Recollection

M. LeBlanc put up a great piece at Bitch Ph.D. yesterday that has inspired me in a couple of different ways.  Obviously, the pseudonymity thing strikes a chord, but I'll be saving that conversation for later.

The opening paragraphs about a person's initial reasons for fascination with the internet, fangirl-ing, the thing that first draws a person to it . . . wow.  I'm not sure I've ever really thought about it.

My family has almost always had a computer.  I think our 486 came home when I was 7 or 8?  I remember a visit to Memphis, my parents exchanging shareware games with my cousin first-cousin-once-removed-in-law Gene (Sorry, I can't help but go all Grandma Wanda on those relationship definitions).  We came home with a pile of giant floppy disks, programs that I wish I still had.  Particularly the one with the catacombs.  Damn I rocked that game.

(Parenthetical paragraph:  That had to be 1989 or 1990.  We went to Memphis Motorsports Park.  The lights went out and they tried to run the track lights from an enormous diesel generator.  Oy.  Jami and I bought matching orange t-shirts, and I still have mine.  We turned around in Sammy Swindell's driveway after cruising his neighborhood in Bartlett.  Talk about fangirlism.)

So, we had this 486, and I was already geeking out a little, throwing out those DOS commands.  Ten+ years later, in a Novell networking class, I learned that I am right on the border of that generation of people who have real life experience with DOS.  The majority of my classmates that were my age began their practical PC experience with an early version of Windows.

The internet came into the equation after we moved to Illinois.  The very first versions were strange, and I'd probably need my uncle John to explain it to me.  One night a week, my mother would drag a phone line to the computer, connect it to an external modem, and "chat" with her siblings in North Dakota, Indiana, and Arizona. 

Our next computer was Windows 95, which means that I skipped all of the iterations of Windows up to then.  I went from DOS to 95.  And it was AWESOME.  (I imagine it will be similar to the experience I'll have when I trade my Cavalier in for that E63 AMG.)  We signed up for AOL and we were off!

My first experience with teh internetz was entirely contained within AOL, like I was on training wheels.  There was a message board for World of Outlaws sprint car fans, a message board for songwriters, and I had email.  That was all I needed!  Eventually, I ventured out to the World Wide Web enough to find OLGA, where I amassed an enormous collection of guitar tablature, leading to the demise of my guitar lessons (because dude, why would a 15 year-old continue to learn the fundamentals when she can skip straight to playing Mary-Chapin Carpenter like the wailing feminist she wanted to be?), which probably explains why, to this day, I can really only hammer out a handful of chords and a few Mary-Chapin Carpenter songs.

The World of Outlaws sprint car board eventually got too heavily moderated, and a few of the regulars struck out and created a rogue sprint car board.  Those two boards are where I met Bill and Al and Rick and Jenn and Kelly and Ruth and Angie and Kevin and Curt, the guy that made the winged sprint car hats.  Mindy came into my life because some weird creep that I talked to on AOL IM also talked to her, and told her I was also a sprint car fan, and so we chatted.  And through Mindy, I met Lacy.  You'll recognize several of these names because they are still present in my life.  Bill, I miss the most, and wonder about the most, and I can't quite figure out how we lost touch.  I will locate him someday.  I am not sure that any of these people know me under this particular pseudonym, as I think that my eventual boredom with AOL crossed paths with my creation of Duchess Jane the Internet Entity and I'm not sure what, if any, overlap happened. 

This all makes me think about the conversation I had with my brother about blogging and memories.  Because all of these experiences are only vague and blurry and I'm sure that I'm mixing up stories and people and putting people in places they weren't.  Whereas, the people I've met since the advent of duchessjane.com are much more memorable.  Remember how I met Marc on that online dating site that I wasn't even a member of?  Remember how I called the sprint car that Dano worked on ugly incredibly ugly because I didn't know who he was or that he was reading until he called me on it?  Remember how BLC crept stealthily into the comments over the years, and how I made a fool of myself on Amy's blog because I had no idea the two of them were together and I fell in love with them separately? I wish I had more concrete memories of the people from the AOL years.  Especially now that I think maybe Curt wasn't part of that at all, and how the hell DID I meet him?

Racing and music.  That's why I'm here.  How about you?  What is your earliest memory of the internet and what drew you in?

I woke up this morning to a flurry of "I will never forget" status updates, a sentiment that bugs the hell out of me every year on this day.  I think it's the implication that anybody, anywhere, ever could forget that bothers me.  But as I showered and dressed and drove to work, I thought about my own silence on the topic, whether that is interpreted as "forgetting", hoping it isn't, because I'll probably always be silent.  It's just the way that I am.  I don't visit graves and I don't bow my head when I pass roadside memorials and the vinyl in your car window in memoriam kinda blows my mind a little.  And I think I may have been permanently damaged from my one visit to the Oklahoma City memorial. 

My point:  Everyone mourns in their own way.  But I don't think anyone forgets.  Or ever will.

I wake up every September 11th thinking about my Grandpa Don.  I could have sworn this was a story I'd told before, and I searched the archives for it this morning to re-post, and it just isn't there.  I told the story as part of my eulogy at his funeral in January of 2005.  I have told it countless times during the "where were you when . . . ?" conversations.  But it appears I've never told it here.

My story starts in July of 1945.  My mom's dad, Grandpa Don, was a 19 year-old tailgunner on a B-17 named Lady Jane.  He was making a quick stop home in North Dakota before shipping out to England, to visit his father who was having surgery in a hospital in Fargo.  Grandpa drove his little sisters to Fargo, passing through Bismarck on the way.  Bismarck is home to the Capitol building, the 19-story "skyscraper on the prairie".  (This may perhaps foreshadow my lifelong obsession with skyscrapers, you think?)

As they passed it, Grandpa's sisters asked him why there were lights on the top of the building, and Grandpa replied "So that planes don't crash into it."  They howled with laughter.  Surely he had to be joking right?  Because how could a pilot not see a building so tall?  They talked about it all the way to Fargo, in disbelief, sure that Grandpa - likely the only person in his family to have ever been on an airplane at that point in time - was a fool for even thinking such a thing was possible.

The next day, the breaking news was the story of a B-25 that crashed into the Empire State Building in heavy fog.

For the next two generations in my family, the line "Why do they put lights on the top of tall buildings?" triggered much laughter.  It was an easy way to mock my great-aunts, but it was also a lesson, because I clearly remember from a very early age thinking that it simply meant that my Grandpa Don knew everything there was to know and one should probably just believe him.

So on the morning of September 11th, 2001, I was at work at the same job where I am today, and our secretary's daughter called to tell us to turn on the TV and we all filed into the break room.  The first plane had just hit and it was still very much the initial shock and confusion and everyone - on TV and there in my office - was still assuming it to be an accident.  I picked up the phone on the break room wall and dialed my mother's office across town, and when she answered, I said "Hey Mom?  Why do they put lights on the top of tall buildings?" and she replied "So planes don't crash into them!"  I told her to turn on a TV, and was in the middle of explaining what had happened when the second plane hit and I screamed in her ear.  And everyone knows the feeling, knows the events, knows what happened from that point on, because that's when it became universal.  So my simple answer to the question "Where were you when . . . ?" is "at work, on the phone with my mother."  But the real truth is that I was thinking about July of 1945 and a man who had all the answers.

And I think that there is a fundamental level of self-preservation at work here, the fact that I wake up every September 11th thinking about Grandpa Don, looking like this:

Because if I really put the thought into it, it all comes down to the fact that I'd prefer to think about him, about his war, about 1945 and Grandpa Don in his flak jacket in the Lady Jane.  Because he was the man with all the answers and he won his war.  In retrospect, through the dense fog of the memories he filtered heavily to be able to share with me, in pictures that all have the glamorous tint of time and distance, his story and the horrors that his generation witnessed are so much easier for me to process than those experienced by my own generation, the horrors of wars we still face.

So I don't think anybody forgets.  Some of us just tack on an extra 60 years to make it hurt less to remember.

This is a repost of something that I wrote in December of 2006.  My great-uncle Helmet's funeral is this morning, and when I found out that he'd passed, I started thinking about how long it had been since I first heard that he was ill.  I started digging through archives for this post, thinking it had been very recently, when it's been two and a half years.  I still remember the day, at lunch with my Dad, when he told me this story - the emotion in his eyes, the impassioned way he wanted me to understand just what this man's actions had meant to him at this point in his life.  I won't forget.

My heart is with family in North Dakota today.  Godspeed.

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I've been thinking a lot about my distant family in the last couple of days. When I say "distant", I mean it in every definition available. They are distantly related to me, great-aunts and great-uncles and second and third cousins. They are far away, in North Dakota. And unfortunately in most cases, they are not people that I share a close relationship with, mainly because of those other distances.

I received an email from my great-aunt Sharon on Thursday morning. Sharon is one of my distant relatives on that side of the family that I am still quite close to, and she has learned that the swiftest way to reach my father during working hours is to send an email to me. She wanted me to pass along the message that her brother Helmet was in the hospital and very ill. I hit print and tracked down Dad immediately to give him the news.

When bad news about distant family comes, I feel so disconnected and helpless and typically my first act is usually to start asking questions of my parents. I want to know everything about how this person relates to and affects me. This time, though, I didn't even have to ask those questions. My dad had a story ready to go.

My dad's mother Wilma died of ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) in August of 1991 and the couple of years preceding her death were a very stressful time for my dad. Not only was he losing his mother, but he was also facing tremendous stress in keeping things running on the family farm. Farming is not an occupation where you can take a week off here and there and still collect a paycheck. The crops must be planted, they must be harvested.

In the spring of 1990, getting the crops in the ground was a challenge for my dad. My grandpa was driving my grandma to Houston for treatment at a facility that specialized in ALS research. The farm - and spring's planting work - was left to Dad. He worked from 6 am to 2 am for days on end and he's still certain he wouldn't have gotten the crops in if it hadn't been for his uncles. Helmet and Herb came from Makoti to help him, driving tractors, working the fields in front of Dad while he seeded. When Grandma and Grandpa returned from Houston, the crops were in and the sky opened up and poured rain, meaning that if Helmet and Herb had not worked to help him, the crops would have been a loss that year. It would have been too wet to plant if they had waited for Grandpa to come home. An entire year's income was saved by their selflessness.

This is the sort of family I have. Attached to each of my relatives is a story of how that person has somehow saved the day, been there at the exact moment they were needed most. I am blessed to be a part of this family.

It's very hard to be so far away from North Dakota at times like these, and I see it in Dad's face when he talks about Helmet. So much of the process of giving and receiving comfort from loved ones is just being there, in the way that those people were there for us in the past.

At about 2:30 this morning, I got out of bed to get a drink of water. I was standing in front of my kitchen sink, looking out the open window. I heard the strangest noise from outside and squinted to try to see where it was coming from.

A teenager on a skateboard came flying down the our hill, right in the middle of the street. I ran to the living room window to try to see what happened when he got to the bottom of the hill, a 4-way intersection that is bordered by a river which is over its banks right now. There aren't many places to bail off of an out-of-control skateboard at that point, nothing that isn't pavement or river or road sign.

I couldn't see him at the bottom, but I also didn't hear a spectacular sounding crash, so I can only assume that he made it.

When I was a kid and we were living in North Dakota, our house sat on top of a very similar hill. Our neighbors across the street were my mother's cousin and her family. Her youngest son (that would make him my 2nd cousin, for those playing Genealogy Bingo at home), Blaine, was my best friend growing up.

Blaine's dad Rick was that one dad, the dad that always tries to be the funny, hip, cool, popular, wild, crazy dad that all the kids love. Blaine and his siblings spent a lot of time yelling "DAD, STOP! Go AWAY!!!!" while Rick danced around with underwear on his head and his pants hiked up to his armpits while lip-syncing to Debbie Gibson.

As part of his quest to be the wildest craziest funniest dad in town, Rick did a lot of hilariously dangerous things. Sometimes they didn't end well. I remember sitting with Blaine and waiting for an ambulance when Rick fell off of the roof. But more than anything else, I remember the Skateboard Incident.

Blaine had a skateboard. We lived on a hill. Rick was convinced he could make it down the hill on Blaine's skateboard. We stood at the top and watched him take off. I don't remember seeing the wreck itself, but I do remember a bleeding, gravel-covered Rick limping back up the hill.

Now some would look at this situation and think about what a terrible influence that Rick was, but you have to see it from another angle. Like Steve Earle once said about his drug problem, sometimes the easiest way to discourage bad behavior in your children is by showing them the results of your own bad choices. If you can't be a role model, then at least be a warning to others. Rick was the reason that I never wondered what it would be like to skateboard down our hill or climb really tall things. Or listen to Debbie Gibson.

So last night, watching the kid flying down our hill on his skateboard, I had two simultaneous thoughts. I smiled and thought of Rick, and then I thanked The Universe that Duke wasn't there to see it and say "Hey, I could do that."

My Grandma Wanda died this morning.

My extended family is almost all in North Dakota, where I grew up. So each time I grieve, it is preceded by several hours of logistics. Planes, trains, cars, phone calls, dropping the dog at the kennel, wrapping up those things at work that just can't wait, clearing my schedule a week at a time.

My loss always hits me at the exact same time. It is that first moment when I am alone and the plans are made and the only thing remaining is to enact them. This time, I walked in the door after leaving the dog at the kennel, and I was alone, and my home had none of the ambient noise that Wrecks creates everywhere he goes. It hurts, and I think "There is nothing here to remind me of her, she never saw this house," and it hurts more. In silence, I remember why the rushing and the phone calls and the planning planning planning chaos is happening in the first place.

It is the same silence that I sat in from 3 am to 6 am in the living room of my apartment in January of 2005, when my grandfather died. It is the same silence that I faced last March when I left Wrecks at Duke's house and went home to my apartment to get my clothes together before leaving for my aunt's funeral. I imagine it is the same silence that my father faced, driving from his jobsite to my babysitter's house 17 years ago when word reached him of his mother's death.

Today I broke my painful silence by turning on the television and facing a full-length mirror to try on all of the clothes that I bought at Ann Taylor this morning. I am never prepared for a funeral, even when I know I should be. I am always the one standing on top of the deep freeze two hours before the wake while my aunts hem a new pair of pants while I'm wearing them so that I don't trip walking through the church. This time, I am leaving with a skirt that is still sewn together at the slit because I forgot to cut the thread before I packed it and I'm too lazy to unpack it now. More than any other fashion offense, I am always that asshole wearing the inappropriate shoes because there just wasn't time.

It hurts to think about what I'm wearing and what I'm going to do with my hair and whether I have packed my makeup bag and where did I put that bracelet anyway? because my Grandma thought it was such a waste of time. I remember the look on her face the first couple of trips that I made home where my pile of luggage was taller than I am, and I take a couple of items out of my bag. Simplify. I look at a pair of boots, remove them. I wore them to Grandpa's funeral and the heels were so sharp they sank into the snow and dirt at graveside.

Two of the shirts that I bought are a pale periwinkle blue, the shade that Grandma wore in almost every single photo that I have of her. I didn't realize that until I got home either. Silence.

I should have been ready for this and I wasn't.