a funerary day
Jun. 11th, 2014 07:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacTuesday found me performing two funerary duties. I visited the tombstone mason, whom I'd contacted preliminarily earlier, to make the arrangements for my mother's headstone, as agreement with my brothers as to what to put on it, confirmation from them that my summation of this was correct (the latter being much harder to achieve than the former, e-mail being the imperfect medium that it is), and an opportunity to get up there had finally coincided.
What the last item coincided with was a memorial gathering for Mike Farren, who died a bit back. I knew Mike back around 30 years ago when he chaired and was otherwise active in the Elves', Gnomes', and Little Men's Science Fiction, Chowder and Marching Society. I didn't know him well, but he was a genial and welcome presence, always good company. After that club drifted apart I only saw him around occasionally. I knew that bad health and hard times had hit him, but in the last few years the kindly arms of the VA had scooped him up (he'd once been a submariner in the US Navy) and placed him in a pleasant residential facility in San Bruno with a social worker to look after him. It was this gentleman who organized the gathering, and the facility which hosted it, but word was passed out among his old fannish friends, so the attendance consisted of about a dozen of us who'd known him mostly back then, and another dozen or so of his neighbors and fellow vets who'd known him recently. It's always interesting and warming when the disparate members of the different parts of a person's life come together, whether the occasion is celebratory or commemorative.
One theme the two groups had in common was Mike's interest in and expertise at computing. He was always technologically enabled and curious. So I told my memory of his great scientific experiment. When compact disks were first released they were objects of great curiosity. Those of us who were used to vinyl records, on which you could see the grooves, found them cryptic. So Mike took one with the worst music he could find - according to memory, it was the album from Flashdance - and drilled holes of various sizes in it, to see what it would take to disable the thing and what the failure mode would be. I was there when he tried playing it on his home stereo, and heard for the first time the strange flutters and skips that we're now all familiar with from decaying CDs.
Alas, also there R. and I did a bad thing. We talked about an upcoming event we're both attending in the presence of someone not invited. That was a bad thing. One shouldn't do that.
Also accomplished on the same drive, a visit to the mother lode of purchasing something on the day of its release that will make a very good present very soon. Who knew that I'd have to press a buzzer to get in, as if it were valuable jewelry?
What the last item coincided with was a memorial gathering for Mike Farren, who died a bit back. I knew Mike back around 30 years ago when he chaired and was otherwise active in the Elves', Gnomes', and Little Men's Science Fiction, Chowder and Marching Society. I didn't know him well, but he was a genial and welcome presence, always good company. After that club drifted apart I only saw him around occasionally. I knew that bad health and hard times had hit him, but in the last few years the kindly arms of the VA had scooped him up (he'd once been a submariner in the US Navy) and placed him in a pleasant residential facility in San Bruno with a social worker to look after him. It was this gentleman who organized the gathering, and the facility which hosted it, but word was passed out among his old fannish friends, so the attendance consisted of about a dozen of us who'd known him mostly back then, and another dozen or so of his neighbors and fellow vets who'd known him recently. It's always interesting and warming when the disparate members of the different parts of a person's life come together, whether the occasion is celebratory or commemorative.
One theme the two groups had in common was Mike's interest in and expertise at computing. He was always technologically enabled and curious. So I told my memory of his great scientific experiment. When compact disks were first released they were objects of great curiosity. Those of us who were used to vinyl records, on which you could see the grooves, found them cryptic. So Mike took one with the worst music he could find - according to memory, it was the album from Flashdance - and drilled holes of various sizes in it, to see what it would take to disable the thing and what the failure mode would be. I was there when he tried playing it on his home stereo, and heard for the first time the strange flutters and skips that we're now all familiar with from decaying CDs.
Alas, also there R. and I did a bad thing. We talked about an upcoming event we're both attending in the presence of someone not invited. That was a bad thing. One shouldn't do that.
Also accomplished on the same drive, a visit to the mother lode of purchasing something on the day of its release that will make a very good present very soon. Who knew that I'd have to press a buzzer to get in, as if it were valuable jewelry?
