow cursed, and that either the population of the universe should be given another year to replace it (the logistics of this are not discussed), or that it should be wiped from the history books. Such declarations usually begin on about the 2nd of January. I’m sure, somewhere on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, someone has already deemed 2019 to be a dud which should be cast into the waste bin reserved for products that failed quality control testing.

Facebook, Twitter, Instragram… you probably don’t recognize those terms, although they were invented during your lifetime. You would have had no time for such foolishness. You also, I’m sure, never participated in water cooler conversations in the office. I’ve no doubt you considered water coolers unsanitary, to begin with–sharing water with all of those other people, whose mouths had been Heaven-knows-where doing Heaven-knows-what! I know you didn’t drink beer or whiskey with the rest of the boys on Tinian. Indeed, you gave all your allotment of whiskey to the flight crew–a year’s worth at one time–and they burned down a Quonset hut.

“The Heat is On”

December 12, 2018

Dear Daddy–

It’s officially Winter. Actually, it’s not. Winter comes in nine days, I believe. But the days of below-freezing temperatures, frost on the grass, aching muscles and leaving the water trickling in my kitchen (old pipes near old farmhouse walls tend to freeze) have begun. Mother had her first oil delivery of the year and was astounded at the bill for over $500. I explained to her that I paid $250 every month last year, and over $1900 in August to make up for the rising cost of oil. Her response was, “Yes, but my oil bill was $500.”

The furnace is heating the house nicely, though. No more space heaters. No more blankets and curtains in every doorway. The whole house is warm and usable.

I was explaining to Renee last night why this house always had oil tanks, when the furnace wasn’t active until last year. She had forgotten the Sears Oil Stove in the basement.

It went like this…

November 15^th, 2018

Dear Daddy—

I once played a squirrel in a school play, in fifth grade. Nutty the Squirrel. I would say that you would recall it, but I don’t think you made that performance. The show was “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” an operetta written in 1938. It was released a year after the Disney film, and, as I recall, was trying hard to cash in on Disney’s version without paying them royalties. Hence the inclusion of my role as a furry animal companion not in the Brothers Grimm original.

I remember auditioning for the part, in the same ballroom at Glenelg Country School where Renee and I later held our wedding reception. I don’t know if the gray sweats and bushy tail I wore as Nutty would elicit as much comment today as the white tux I wore to the wedding, but I do recall being asked why I thought I would make a good squirrel. I believe I said I was small and cute like a squirrel.

Yeah. It wasn’t an easy childhood.