I'm easily entertained...

...but also easily bored.

In the presence of words (almost any book, magazine or newspaper will do but spare me the Sports section with no news of tennis and Romance novels) I am almost always be entertained. I may be distracted by something else and lose track of the reading, but I won't be bored. I read the program at concerts and events before they begin (assuming I haven't taken a magazine). I read ads. Pictures are nice, too.

Give me a keyboard and the right mood and I can type until the cows come home. My dad used to whistle for them to do that on the old 60-odd acre home place at about dusk. But I could type on until midnight. I may not say a thing but I will produce a stream of letters formed into English words but the sentences may make sense, alone or together. I will even invent initialisms like HQWF (How Quickly We Forget). Even though I hate them. Laugh out loud! Not going to abbreviate it.

I can people watch endlessly, browse the WEB and, even, read old online and handwritten journals by yours truly for hours on end.

Unless I get distracted.

I am easily bored in some ways. Playing tennis the other day with someone who never runs after an errant ball and who strolls into position to receive, back turned, holding up her hand and saying 'wait a minute' strains me. So I start observing things and entertaining myself. Noticing how the uniforms (all red outfits, all white visors) on some players down the way look, wondering what weeds have opportunistically poked through the cracks in the awful court we are using, considering the resemblance of the Lacrosse player practicing on the half court behind us to a send-up painting of a kid with a backwards cap on the cover of The New Yorker a few years back on the anniversary issue. (Supposed to be a Gen X version of Eustace Tilly he was.) And so it goes until I get a chance to touch ball to strings. Or to serve. I like serving because I get to hit more balls. Two aces Tuesday. I don't hit hard but I move it around. I've been writing a poem in my head about math, tennis and boredom. I work on it sometimes while I'm bored at tennis.

Fractal branches cast fractal shadows against the order of the lines.
Perpendicular lines and partial lines carving the court into rectangles.
Spaces of in and out and fault and ace. Rules about touching and missing.
Why twenty-seven feet? Or twenty-one? A three-foot net at the middle.
I see a pattern and yet not. Only one prime in sight. But I digress, interrupted
By caroms in three space, arcs predictable except for spin and striking
Nails in the tape to hold the lines to the clay surface. How far apart?
How distracted and yet focused the math makes the tennis and the ennui.

No, that isn't the poem. It's just random lines I constructed just now to illustrate.

I have been writing a short story in my head (although it might be a novel or a novella or a part of a novel) for a long while about a guy hitting tennis balls on the very court where I played Tuesday so I thought about that when things were going. too. slowly. I like how some online writers invented the technique of adding extra periods to slow you down as you read. The story has a bicycle rider and an SUV and so when I see a bike go by and then an SUV I visualize what the protagonist (a guy from Odessa, Texas, I'm not sure why) sees through the fence and wind screen.

Yeah, I'm easily bored and yet, sometimes, when I flip from running my iMac as an Apple to the window running XP under VMware and it has gone into a screen saver mode and is showing my own picture collection to me I just sit there, watching pictures I've already seen over and over for a few minutes. But in front of the TV with the satellite hookup and a DVR with captured episodes of this and that I can be so completely bored and unable to be engaged that I have to get up and get something to read.

I watch a lot of TV and movies at home. And sometimes they are pretty exciting and encompassing. But I get bored if I JUST watch them. And not just because of commercials which we usually skip anyway. I almost always read as well. Newspapers usually. So I'll be reading about Somalian pirates, Taliban areas of Pakistan, Obama's dog, Broadway revivals of "Hair" and "West Side Story", whatever, and sort of watching with one eye and listening. Makes sub-titled movies (which I love especially if they are French although German is sort of amusing, too) hard to follow. I also like to work puzzles while watching TV. I will learn a new word in a crossword (e.g.: marten; toque meaning a woman's hat instead of a chef's tall one) and not be able to contain myself until I look the word up in a real or online dictionary.

There is infinite entertainment in this apartment and yet I get stir-crazy to leave it now and then. Then when I'm out I get eager to come back and settle down with my computer, newspapers, books.

I stay engaged with movies, in a dark theater, although I like to have some food and I hate the food except for the Alamo where drinking beer and eating fried things and actually watching the movie keeps me there. Unless my mind wanders.

This restlessness, dare I say bordering on attention-deficit, makes me anxious. So, I guess I go from being entertained by many things to boredom to anxiety, all in the space of minutes.

When I was in school or at work in meetings with presentations by others, I had to write something to stay focused. It might be about what was being presented. It might be a 'to do' list or a grocery list or a doodle. It might be an idea only peripherally about the content the lecturer was presenting. One such segue produced an idea which is one of the few ideas that both received a patent for some of us at the company and actually made a bit of money in the marketplace.

I see people who are really focused on something. Maybe it is a very BIG thing like running a company or non-profit or a tiny thing like a very focused hobby or sport. Nothing gets my attention like that. I'm used to starting on things and never following up. Blogging and posting pictures online is something I've been pretty faithful doing (if that's the proper word) but, let's be honest, the form is constantly changing. And it isn't a thing you finish. It's the equivalent of notebooks full of non sequitur musings created during lectures and other entertainments that did not fully engage my dilettante mind.

Lately I've been watching people who focus closely on something, shutting out distraction. They are creating businesses, fighting for causes, writing books and plays. That will never be me, I guess. And my accomplishments will always be brief breakthroughs: an idea, a sentence, a paragraph, the short essay, the clever bon mot. The other day on twitter I said:

viswoman found blogging reduced her writing to a few paragraphs. Twitter to 140 characters. New service: Heartbeat. Nine letters or less.

I thought I was so clever. Heartbeat. In some techie worlds it is a notice that some process or service is there, working, alive if you will. And the word has nine letters. And yet when I tried to label this post, selecting from labels used on some of the prior 638 posts, I ended up with more than two hundred characters which, apparently, is the blogger limit.

You can't disappear even for a moment...

That's what it's come to really. If you blog and you miss a day (or a week or whatever) people wonder. On facebook? Your friends follow. Tweeting? They follow more. Have e-mail? Your friends, too? Why aren't you keeping up? Smart phones let you follow and be followed everywhere. You never have to out of touch with buddies or family.

I still don't have a smart phone. (I am starting to pass my phone around at parties and meetings to show what a relic it is.) But I have opened a Twitter account. (Not to Tweet but just to follow one person. No it's nothing like that. Just a blogger I like.) I am kind of a facebook addict and I try to make my silly life interesting in short, frequent sentences. I blog, of course. And I have been thinking about this blog entry for a few days. (It was better in my head, really it was.)

Anyway, I was thinking about how, now that we are so connected in so many ways, that it is a radical act not to communicate or to build communication walls with a particular person. Wasn't always so.

Around Labor Day 1972 I left for a tramp around Europe. I had an open-ended return ticket (to New York anyway) and a three month Eurailpass, a bit of money and a vision of adventure. It wasn't exactly what I imagined but it was pretty glorious. I came home around the first week of December. Letters went home, taking many days if not weeks. Letters came to Post Restantes or American Express Offices and finally to the home of friends of friends. Long lapses of communication. I phoned home maybe once or twice. Expensive proposition of going into an office, waiting in line, getting a booth and having the call placed. With no Internet and a limited knowledge of the languages around me, I craved words in English. Precious English language novels and magazines were passes around and after I made friends with someone who worked on an army base we got some magazines that way.

I was out of touch with people back home. They had to follow along with those much-delayed letters and postcards. The lag did us some good, I think. Put a bit of reflection on all relationships. Dulled the edges of things. I still have some of the postcards I sent home. And letters on thin paper designed for Air Mail with every bit of the space carefully filled. It allowed me to grow in a new place and way.

Makes me wonder if our very connectedness today doesn't tie us to our current selves. Not that much personal growth or change will come about at my age. Although...what do you think of my radically short haircut? And what do you think about the fact that everyone on the Internet can see it this way? No going away now to lose a few pounds, change your hairstyle or get a tan and surprise everyone next time they see you. You have to upload mobile pictures all along the way.

It's not really true, though. Actually we can't mentally keep up with any more things than we can physcially really. When millions are out there, you can still just keep up with so many. But maybe you can do it at home, while being a recluse and communicating only one way and keeping your haircut to yourself.

The Virtual Line

As my three (or is it five?) loyal readers know, I'll say pretty much anything here in my blogs and publish pretty much any self-indulgent picture. Above, me reflected in Turquoise Door shop window, SoCo, with Oaxacan animals and a shadow of...what?

I figure it's a blog. You don't have to come. You can stay away entirely. I rarely (have I ever?) post a link pointing to my blog except on other blogs (and in my info on facebook). I'm not pimping the thing, trying to go viral, whatever. Think of me as off in a corner at the party, talking to myself unless you come over and draw me out.

That facebook thing and message boards present some unique virtual lines, though. Once someone is in your network you have to opt out of seeing what they are up to. And you have a choice really, to just lurk, or post status, notes, etc. there. Today one of the people in my network posted this status: " X shares unrequested advice, third hand: Make every update count." I'm guilty of posting inane things. Or boring ones. But you know what? I don't mind anyone's little status updates. "Going to bed." "Up too late." "Working on a contract." I like it. Some people just hit 'post' on status and it comes out as something like "Joe is." Like a heartbeat. Cool in a way. Showed up and pushed a button. Sort of like those lifelines for old people that go beyond the button and sense whether they are there or make them intentionally check in. I see people I like doing ordinary things. It's cool. The links I don't like so much? People are trying to pimp something and you don't always even know what and you follow the link and it's a video (did I mention I don't much like watching videos online?) or a political diatribe. I don't care about people who are playing games or giving virtual crap to one another. It's not real. Go out and have a real beer and put it in your status.

Yeah, everyone has some virtual line he won't cross in these sort of unreal worlds of social media (what does that phrase mean anyway?). On facebook one thing I don't like to do is ask people to be my friend if I am not sure they would have any idea who I was. Also, even if I know some one perfectly well and would be civil to them and confirm them as a friend, if they are someone that I would not invite to my home then I won't initiate the friend connection. If they initiate, though, then fine. Does that make sense? Sometimes people suggest I be friends with someone and I'm just not sure who they are, sadly.

It's la-la land out there, almost as surreal as the real world where we bump up against strangers, acquaintances and friends in odd ways. We all have our odd rules and boundaries there. So it's no surprise that the cyberworld has people with lots of differing opinions sliding around against each other. And it's no surprise to me, given my propensity to occasionally sit in a corner at parties, that I sometimes feel like leaving message boards, other people's comment threads and facebook behind to slide into the cul-de-sac of a blog. And one with moderated comments at that.

Things are just layered and nuanced out there. No one straightforward path. And, oh, that shadow. I think I know what made it.

Do You See What I See?

Do You Hear What I Hear?

Of course not. Beyond the obvious religious implications (only a certain number of people acknowledge the star of Bethlehem, the Christ child and such), we don't see or hear (or for that matter know, as in the third verse of that carol) what others do. We are in a different spot with different sensory tools. Our brains are wired to interpret things in certain ways.

This shop window reflection looks almost bucolic because some growing thing (I'm not sure if it was a tree inside or on the sidewalk) imposes its random pattern. But it was taken on the decidedly industrial turned bar Fourth Street in the Warehouse District. The Christmas Balls (and the sign which says 'Please Present ID on Entry') are at Oil Can Harry's bar, one of the most venerable gay bars around.

I see me, hiding behind a camera and a pink cap. Has it occurred to anyone else that these images of me, reflected in reverse and often obscured remind one of identifying bank robbers in disguises. (I almost said in 'costumes.' Isn't it interesting that costumes and disguises can be the same thing, with different intention?)

Anyway. I digress. This isn't about crimes or even me and my reflection. Except to say that not everyone is seeing, hearing and knowing the same thing.

Living downtown has reminded me over and over of the mathematical reality that a very large building can completely disappear behind a shorter, closer building. This phenomena of disappearing and reappearing makes walking and driving around a city so interesting and, let's face it, a bit disorienting. I can be very close to a forty story building but not be able to see it because of my distance and position from a much shorter building. Yeah, every fifth grader knows this. Still, the fact of it is shocking sometimes.

Another interesting perspective is how two people can sit in the same room and experience completely different things. Of course, if they are reading a book or newspaper, there is that. Worse, if they are both reading and writing on the vast plain of cyberspace, they can be in a different world. FFP reads the Drudge Report and sends pictures of Mother Ginger VIPs to people while I write to you, dear readers, and look up the mathematics of perspective and prowl Holidailies for new thoughts. I've been over here trying to fix little problems in my Windows XP under VMware. I'm surfing a different wave.

We think we have a shared experience. But, depending on where we are standing, it can be very different. It's amazing that media assault can inform a large number of us on Madoff, Caylee and Caroline Kennedy, given that we are all looking in different directions with different obstacles between us and the tall buildings (or the big stories). It's also fairly amazing that so many people, after two thousand years, think they see a 'child shivering in the cold.' Who's to say they are wrong? And it is a nice song.

Secret Pleasures

I started dutifully working on an entry for this blog this morning. It was a whine about "I'm not in the mood for it" entitled "Enough with the Holidays." Really. And maybe I'll work on that one and post it eventually. (Holidailies will suck out all the available words like Austin Daily Photo does images.)

But I decided to start over and write a different one. One with the provocative title of "Secret Pleasures." No not that kind of secret thing. Nope. But instead things like this:

• The secret pleasure of just typing away on a nice keyboard. Just leaning back in my Liberty Chair (we got new chairs for our new office in our new condo) and typing on my Blue Tooth iMac keyboard. I usually use the USB one that has a numeric keypad but, just typing like this, I put the little wire-free Bluetooth number in my lap. I type, touch typing as I learned when I was a kid. (Amazingly I found myself in a career where, eventually, there was a keyboard under my hands, more often than not.) I still love to see words appear in the white space, all neat and punctuated. The time to just play around on the computer, reading stuff and following links is fantastic, too, but those of you who know me probably know I'm happiest saying something myself. And just typing.
  
• Playing with kids toys or, at least, admiring them. I collected toys for a while. I even collected a pile of Legos (one of the most wonderful toys around) which I eventually gave away to my great nephews. I actually put together a few Lego toys here and there. And we all know about the infatuation with bendable, posable figures. I'm over it and only kept a few toys for decoration in the condo as a nod to where I've been. I don't know where my admiration for toys came from...maybe those many years of unrequited longing while looking at the annual Sears toy catalog followed by an era when I had more money than sense. Over it now, I still get a secret pleasure from looking at toys. Like the (disarmed) Buzz Lightyear Room Guard presiding over my side of the office. Sometimes I think I'll go get a Lego toy and put it together or find a compatriot willing to play a board game or put toegher a jigsaw. But I usually satisfy myself more than that would with something from the following list:
• Taking digital shop window reflection pictures (or really any pic involving a reflection).
• Blogging.
• Reading other people's blogs even, no especially, those that are full of simple mundane details of their everyday lives.
  
• Reading. Especially the newspapers. Even the obits. And filling in the squares of the crossword in the Times and smiling to myself if I detect a theme. Even if it's a punny theme and even if I profess to hate puns.
  

So...what's the problem anyway? How can I be depressed when I can step into the other room, pick up three papers and settle in to read them with a cup of good coffee. Where's the problem, huh? Tired of the papers? There's a jillion books. And when you tire of reading and want to write (or want to cheat on the puzzle by looking something up on the Internet), step in here and access the always on Internet connection and connect and type away or read other people's endlessly fascinating blogs.

So OK, maybe these pleasures aren't so secret. But I do have them in reserve, ready to trot out when I'd otherwise be whining.

The Monkey and Me

I'm under the gun because the Internet provider in our building is going to cut off service for three hours today to improve the line speed of our connection to the Internet. So I have to blog now or go to a coffee shop. I'm glad I don't do any real work from home. So I'm putting off making my bed to tell you about my last movie in the film festival.

We considered watching a double header of a French film and a Dutch film. We took along a delightful playwright and filmmaker from the conference so we 'got out the car' as we say now and picked her up at Austin Motel on South Congress and drove to the Bob Bullock Museum by the University and snagged a parking place to avoid the garage. Even though we park in our garage all the time we still hate strange garages. We were way early so we quizzed her about her life and told stories of a party that we went to at the museum.

We just ended up watching the French film, "The Last Deadly Mission." It was so dark (literally and figuratively and it was supposed to be the Riviera) and bloody that they had to put in a fluffy cat and a cute puppy to soften it. Even that didn't help when they introduced snarling German Sheperds as well. I mean brutal, bloody crime scenes; terrible violent memories; dirty police offices etc. (If there was a bright, airy beautiful home it had to include a bloody crime scene.) At the end you knew certain things were going to happen and I suddenly thought "OK, there has to be one last surprise, what is it?" Oh, OK. Up the body count one more. Of course. I see.

We went to Jeffrey's bar. Business was slow at Jeffrey's. FFP says business was slow where he had lunch yesterday and he heard rumors of business being slow in other restaurants. The economy is starting to weigh down everything, I suppose. But our Internet is getting faster so I'll be able to watch my retirement funds shrink more quickly. At least it's supposed to be faster. Will it even work later today? Also...all the people that bought into VOIP phones won't have phones. Most people work, I suppose, and are gone in the middle of a weekday, but the concierges and building management have VOIP phones.

[Picture is me and the monkey in the shop window of Monkey See, Monkey Do on South Congress. Really there aren't many monkies on my back. Although I did have two cocktails last night and they really socked me!]

The Romance of Paper

My doomsday title of yesterday's post ("The End of Paper") sent my most loyal reader (well, the most loyal commenter for sure) scurrying for an article she read in a publication in defense of paper. Now, I'm sure paper will survive. Print is becoming, however, a companion to bits and bytes and sound waves. I read the actual newspapers on the exercise bike while glancing up at the five television they provide at the gym. (I rarely plug into the sound, just looking at stock quotes and those handy running news feeds.) When I find something interesting in the actual New York Times like I did yesterday, I can refer you to the online article. I can e-mail it to people, too. And I can save it, electronically, in a sort of virtual clip file.

As I sort through books, unable to give up a (too large) number of them, I go down rabbit holes of reading. The above scan is of the cover of a book I bought some years ago in a second-hand store. I read it and found it intriguing because this escaped German POW who turned himself in forty years later got this book published before turning himself in. When I got this book, probably around 1993, online research was in its infancy. So I never found out the story's end...what happened when he turned himself in. I lent the book to my dad in 2001 to read and then stumbled on it in 2003 again while looking for books for him to read. Then I did some research with the Internet capabilities of ten years later. Here is an excerpt from my 2003 journal about that:

I started collecting first person accounts from World War II over twenty years ago. I picked up a book (Howard K. Smith's Last Train from Berlin) at my in-laws' house and read it. It was so interesting reading abuot events just before I was born and seeing the events through the eyes of one person in the vortex of history. The story had such individual urgency and yet the events were sweeping the whole world along. I went to the secondhand book stores and searched out similar books. A lot of them were like this copy of Smith's book. They were printed during the war or just after and were now old and musty, especially since the best quality paper couldn't be used. There were stories by refugees and journalists, foot soldiers and pilots, resistance fighters and civilians in the way of war. There were harrowing accounts of concentration camps, POW camps, fox holes and war rooms. There were touching accounts of lives touching, caroming off and spinning away from each other forever. Sometimes I felt that a big patchwork quilt of a story was being told to me, adding up to something like the truth. If truth is chaos and confusion. Sometimes the stories touched, recounting the same event from two sides or the people actually met.

About ten years ago I picked up a more recent book that still fit the genre. I bought it at Half Price Books for $2.98. It was published in 1985. The book was Hitler's Last Soldier in America by Georg Gaertner with Arnold Krammer. Georg was a member of Rommel's Afrika Corps and was captured and sent to New Mexico. He escaped from the POW camp in 1945 when the war was over. He was afraid of being repatriated into Russian hands. He lived without detection until 1985 when he published a book. The book implied that he would turn himself in, in conjunction with the publication.

As Dad and I talked about the book, I told him that I'd never found out what happened to the guy when he turned himself in. It had been a while since I'd tried to search and I'd never been that serious about it. I had tried the Internet once, I think, a few years ago. I gave it another shot and found the resume of the co-author, a professor at Texas A&M. I clicked on his e-mail and told him about buying the book and wondering. He wrote back in short order. Amazing. I printed his e-mail and put it in the book.

Georg's story is so improbable. You live in Germany, there is a war, you end up in the U.S. living a life. Your hometown is now in Poland. Life goes on for forty years and then you admit that you are not just a ski instructor, tennis player and amateur painter, but this last unaccounted for POW.

But everyone's history is interesting when you dig into it and see what happened and how and when. How some things seemed to be choice and some events just steamrolled the person. And how the generatons come and go, considered less than you might think by children and grand children.

Yesterday I found the book again. I was pretty sure I'd keep it, but I decided to see how easy it would be to replace if I didn't. This is something I often do. I'll say "yeah I might read this some day" and then I'll see that I could get one secondhand on the Internet easily. So I'll give it away and figure I'll buy one if I ever want to read or reread it. Well, Georg Gaertner's story wasn't that available. Powell's offered to let me know if they got one. A couple of dealers offered them at high prices. I decided to keep it. The e-mail from his writing collaborator is printed on paper and tucked inside. The reason I scanned the cover is so that my Library Thing bookshelf could show the cover. (By the way, on Library Thing, four other people have cataloged the book.)

As I sort through the books some have wonderful covers, beautiful paper (although the WWII era ones alluded to above are on awful wartime paper) and great inset pictures. It's hard to beat the experience of a book. Or a newspaper. I still like to fill in the crossword on the newsprint even though I have access to the fancy online crosswords.

The end of paper? No, paper and pixels will blend. Your book will come with a WEB page. As most do today. You will research things online and then buy an obscure book from a store across the country or find out online that it is in your library down the street or across town.

Why I 'Diblog'

I just coined this word, 'diblog', as a combination of 'diary' and 'blog.' (I'm sure someone else already coined a word for this or thinks blog is sufficient or thinks, as I once did, that you should just call it a journal and journaling.)

You see, I want to write. I do. But all I do is write journals, diaries, scribbles, blogs, online journals, whatever. As it says in the blurb to the right: "Pretending to write but really just blogging."

But what I do isn't exactly blogging. Depending on what you mean by blogging. Sure I provide links and take the occasional stand on the issues of the day or write what would pass for an essay now and then. But mostly this venue is really personal. Sometimes it is very much in the spirit of 'what I did today.' Like a diary. My writing outside this venue, offline, in notebooks and Word documents on my computer is very much in that diary vein. I do have what I consider a real blog (The Journal Of Unintended Consequences) but it doesn't get updated nearly as often as this space. I have a picture blog, too, that gets updated every day (Austin, Texas Daily Photo) but the writing is secondary if often voluminous. It's about the pictures or is supposed to be.

Visible Woman and my writing offline has always been diary-like for the most part. Or it's a journal if you will. I cannot seem to complete a book, article, essay. I have completed a few (unpublished) short stories. And yet this year I have written thousands of words of 'diblog' here and over two hundred pages in offline Word documents.

Why do I do whatever you call this? Well, I think I know.

One of the main reasons is that everything is more easily dealt with once it's translated into words and put down on paper or in pixels.

Another reason is because I want to have my say and not really be edited by anyone. I get comments, but I can moderate them. I can accept edits sent in although they rarely are. FFP will point out typos and mistakes and I can edit them if I wish. No editor is trying to keep me on point, trying to puff things up or slim them down.

And yet I love to edit myself. With my online musings and my Word docs I can edit anything at any time. I was just pondering writing this and I went back and looked at an almost eight-year-old entry on my old WEB site and I wanted to remove a single period. So I did. What power! Once you write a book it's nice to see the permanence of it...but wouldn't you be itching to edit it?

And finally I 'diblog' because I want to remember what I did today and yesterday and I seriously will completely forget if I don't write or type it down somewhere. See those old paper journals above? I was glancing through one of them and I was writing about having our Old English Sheepdog put down. In 1991. Of course, this is something I remember doing and even the approximate time. But the other things going on at the same time, forgotten. Except I wrote in that book.

So yeah that's why I'm here (or over there or inside my own computer) writing what I do. Because I want to deal with my demons, be heard, avoid editors but always be able to edit and, years from now, remember where I was and what I was thinking. I'm not here trying to influence anyone else or become famous. I'm not seeking readers. So, no I'm not sure why I join things like Holidailies because I'm not really seeking readers which is one purpose of portals. Fact is, for a long time I purposely did NOT join portals. I even went to a conference for online journal writers (JournalCon they called it) one year before the word was 'blog' and listed my name in the program without a WEB site!

By the way...I spent my morning at my club playing tennis and then working out a little. I drank an espresso smoothie at the club. This afternoon I ate a chicken sandwich. I changed the filter on my coffee machine. We considered going to a movie but decided to stay home and watch the bowl game with the Texas Longhorns playing. I plan to read, do some things on my 'to do' list and maybe watch a DVD. Just in case I forget later what was up with me on December 27, 2007.

Goodbye, Friend

There weren't as many social opportunities online in 1995. But there were some. Like-minded people had been getting together in Usenet Groups for over a decade, bonding over similar technical and non-technical interests. I would scan a group called rec.travel.europe. The name meant it was a 'fun' or 'recreational' topic and not a technical one about the Internet itself or Usenet and such and about travel and, more specifically, in Europe. In July of 1995 I was giving advice on Berlin, where I'd just been, on the thread. Thanks to Google collecting archives I can still find the message I read in the summer of '95. The message was from a woman who'd traveled alone in Europe, something I'd done a bit of and something I might do again. FFP didn't travel too far then, because more than four or five days away from his one-man business didn't work well. I went places without him, for business and pleasure, or maybe had female traveling companions. So I thought it would be interesting to talk to someone else who traveled alone and was close to my age.

So I wrote a reply. Not to the thread but to the author: magie@iafrica.com. I didn't realize when I did that she wasn't living in the states. Just didn't notice the e-mail address, I guess. But she wrote back and said she lived in the Cape Province of South Africa and was a Scot who had emigrated to Canada in her teens, met a South African, moved there, raised two boys and divorced after over thirty years of marriage. And we began to exchange long e-mails about our travels. I had just made a trip to Berlin where Christo and Jeanne-Claude had wrapped the Reichstag. I probably sent her a journal from the trip. She managed to send me a journal from her '92 trip that inspired her Usenet posting. In November '95 she was off to Kuala Lumpar and gave me a detailed account of the trip. We began exchanging mundane details of our lives: friends, neighbors, outings, charities, work, family. She told me all about the Fish Hoek Surf Lifesaving Club where she volunteered training kids to become beach lifeguards and about her work with a handicapped workshop.

Margaret began to mail me postcards of the Cape with brief notes designed to entice me to come for a visit. At some point we decided that I would visit, in January/February 1997.

I went to Toronto on business in June '96. At some point Margaret had mentioned that her twin sister lived there. She insisted I contact her and meet her. And I did. After a meal and sharing some wine and a tour around where she worked, she said, "Margaret and I are nothing alike; but you two will get along well, too." Indeed, the non-identical twin sisters were very different, in appearance and personality, but both lovely, fun, warm women.

So, I traveled thousands of miles in January 1997 to arrive at the Cape Town airport and meet a woman I'd never met face-to-face. Three weeks later I had met so many of her friends that it just seemed right to have a 'going away' party to say goodbye. The above picture was taken at that party. (This trip deserves being blogged some day.)

In the spring/summer of 1997, Mags was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent surgery and treatment. But she mustered her strength and came to the U.S. in 1998, visiting Austin and other places with us and with other friends. (This elaborate travel itinerary deserves a blog of its own as well and maybe, one day, will get it.)

In 1999, a couple of my girlfriends and I went to London and Scotland. We met up with Mags and a friend of hers from the Cape in Edinburgh (they were attending the rugby world cup and visiting with Mags' relatives and friends in her hometown) and we met her younger brother and many friends of hers.

Mags would suffer a relapse of the cancer again in 2001, but would still manage a visit to her sister (now living in New York State) for the holidays. A friend and I flew to New York City on New Year's Day, 2002, to meet up with her and visit a few days with her on her way home.

In 2004, Mags' son was living in Dublin and she was planning a trip to Edinburgh with a side trip to visit him. She suggested I meet her there so we could be tourists while he was at work. Then he decided to move to Namibia. Undaunted, she rented an apartment at Trinity College and we still met there for a visit. One morning she woke with a swollen eye. We wouldn't know it for over a year but this was another tumor announcing itself.

In 2005, I once again flew to the Cape and visited Mags and other folks who felt like old and dear friends after meeting them in '97 and hearing about them for years in e-mail. Mags didn't feel well and when her eye became swollen again she asked me to take a picture of it and print it on her computer so she could take it to the doctor in case it had gone down when she visited him for an appointment that was scheduled after I would leave.

Finally the doctors decided a tumor was causing the eye swelling and gradually Mags became unsteady and had trouble seeing. She moved to a retirement home from her apartment but had her computer there and through March of this year was writing me with some of her usual wit and vigor. Then I had to rely on her son typing for her or reports from others. In one of the last messages she typed from the retirement home, in March, she said:

Yesterday afternoon I went with the singing group to Frail Care and then to the Alzheimer’s unit. They sing all the old songs like Hokey-Pokey. Some actually know the words while others clap their hands to the music, while others manage to sleep right through it. Fun though and I am sure they all enjoy it. I met up with an old friend, Joey Swanson, in the Alzheimer’s unit and she said “oh are you down here now?” Sometimes feel maybe I should be. Occasionally, I don’t know whether I am Arthur or Martha

You were neither Arthur nor Martha, my friend. You were a special one. Margaret, Maggie, Mags, whatever we called you, you were one of a kind. And you brought so many people together all over the world. Margaret's son, in reporting her death through her e-mail account said it best: "I miss her so much already." I will also miss all the friends I made through her because she stitched us together, communicating with us all and telling my tales to them and vice versa. I fear that I'll lose track of Babs, Gary, Jim, David, Rusty, Don, Dorothy, Dawn, Colleen, Sue, Brian, Buntu, two Andrews, Beatrice, Bryan, Patricia, Francois, Nick, Penny, Vaughn, Ralph, June, Ann, Paul, another Ann, Tom and many others. It was fun meeting all those folks and more. But Mags brought them to life with her e-mailed stories, too. And no one could do it like she did it.