Pyroclastic tendencies

I would never live anywhere near a volcano with pyroclastic tendencies. I currently live in the California Bay Area and some days I think even that is that is too close to some of them. (Pumice is bad for your hard drives—never mind the floppies.)

I visited Pompeii and Herculaneum (right on the slopes of Mt. Vesuvio, not far from Napoli) back in 1969 when I was 12 years old. In preparation for the trip, I had read Pliny the Younger's letters to Tacitus (in translation, I'm still the only one in my family not to read Latin...[sigh]) so I had some idea of what to expect, but the extent of the devastation is awesome, even 1,900 years later.

When some of the victims where covered by the ash fall, they left cavities as their flesh rotted away. Later the archaeologists discovered that filling the strange holes they found with plaster, would let them recover the exact shape of the victims at the moment of death. Sometimes the casts would turn out to be of plants or animals. (The "sculpture" of a dog frozen in time as it makes a final futile attempt at escaping the burning hot chain around its neck, still stands vividly in my mind.) But most casts shown are of the everyday people of the cities fleeing from what they thought was the safety of their homes.

The casts made of these victims where so evocative; a mother covering her child with her body; a man covering his head with his arms even though he is inside a building (maybe his home?); stacks of victims trying to get out through the narrow streets.

To this day I don't really see the plaster when I look at them, but the flesh and blood of the victims slowly asphyxiating under the ever growing mounds of hot ashes.

Because the bones and teeth are still inside the cavities when they pour the plaster, the teeth shows behind plaster lips if they died with their mouths open—and many did, gasping for air even as their throats filled with hot volcanic ashes. Looking at one of the casts in the museum in Herculaneum, my mother—an MD—coolly observed "Look! You can see the lead-lines on their teeth" pointing to a dark band across the teeth of a huddled body. The dark horizontal band across the front of the teeth indicative of severe lead poisoning was clearer than any medical textbook could have described it. No wonder, I wasn't looking at a picture or even a sculpture, I was looking at the actual victim of the metal poisoning. The flesh was gone and replaced with plaster, but everything else was still as it was the moments after death.

The Romans not only used lead in their fresh water pipes—L. plumbum : lead; thus our word plumbing—but also liked to make jams in lead cooking pots because it sweetened the taste of the jam as lead acetate formed when the acids of the fruit reacted with the lead oxide on the inside of the pot -- lead acetate is quite sweet to the taste, often called lead-sugar. Definitely a bad habit, however sweet the jam.

So, not that I want to work for MicroSloth anyway, but Mt Rainier and Co. makes the choice to stay far away a no-brainer.

Firefox

In case you are one of the dwindling number of Internet Explorer users out there, take a look at Firefox, the next generation browser.

It is stable, free, light weight but quite complete, and it is virtually immune to the hacks and viruses that plague Internet Explorer.

Modern internet viruses are a plague upon mankind -- well, the Microsoft using part of mankind, others are hardly affected -- so switching to Firefox is a cheap insurance. (Although if you are running on a Microsoft Windows based computer there are other doors for the evil little bugs to get in. Consider exchanging your Outlook for Thunderbird, or even better, switch to Linux or Macintosh.)

So, here is to Firefox: The best browser since sliced bread!

(BTW, sliced bread -- although a better browser than IE -- makes for a lousy user experience since it literally crumbles under heavy load, the peanut butter sticks to the screen and keyboard, and it gets moldy after a only few weeks -- even without viruses. It does go well with SPAM though.)

Wear Your Fucking Seatbelts

I originally wrote this in response to a posting (also titled WEAR YOUR FUCKING SEATBELTS) that resonated somewhere deep inside my memories. I haven't written much, if any, about this before, and given what just happened to my father, I thought a tiny bit of context might be appropriate.

1979... I was just 22

I had a wonderful dinner with my parents and then said goodbye as they were going back home. (They had been in town for a conference, but they lived four hours away, so I didn't get to see them all that often.)

I went back to work, trying to get some software to work. Around 2am the phone rang. My friend and co-worker picked up the phone and said it was for me. It was a police officer from some place I had never heard about.

He asked if I was so-and-so and checked some general information to make sure I was the right person. "There has been an accident."

Time kind of stands still at moments like that.

My parents car had hit another car head-on. Each car going at least 50km/h. Both my parents were in the ER of the local hospital.

Could I come?

I don't have a car, but I'll see if somebody can drive me.

Are my parents alive?

Your mother and father are both being treated at the moment.

What are their injuries?

Your father has broken legs.

How about my mother?

Your fathers injuries are serious.

(Uh-oh... he is avoiding the subject of my mother. Not good.)

After a series of rapid phone calls to siblings and relatives, I found an uncle who got up, fetched me, and drove me to the hospital three hours away. (Thanks Mats!)

Talking to the nurses at the ER I again got that same avoidance of the subject of my mother. Finally a surgeon told us (it did help that my uncle was an MD) that they didn't know if she was going to make it. "The next 12 hours will tell us".

They had a "guest" room at the ER for relatives. It was not an easy night, but the worst was having to call my mothers parents early in the morning and explain what had happened and that we were still waiting for word of the outcome.

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Anyway, they both made it, although it was a very long recovery. My mother was significantly better after six month and in most respects recovered. My father was able to return to work a year later, but the combination of losing a leg and some damage to his brain has accelerated his aging. While he is still alive, he is not really there any more. Still, they are both alive and have been able to see two grandchildren.

-------

But I will never forget that night and having to make that early morning phone call to my mothers parents...

I wish you and your father the very best of luck on the road of recovery.

And yes... WEAR YOUR FUCKING SEATBELTS

(If my parent's hadn't worn theirs, my son would never have met his grandparents.)

--j

The inevitable

I was going to write something about the joys of being the father of my son, but then I got that call most of us dread.

Your father died.

So, what can I say but:

I miss you so pappa. I still remember that last time whe had a normal dinner together -- hours before the car accident -- and watching you and mamma walk away across the street. Things where never quite the same after that.

The last few years I was here in California while your mind slowly faded away into nothingness back in Sweden. I guess I was never brave enough to face it head on, so I had a hard time going back to meet you. I knew that you were well taken care of, and you did not give in to the darkness, even at the very end. But I should have been strong enough to be there more often. Now it is too late. And that is wrenching sorrow, and also a relief. The end came -- camly in your sleep -- and now it is over. Now I have to deal with the guilt I feel, but I suppose that is normal -- who can honestly say "I did everything I could" and not lie just a little bit?

I'm glad Einar got to meet his farfar, but I have no idea how to tell him tomorrow, he will take it hard I know, just as he still is trying to understand how grandma Joyce could die. "Pappa, how do you wave godbye to somebody who has died?" All I can say is "I don't know Einar, but I wish I did."

I know you did not even remember Einar at the end, but he remembers you, and in that I hope you will live on for a long time to come, even if it is only as the fragment of memory from a 2 year old.

I don't think I can go to the funeral. For me the farwell takes place here and now, and I have no strength to support others greif. Sounds so callous, doesn't it? But church funerals and litanies about the afterlife makes me feel like I'm standing in front of a large crowd speaking and endorsing lies that I know are false and that the people around me know that I know are false. For me death is the end. No second chance, no wings and harps, no fire and brimstone, just the fatal blow of entropy and then nothingness. The only remainder of what we once was is our work and writings, and the memories we leave with others. Fleeting ephemera lasting a blink of time. Then gone into the heat death of the universe.

I mean no offense to those who so belive, and maybe you belived it too -- I just don't know since we never had that discussion. Oh how I wish we could have talked about such things once I got older, but then it was too late. I never got to talk to you about how it is to be a parent, a father, a role model, and how you dealt with the demands of secrecy that your job imposed on your very thinking. Somehow I know that your job in the military was something that you deeply belived in, and that you thought it was just and right, but that you sold a part of your soul to be able to do it. What was it? I will never know, although I probably have figured out more than you ever intended for us kids to know. Does it matter? Only as much as it put a barrier around you that you could never quite drop. Was it worth it?

You wrote books, and I will make sure they are transfered to the net so they don't just fade into a few bookshelfs, hiding from the inevitable makulatura that reaps so much writings. Hopefully serandipity will put it into the hands of somebody new who will be enriched, amused, moved.

Godbye Pappa