personal – Page 14

Take the time, do it right

I used the following story at work the other day to illustrate why some of us should avoid some ill-advised shortcuts and choose instead to stand up to critics of how long our project is taking:

In 1995, when my primary flight training was complete, it was time for my checkride to see whether I’d become a licensed pilot or not. For the checkride I had to fly from my home airport, Petaluma, to the FAA examiner’s airport, Santa Rosa (er, the Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport — yes, that Charles Schulz). That flight was uneventful. When I arrived I shut down and secured the plane as usual, then went in to talk to the examiner for a while before we began the “practical” (flying) portion of the examination.

Unlike Petaluma, Santa Rosa has a control tower, which means you must radio for permission to taxi. So after preflighting the plane, climbing aboard, strapping in, putting on my headset, starting the engine, and performing the pre-taxi checklist, I radioed the tower. “Santa Rosa ground, Cessna 24498 on the main ramp, taxi to the active with Foxtrot.” The tower did not respond, which is not too unusual as control towers sometimes get busy and taxi clearances get low priority. So after a few seconds I radioed again. “Santa Rosa ground, Cessna 24498 on the main ramp, taxi to the active with Foxtrot.” Still nothing. I double-checked the frequency to which the radio was tuned, waited a few seconds and tried again. Then again. Finally after several long minutes, with the instructor waiting patiently beside me (and was that a bemused smile on his face the whole time?), I noticed that I’d forgotten to plug the headsets into the radio stack! The instructor and I were able to talk to each other but not to the tower.

Flustered, I explained to the instructor that this was my first time using a two-person intercom with the radio stack. (In small planes, very often the intercom is a separate little box that the pilot owns. Two headsets plug into it, then the box — which usually ends up wedged between the front seats or knocking around loose on the floor of the cabin — plugs into the radio. Before the checkride, I flew solo with no need for an intercom — my headset plugged right into the radio — and before flying solo, my instructor would always set up his intercom for us to use.) The examiner put me at ease, saying, “Anyone could have forgotten to plug in the intercom. It’s not on the checklist. A poor student would have given up and started taxiing without clearance. You did what you were supposed to do, even if it took a little longer.”

About an hour later I was a licensed pilot.

Moral of the story: if it takes a little longer to do things right because you haven’t thought of everything, it’s still better than the alternative.

Score!

Recently I discovered that Sony is planning a new in-dash car stereo with a USB port for reading and playing MP3 files from a thumb drive. I had an earlier such model but it got stolen. I replaced it with a JVC model that I don’t much like. (Among other things, its clock won’t display when the unit is switched off. And when it does show the time, occasionally the time display won’t update itself for many minutes in a row!) For someone with a long daily commute, a good car stereo is indispensable. So I’m interested in Sony’s latest and I have been checking Amazon periodically to see when it’ll be available to order.

While checking just now I discovered that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — the final book in the series — is now available to pre-order. Its just-announced release date is 21 July. Yay! Into the shopping cart. I’m proud to be among the first to pre-order it. Thanks to an automated recommendation I also discovered that Universal Hall Pass — Melissa Kaplan’s post-Splashdown band — has a new EP out. On it she collaborates with former Splashdown bandmate Kasson Crooker — yay! Into the shopping cart.

Today’s run of luck continues…

Luck o’ the Jewish

It happened again: I left my wallet at home and didn’t realize it until I got to work (some fifty miles away).

On “in line”

New Yorkers don’t say “standing in line,” they say “standing on line,” and so did I for the first half of my life. My sister Suzanne noticed the change when I started saying “in line” instead, some time after I left New York for college. She ribbed me about going native, since in Pittsburgh (as in most other places), people say “standing in line.” I explained to her the real reason I switched: to avoid confusion with the computer networking term “online,” which in the mid-80’s had not achieved any meaningful linguistic currency outside the world of computer nerds, but which was part of my everyday vocabulary at Carnegie Mellon.

I discovered it while standing in line to buy some food at a local lunch joint, just like last time. Muttering a curse, I went back to the office unfed.

…where I found aluminum catering trays full of white rice and Chinese vegetables, left over from someone’s lunch meeting. I heaped some on a plate and headed for the stairwell back to my desk. On the way there I encountered my coworker Cid, who asked me, “Do you eat meat?” “Sure,” I said, and he handed me a take-out box of leftover Szechuan chicken! Continuing to the stairwell I began trying to fetch my security badge (to open the stairwell door) while balancing the items in my hands — when my coworker Stefan saw me coming and held the door open for me.

Now it’s just after lunch. When I discovered my missing wallet I thought, “Well, at least this will help me lose a little more weight,” since my efforts in that department have plateaued — but I’m stuffed!

Relative weight loss is easy:
just fatten up everyone else

I just hope all this good karma doesn’t mean I’m going to get busted for driving without a license on my way home tonight. I’ll have to do something nice for my co-workers tomorrow.

My Civic duty

My car, the Nimble Imp, is a nine-year-old Honda Civic hatchback. On Thursday it wouldn’t start, so we towed it to a garage. On Friday we learned that it had a dead battery ($100) and a leaky clutch master cylinder ($600) — and that according to Edmunds, it’s worth $767, or $67 more than the cost of the repairs I’m facing.

On Saturday I began car shopping.

Fuel efficiency is my main criterion. I’m intrigued by the Toyota Prius — I’ve driven one and liked it — but the car I’m really after is the new Honda Fit. I have some lingering doubts about the Prius’s hybrid drive — just how long do those batteries last, anyway, and what is their true environmental impact? — whereas the Fit’s gas mileage is almost as good, its price is right, and it doesn’t have a distracting video display in the center of the dashboard. Only the name is a little off-putting. (I like its European name better: “Jazz.”) Yes, it’s tiny. No, I don’t have a problem with that. So I ordered the Consumer Reports price report and started calling Honda dealers to find one where I could test-drive a Fit.

Marin Honda didn’t have any. Neither did Honda of El Cerrito. Nor did the San Francisco, Berkeley, or Oakland Honda dealers. I called Walnut Creek Honda — no luck. I called Concord Honda — no. San Leandro, Burlingame, Hayward, Redwood City — no, no, no, no. At Vacaville Honda (42.7 miles distant) they thought they might have one or two on the lot and promised to check and call me back in five minutes. Mmmmmmmmmmno. I began to feel like I was living in the Cheese Shop sketch.

Glickstein: You do have some Hondas, don’t you?
Element: Certainly sir! This is a Honda shop, sir. We’ve got–
Glickstein: No, no, don’t tell me. I’m keen to guess.
Element: Fair enough.
Glickstein: Element?
Element: Yes.
Glickstein: Ah! Well I’ll buy one of those then.
Element: Oh, I thought you were talking to me, sir. Mr. Element, that’s my name.

It took a not-inconsiderable effort of will to psych myself into buying a car this weekend, but psych myself I did, and for a couple of hours on the phone Saturday morning I persisted in spite of the best efforts of Bay Area Honda salespeople uncharacteristically to prevent me giving them my money. But they finally wore me down, with the result that I authorized the $700 repair of my $767 car. I am “Fit” to be tied.

The laundry saga

The first several months of 1986 were a low point for me. I was suspended from college for low grades and had moved into a squalid tenement-style apartment with a roommate named Paul. I felt lonely, with my friends continuing to attend classes. Often I had to listen to Paul having sex with his girlfriend in the next room.

Things didn’t stay so bleak for long. Thanks to a tip from my friend Mike, I got a programming job at the University of Pittsburgh, and took a couple of classes there, too. I continued to see my friends from time to time. I was busy looking into other schools, thinking that I’d prefer one with a creative writing program rather than the computer science program that had drawn me to CMU. And my friend Julie, whose relationship with her boyfriend had grown strained, took up with me.

Reefer madness

When my college friends George and Merle rented a house together in the Shadyside section of Pittsburgh, I went to their housewarming party. Because I was a special friend — I’d visited George often when he was hospitalized the previous winter — they took me aside to show me their secret pot-growing closet. Inside was a veritable jungle of pot plants. The closet was lined with tinfoil, reflecting the blaze of numerous grow-lights. I was duly impressed. George volunteered to give me one of the smaller plants, which he concealed inside a green garbage bag for my walk home.

There’d been plenty of pot-smoking at the party, but I’d only had a couple of tokes, never having been very much into drinking or drugs like some of my friends. Nevertheless, I must have gotten a pretty serious contact high, because as I walked home in the wintry dark carrying that garbage bag, I kept having the same strange experience: I’d be at the beginning of a block, and suddenly I’d be at the end of the block, with no memory of having walked the intervening distance.

That didn’t change the squalor in which I was living. I had a tiny closet of a bedroom that was mostly taken up by the bed. In a corner of the room was a growing pile of dirty laundry. The only other things in the room were a reading lamp and a small marijuana plant on the windowsill, a gift from my friends George and Merle. It never flowered.

I was almost never in my apartment except to sleep and shower. The laundry pile grew and grew, because there were no laundry facilities nearby, and even if there had been, I was on the third floor of a walkup, and all those stairs made an effective barrier. I knew I should get to a laundromat before things got totally out of hand, but before I knew it, they had.

There came a point — it took surprisingly long — where all my clothes were dirty. When I dressed in the morning, I picked the least dirty clothes out of the laundry pile. I think I may have washed some socks and underwear by hand in the bathroom sink from time to time, but that was it.

Finally I’d had enough of living that way. It was time to have some clean clothes. One way or another, I had to do laundry.

I waited until midnight one weeknight, by which time I figured students at the Morewood Gardens dorm building would be finished using the laundry room there and I could monopolize as many machines as I needed for as long as necessary. I had assembled a pile of one-dollar bills. These I planned to feed into the change machine in the dorm’s video game room in order to get quarters to run the laundry machines.

I hauled out my giant denim duffel bag and started stuffing clothes into it. And stuffing. And stuffing. You never saw clothes packed so densely. I was determined to fit everything into that one bag, because if I couldn’t, it meant finding another good bag (which I didn’t have) or making two trips, and I was hellbent on getting all the laundry done in one shot as quickly as possible.

I managed to fit everything in the bag, but it was so tightly packed I literally couldn’t lift it. I couldn’t even dent it. Literally.

I called for a cab, then dragged the duffel bag across the floor of the apartment, out the door, and to the top of the stairs, which descended straight down to street level with no turns or landings.

I gave a shove, and down went the clothes.

When the cab came, I wrestled the bag into the back seat with me with great difficulty. I rode the three long blocks to Morewood Gardens, paid the driver, and for the next twenty minutes manhandled my clothes to the dorm building’s basement.

With the duffel bag in the laundry room, I walked upstairs to the game room to get my first batch of quarters, about three dollars’ worth. I used some of that to buy a box of detergent powder from a vending dispenser. I put in more quarters to buy dryer sheets, but the vending machine jammed! I couldn’t get my quarters back either. Oh well, I thought. Little did I know I should have given up right then and there.

There were three washing machines, and I loaded them up. At once I saw just how long I’d be there. The duffel bag seemed no less full after removing three washer-loads of clothes!

I sprinkled some detergent into the machines, fed in my quarters, and started them going. Then I went upstairs to play some video games. After twenty or thirty minutes, I stopped by the change machine again, having used up the last of my quarters — but it was empty! Cursing, I crossed the street to the University Computing Center, where there was another change machine. But now it was after 1am and the UCC building was locked. There was yet another change machine in Skibo, the student center, but I knew that building would be locked too. Finally, I remembered a vending machine in one of the academic buildings, Baker Hall, and the change machine that stood next to it. Baker Hall was clear on the other side of campus, and I sprinted over, eager to get the next load of laundry started so that maybe I could finish before sunrise.

I found the change machine, fed in two dollar bills, and then got the dreaded orange light — “machine empty.” Eight more quarters was not going to get the job done! But at fifty cents a cycle, it was enough to start three more washer loads and one dryer load while I hunted for still more quarters. I ran back to Morewood Gardens and flipped up the washing machine lids to remove the clothes, and this is what I saw:

In one machine, although the cycle had finished, the dirty water hadn’t drained.
In another machine, although the cycle had finished, there were soggy, sticky, undissolved clumps of laundry detergent clinging to my clothes.
In the third machine, my clothes were clean and damp.

For the next five minutes or so I suffered a major frustration attack, swearing, banging on machine lids, and on the verge of tears. Then I pulled myself together. I moved the clean clothes to a dryer and started it running. Then I moved the clothes from the dirty, undrained machine to the empty machine and ran that. Finally I re-ran the machine where the detergent hadn’t dissolved.

Now what? There seemed to be only one thing to do: walk two long blocks down Forbes Avenue to the Mini-Mart and beg them for quarters. While there I could also pick up some liquid laundry detergent, which wouldn’t fail to dissolve like the powder I’d bought; and some dryer sheets.

The Mini-Mart had just closed. It was a few minutes past two.

I walked several blocks farther into Oakland, where there was a 7-11. I asked for twenty dollars in quarters, all prepared to tell my tale of woe, but the look on my face must have done the job, because the cashier unhesitatingly complied. I picked up some other needs — snack food, a magazine or two — paid, and left.

On the walk into Oakland, I hadn’t noticed the cold, being overheated from frustration and anxiety and running. But I had spent several therapeutic minutes in the 7-11 and as I plodded back to Morewood Gardens my sweaty skin made me freeze.

The load in the dryer wasn’t dry. The load with the undissolved detergent still had undissolved detergent. The load in the good machine was clean. I moved that load to a dryer and ran it; I re-ran the not-yet-dry dryer load; and I moved the undissolved load to the good machine and ran it for a third time.

From that point on things proceeded slowly but without much further incident. I could use liquid detergent in the machine that didn’t dissolve powder, and the loads came out fine. I discovered after a few loads that the dryers barely did anything, so I stopped using them. I’d brought hangers, but the wet clothes were too heavy and difficult to hang, so I crammed them back into the duffel bag. I’d deal with them when I got home, if I ever did.

With just two machines going at a time, it wasn’t until after 9am that I finally was back in my apartment with my even-heavier duffel bag of soggy clothes. I have no memory of getting the duffel bag back up the stairs. The human brain has an amazing capacity to block memories of pain.

I hung up my clothes, passed out, woke up at night, and got drunk with my friends.

Weight, weight, don’t tell me

Losing weight is hard.

I weigh myself first thing each morning. Occasionally I am pleased by what the scale says, and then I exclaim, “Yes!” (whispered, so as not to wake anyone else up) and do a victory fist-pump (feebly, since I haven’t had any coffee yet). But much more often I am not pleased, and then I talk back to the scale, casting aspersions on its ancestry, entreating it to perform anatomical impossibilities, and the like.

As of today I am 117 days into my weight-loss program, which is 29.1% of the way from when I started to the goal of my next birthday. Unfortunately my weight is lagging about ten days behind at 26.7% of the way from start-weight to goal-weight.

Still, considering the holidays just passed — dietarily disastrous as expected — and the fact that I still have not begun any meaningful amount of exercise, I guess it’s not too bad. I have a good strategy for catching up when I’m starting to fall behind: skip dinner. Getting on my bike when the weather turns nice again (actually it’s been unseasonably pleasant so far, but I plan my activities as if it’s a normal Northern California winter) will be an even better strategy.

Subway action hero

In which the author evades a citywide pursuit, battles a gang of ruffians, and kisses two women within minutes of each other.

From seventh through twelfth grades I attended Hunter College High School in Manhattan. I took the subway from Queens in the morning and back again to Queens after school. Most days I rode home with my friend and fellow Queens resident Chuck.

We were two geeky little guys, and we had female counterparts at Hunter: Kathy and Joelle.

They were the sort of girls who were into Tarot and Stevie Nicks and Lord of the Rings and guys who played Dungeons and Dragons. By rights, Chuck and I should have been D&D players, considering our other interests such as computers, electronics, and Star Trek; but we weren’t. That didn’t keep Kathy and Joelle from acting interested in us, though; and being still at the dipping-pigtails-into-inkwells stage of relating to women, Chuck and I feigned displeasure at Kathy’s and Joelle’s attentions.

(Not that they were especially mature themselves. Their nicknames for me and Chuck were “Cow-face” and “Moose-face,” respectively, and they delighted in pretending to annoy us.)

As it happened, Kathy and Joelle also both lived in Queens and so we frequently encountered one another en route in the afternoons. (Somehow none of us ever ran into one another in the mornings.) Whenever this happened, Chuck and I always made a big show of being vexed, and Kathy and Joelle always made a big show of following us as we tried to evade them by switching trains, walking to the far end of the platform, etc.

Of course, it was love, but none of us ever figured that out.

One time, for no particular reason, the chase was truly on. Kathy and Joelle made clear that they’d stick to us like glue on the ride home that day, so the instant school let out, Chuck and I raced for the 96th Street station and counted ourselves lucky to get on a number 6 train almost immediately, before the girls could catch up. At 59th Street we got off the 6 to switch to the N train — and there we found Kathy and Joelle waiting for us! When they saw us run from the school, they knew they’d never catch us if they followed us to the 96th Street station, so they hot-footed it down to 86th Street, where they caught the 4 express and beat us to 59th Street!

You can’t go home again

The N train no longer goes where it used to. The RR train no longer even exists. The one constant in the New York subway is change. Change, and the smell of stale urine. Two! Two constants. Here is what the MTA route system looked like around the time of this story; here is what it looks like today.

Chuck had a plan. On his cue, we unexpectedly hopped onto a departing RR train after its doors had closed (using the cool but stupidly dangerous leap-on-between-cars maneuver), leaving Kathy and Joelle behind once again. At Queensboro Plaza we switched to the 7 train, and got off at Roosevelt Avenue to transfer back onto one of the Queens Boulevard trains.

And there were the girls again, waiting for us with shit-eating grins, having foreseen our strategy. We conceded the battle and rode home the rest of the way with them.

One other time, perhaps a year later, I was waiting on the Queens Plaza platform after school with Joelle, maybe Kathy, maybe Chuck, and maybe one or two other Queens friends, when a group of slightly older kids started verbally taunting us. Naturally we ignored them. Then they began to insult the girls. I got angry and said something to them in the way of a warning, I don’t remember exactly what; then we continued trying to ignore them. The last straw for me was when their harassment became physical, to wit: tapping some of us on the head. I felt protective of my friends and grew uncharacteristically bold. I threw down my knapsack and demanded we be left alone. “What are you gonna do about it?” asked the chief bully, and gave me a shove. I shoved back and the fight was on. We circled each other with our fists up, each of us swinging occasionally and either missing or landing pretty ineffectual blows.

[I am a lover, not a fighter, but I am not above settling the hash of someone deserving. Though I don’t remember it, my mom loves to tell the story of the time I finally snapped and beat the crap out of my elementary school’s resident bully — who treated me as a friend ever after.]

The fight somehow petered out with no resolution. When a train came, his group and mine got on separate cars. It was one of the newer R-46 trains that prevented crossing from one car to the next without an operator’s key, so once we were underway, that was pretty much the end of that.

Through the window to the next car we saw the gang get off at the next stop, Roosevelt Avenue. However, as the conductor announced, “Watch the closing doors” and the door-warning chime went “ding dong,” the bully I’d fought ran back onto my train car, punched me square in the nose (knocking my head back into the wall behind my seat), and hopped back off.

I saw stars. But nothing was broken or bleeding, I had the sympathy and admiration of my friends, and the bully’s cowardly final act had given me a moral victory that I still savor.

There’s a nice little coda to the Bob-Chuck-Kathy-Joelle story in which I get kisses from both women.

In our senior year at Hunter, we had our Spring Carnival in the schoolyard. Kathy was one of a few people manning (“womanning”?) the kissing booth, and for a buck I finally got a smooch from her.

Another booth was a dunk tank — one dollar for one throw of a baseball at a target that would drop some poor sap into a tank of water. To my great surprise, there was Chuck, sitting on the hot seat in a bathing suit and T-shirt, looking distinctly dry. “I’ve got to try this,” I said, as I handed a dollar over to the booth barker — Joelle. Now, Chuck, Joelle, and everybody else in the world knew that I was athletically — what’s the right word? — pathetic. A small crowd gathered of folks who knew this fact and the fact that Chuck and I were best friends. Chuck taunted me confidently from his perch. I wound up and hurled a true baseball-style pitch. On that sunny afternoon the gods of great story endings guided my throw straight and true. The ball struck, a bell rang, and the look of astonishment on Chuck’s face as he fell into the water was worth a million bucks. Joelle squealed, jumped, and gave me a hug and a kiss.

Zanetti

This morning I spotted this shutterbug.com link about commercial food photography on del.icio.us’s popular page, which was my cue that it’s time to tell my Zanetti story.

In the late seventies and early eighties my dad worked as a salesman for a bookbindery. One of his clients was The Creative Black Book, a celebrated annual directory of and for professionals in creative services such as filmmaking, copywriting, photography, etc. The Black Book staff, led by founder Marty Goldstein, was young and hip, and their offices were fun to visit. My dad found plenty of reasons to pay “business calls” on this client that were really excuses to hang out and goof around. Goldstein and my dad became friends.

One of Goldstein’s friends-and-clients, in turn, was a photographer named Gerald Zanetti, who had a thriving commercial-food-photography studio in midtown Manhattan. Zanetti was also a technophile who in 1982 had one of the first small-office computers — the TRS-80 Model II — and no software to run on it.

Who you gonna call?

In 1982, Zanetti had a new computer but no way to use it, so he called me. The following year, my high-school friend Joelle bought herself a car but didn’t know how to drive, so she called me — letting me keep and use the car myself for many months in exchange for occasionally driving her places.

A tenuous connection between these two stories? Maybe. But today, Joelle’s husband runs the TRS-80 website hosting the Model II link you see in the main part of this story!

Enter yours truly. After a few years as a programming hobbyist I was ready to earn some afterschool money writing software. Through Marty Goldstein, my dad hooked me up with Gerry Zanetti and I had my first programming job.

(Holy hell, that makes this year the silver jubilee of my career.)

Zanetti loaded me up with a bunch of documentation about the Pickles and Trout version of CP/M, an operating system and programming environment that famously was almost the basis of Microsoft’s original DOS. Within a few weeks I was writing some simple office-management tools for Zanetti, but in the classic fashion of non-technical enthusiasts with money to burn, the specs for what he wanted were ever-shifting. Far from a consulting gig, my position at Zanetti’s studio became open-ended. When the school year finished I worked full-time over the summer. I became part of the Zanetti studio family, which included Zanetti, his wife, a rotating slate of assistants, and recurring visitors such as suppliers, food stylists, and other partners. My sister Suzanne did office work there on occasion too, and even I occasionally answered phones, stuffed envelopes, and ran errands.

As I toiled at the computer on a wide variety of projects — now programming, now data entry, now educating myself further in CP/M and later Xenix — all kinds of fascinating photgraphy-business stuff went on in the adjacent studio. I saw all the tricks of the trade described in the shutterbug.com article and then some: cereal arranged in a bowl of white glue, not milk; cigarette smoke blown across a cup of coffee to simulate steam; mashed potatoes for ice cream; and so on. For most jobs Zanetti used a professional home economist (a.k.a. food stylist) to prepare the food to visual perfection. I never knew a Whopper could look so good!

He was among the best in the business and lots of big-name clients came through the studio. Very often they purchased excessive amounts of food for the shoot and left it behind after the shoot was done. Many were the times I lugged a dozen steaks, a few hundred slices of American cheese, or a crate of Ronzoni spaghetti home on the subway.

Eventually I left New York to go to college but I continued doing bits of work for Zanetti from time to time via a character terminal and modem he supplied me with. He could never get enough of me writing software for him though he needed almost none of it, and his wife occasionally gave him a hard time about the expense of it. He was full of ideas for new computer projects, some quite ahead of their time — his blue-sky description was the first I ever heard, for instance, of an object-oriented photo-editing application.

Zanetti exhibited paternal forbearance while I learned my craft on his dime. I was exceptionally lucky to have such a willing patron and would not be where I am today without his support. Thanks, Gerry.

It was a wonderful life

Shortly after I wrote my eulogy for my childhood friend Jon, I sent a printed copy to his mother, who hadn’t heard from me, nor I her, since the 1970’s. After a few weeks she responded with a lengthy letter and a portfolio of Jon’s life: photos, writings, news clippings, accolades, stories about Jon, and finally many beautiful remembrances. I am happy to report that, short though Jon’s life was, it was rich and accomplished.

Jon was the editor-in-chief of his college humor newspaper. He earned a masters degree in sociology and a degree in law. As a legal intern he represented troubled youth in court, part of a child advocacy program. At the time of his death he was working to pass the bar exam, struggling with mounting medical problems arising from both his kidney disease and from a hepatitis infection he contracted from a transfusion years earlier. He was the first recipient, posthumously, of an award created in his honor, the Jonathan Roppolo Student Achievement Award of the Suffolk County Bar Pro Bono Foundation.

The other eulogies that Jon’s mom forwarded to me from friends and family were unanimous on many points: that Jon had exceptional intelligence, integrity, humor, and compassion; that he endured his disease and the tedious routines that went along with it entirely without complaint; that he had uncommon passion and drive; and that Jon made indelible changes for the better in those who knew him, as he did me.

All of which makes him out to be rather a saint, which may indeed be appropriate but is also rather depersonalizing. When I knew him he was just an uncommonly fun friend, part of my inner circle. We hung out, played games, hatched schemes, acted silly.

Does it take adversity of the kind that Jon faced his whole life to make someone passionate, driven, and accomplished? Maybe. I certainly don’t have Jon’s levels of passion, drive, and accomplishment, though I do have some of each. It is very possible that what I do have simply rubbed off of him somehow, long ago.

The circle, already complete, is now illustrated.
Incidentally, that’s Amy Linker in the center of the second row.

Santa versus the bees!

One afternoon this past summer I was in my office when the phone rang. It was Andrea. “There are bees in our house,” she told me.

“What?” I thoughtfully probed.

“There are thirty or forty honeybees flying around in the living room. Some of them are starting to die, they’re lying on the floor.”

“Did one of us leave a window open this morning?”

“Nope.”

“Then where did they come from?”

“I have no idea.”

Thus began the Night of a Million Bees. Actually it was only thirty or forty, but to me it seemed like a million. You see, even though as a scientist I like and admire bees, and can even enjoy watching their industrious activities from a safe remove, in person I’m terrified of them. My parents used to make fun of the way I skedaddled out of the way whenever I saw one as a kid; they called it “The Glickstein Shuffle.” In summer camp I was always relegated to right field when we played softball, where the clover was dense and the honeybees were busy. Many were the times when a fly ball would land just a few steps from me while I was preoccupied with staying out of the bees’ way.

But now I am the head of a family and I have to be Brave, so I told Andrea to take Alex (our dog), pick up the kids at preschool, and keep them all at her office for the time being. I would go home, scope out the bee situation, and take appropriate action. I fully expected to take one quick look inside, see a buzzing swarm centered over our sofa, say, “Uh huh,” close the door again and get a hotel for a few days while armor-suited professionals tented our house and fumigated the hell out of it.

In fact what happened was this: I went into the house and immediately saw three or four bees on the floor in the entryway, motionless. I crept slowly inside, taking great care with each step, touching nothing and thoroughly scanning the next patch of floor before placing my foot on it. Sweating bullets, heart pounding, I switched on every light in the place until it was ablaze with brilliance, and then got a flashlight for good measure, and a long stick. I found more motionless bees: some in the kitchen sink; some on the sofa; some on the windowsill. I grew a bit bolder and pushed apart the slats of our vertical blinds with my long stick, and shone the flashlight in. There I found more bees. And more still between the sofa cushion, and under the piano bench, etc. Some were quite hard to see.

Then I noticed that a few were moving sluggishly; the first couple I’d seen, in the entryway, seemed to be coming quickly back to life! I trapped them under drinking glasses. Then, still trembling with fear, I plugged in the vacuum cleaner, assembled the long-reach hose, and began sucking up the bees. After ten heart-stopping minutes I believed I’d gotten them all, and only switched off the vacuum after considerable hesitation, certain that when the suction abated they’d emerge all abuzz to exact their revenge.

We slept at home that night, albeit a bit uneasily. But for several days there were no more bees. Then one day we saw three new bees in the living room, flying around, not yet exhausted. Emboldened by my prior experience, I sucked them up with the vacuum cleaner right out of midair. But the mystery of where they could be coming from remained.

One afternoon I heard a strange hum in the living room but saw no bees. I triangulated the sound to — our fireplace! That’s when I noticed that, though our fireplace doors have been closed for years — we never use it — a tiny air vent in the corner of those doors, big enough for a bee to crawl through, had been open all along. I closed it.

Our hypothesis now is that there is a nest of honeybees in our chimney, and perhaps a piece broke off and fell into our flue or even the fireplace. In the confusion some bees escaped through the air vent into our living room. We made a note to address the problem sooner or later, but it drifted down to the bottom of our priority list. After all, closing the vent seemed to solve the problem once and for all, why not let the bees be? We never use the chimney ourselves. We never even open the fireplace.

Except for tonight. Christmas Eve. How will Santa get in?

Tonight the kids will expect us to throw the fireplace doors wide and set out a folding table next to them with cookies and milk for Santa. But there is no way I’m opening those doors. What can we tell the kids to allay their fears that Santa will be locked out?

I may have to haul out the ladder, write a note, and let the kids see me taping it to the roof. “Dear Santa, there are bees in the chimney, please use the patio door.” Then of course we’d have to leave the patio door open, which exposes us to the possibility of a visit by one of the many neighborhood skunks. Bees, or skunks? Either way, Merry Christmas.