One year later

I was just reminded that it's been a year since my baby sister died. Sometimes, I forget and think of something I want to tease her over. Then I remember. I will always be grateful that number one sister flew me up so I could be with her. She was in a coma and we had to make the decision to unplug her. When she finally went, her husband and I were there holding her hands. All morning the hospice people and grief counselors came by and introduced themselves. Just a little before, a harpist came by and asked if she'd like to hear anything. Her husband asked if the harpist knew and Led Zepplin. She did, and she played it for us.

Bonnie McKay (1959-2012)

I am now an Archy without a Mehitabel

Tessa had to have Mehitabel euthanized today. Her liver failed and she stopped eating last week. I'm in Alaska while the house sells, so I wasn't able to say goodbye. 

Bonnie

On Tuesday, my baby sister died. I've tried to write something about it a couple times since. I can't do it. I'd put up a picture, but my photos are all packed away. My oldest sister flew me up to Alaska so I could hold my little sister's hand and brush her hair for a few hours. Then I flew back South. Right now, I just want to punch reality in the face.

Time and memory

If you've been following the drama that is my life, you might know that I'm in the process of giving up my home and getting divorced at the same time. It sucks. Thank you for your kind thoughts. But that's not what I want to talk about.

I was going through some papers today and came across some files of Tessa's college poetry, novel starts, and such. When I passed them over to her, I mentioned that I had some of her later writing on floppy disk and that I would send it to her after I am able to convert it into a newer storage medium. I began to think about the very different nature of physical data and electronic data. Much, possible too much, has been said, written, and generally pontificated on this subject. My tiny contribution is an observation on owning stored information.

Information stored on paper takes up a lot of space and it's heavy. For the last century or so, when people move or die, the debulking (that word might be my mom's creation. If it's not, don't tell me) process that happens often involves the destruction of a lot of their paper. Personal information is also often unique information, which means this destruction is equally often permanent. We historians hate the destruction of information. The Second World War not only saw a wholesale destruction of information with few parallels in history, it is the only such destruction where so many historically minded people were around (or survived) to appreciate the destruction. After the war a number of projects were started to save vulnerable knowledge by making copies and distributing them around the world. Ten copies of a Fifteenth Century book existing in German libraries could easily be destroyed by another European war, but then thousand copies on microfiche in libraries around the world are almost invulnerable. And a million copies in databases... ?

My first thought looking at the file box that contained a decade or so of her creativity and comparing it to the pocket full of disks that contained another decade was that the later version was far more likely to survive debulking than the former. Looking further, I had a thought about that survival of information.

I'm not sure who first pointed it out, but we are going through a truly amazing shift of wealth right now. As the Greatest Generation and the Korean War generation pass away, the baby boomers and their children are receiving the largest transfer of wealth in the history of the world.* At the Fremont Sunday Market, where Tessa and I sell her uniquely scented and gentle soaps and skin care products, the junk, antique, and collectibles dealers talk about this. "Wealth" is a nice abstract term. In reality, wealth isn't just numbers on bank ledgers, it's stuff.

Here are some vaguely remembered numbers from my teaching days in the early 90s. Those of us who were born in the 1950s, as children, had roughly three times as much stuff as our parents. Our children, born in the 70s or 80s, had roughly five times as much stuff as we we did. Do the math: Gen X kids grew up with around fifteen times as much stuff as the Greatest Generation.

This is what I've heard from thrift shop keepers and junk dealers. They have no problem finding stuff to sell, what they have is a problem of sorting through all the stuff to find the sellable stuff. College kids no longer have a problem finding furniture for their apartments, they have a problem finding the furniture that they want for their apartments. When a flood hits the Mid-West, relief groups don't want you to clean out your closet of last year's clubbing outfits, they want a very specific list of coats, boots, and rugged outdoor clothing. Most of the greatest property transfer in history will go into landfills. The great issue of this "wealth" transfer is sorting.

What does this have to do with Tessa's old poetry? Information, now called "data", is having less and less to do with this process. Diaries, files of papers, and photo albums are less bulk than they once were. Boxes of paper became disks in the 90s. A decade later they became fewer disks. A couple boxes of papers? Oh... throw them away. A handful of disks? Pitch them in this drawer... I'll worry about them later. Data storage becomes exponentially cheaper. I can now keep my parents' entire lifetimes in a corner on my hard-drive. Now I can back it up on a flash drive on my key chain. Next I can give a copy to each of my sisters and all their children. Duplication ensures survival. What happens when we all embrace distributed computing and data storage--the cloud? Blow me up or let me die alone and the data is still there.

Now that I'm giving up my house, I've begun moving my belongings into a storage unit. I don't know how bad my downward mobility will be. I doubt I will be able to take everything with me at this stage. I'll pay for the storage as long as I can in the hopes that my luck will turn around. Across the hall from my space is the unit of someone whose luck did not turn around. They've sawed off his lock and replaced it with their own, representing foreclosure. I hate the cable show Storage Wars. Each "treasure hunt" signifies the end of someones history, their dreams, and their continuity. At the Market, sometimes the junk dealers have boxes of old photos. Who are these people? These photos were taken for other people to look at. Continuity. Somehow that chain has been broken and now the photos are just images, illustrations. They have no human meaning.

As the bulk of personal history begins to shrink, what will happen to the fragility of human memory? Paper to disks to fewer disks to drives to smaller drives to the cloud. Memory increases exponentially. When i die and cease to visit my data, will it even be worth the effort for the keepers of the cloud to isolate my data and sell it to the future equivalent of the Storage Wars ghouls? Does this make my data more vulnerable to destruction or less? Memory becomes exponentially cheaper. At what point does it become not worth their effort to seek it out and destroy it? At that point, my history becomes immortal.

Millions and billions of us will be buried in the background noise of the global database. Who gets to mine that data? The intellectual property and privacy battles of today deal mostly with the living and their heirs. Will the next round deal with the extinct who have no heirs?

My generation is receiving the greatest property transfer in the history of the world. The next generation is going to receive the greatest information transfer in the history of the world. I wonder what they are going to do with it.

* As an historian, I think the terms of that proposition could be argued all night if enough beer was available. Technically, every generation transfers 100% of it's wealth to the next generation (or the one after). The only exceptions to this rule, that I can think of, involve imperial conquests. One group of conquests, like the Mongol invasion of Central Asia, are so devastating that they put a significant dent into the total wealth of the world. Another group, like the Spanish looting of the Aztec and Inca empires, accelerate the transfer so much that a fraction of one generation receives wealth that would have taken more than one generation to transfer in normal circumstances.

Compare and contrast. Cite sources. This will count for 20% of your final grade.

Today is my birthday

Today is my birthday. I keep thinking of cute things to say about that. It is also the tenth anniversary of my father's death. So, I think I'll save the clever for another day. I just had a nice dinner and now I'm having a nice beer*. Later, I'll take a little Scotch out under the stars and have a drink with Dad. Then I'll have another. Dad said he would never ask a man to stand on one leg.

* For those who need to know, it's Arrogant Bastard Ale made by the Stone Brewing Company of Escondido, CA. Dad would have approved.

I HATE MOTHS

We have moths, tiny, evil, wool-eating moths. I do battle with them from time to time. When we cleaned out Mom's house, I claimed two Pendleton coach blankets that had belonged to my grandmother. I remembered them from my earliest childhood. I would curl up in one whenever I was sick or just need some comfort. I put one on the couch for naps and put the other one in the closet. The one on the couch has been getting a little moth damage so I sprayed it with lavender this a few minutes ago. Then I went to get the other one. It's ruined. It has palm-sized holes in it. I want looking for other things and found that they had ruined my father's (and my) wedding suit. One shoulder is gone and the lapels are rags.

I WANT THESE MOTHS DEAD! I want to see rows of of tiny moth heads on stakes (you're all Spartacus, you little bastards). I need to know how to get rid of them completely. Lavender and cedar will repel them from this closet or that chest, but that's not good enough anymore. I want them gone. I want them extinct in this house. I don't want them destroying my history any longer. If anyone knows of a method, short of poisoning the whole house, I want to hear it.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

Today is a day for birthdays. Science bloggers gerty-z and Bora "Coturnix" Živcović were born on this day. So was my father. Dad would have been seventy-nine today.

My grandfather was a cowboy with an eighth-grade education. Grandma was a waitress. A few years before Dad was born, they homesteaded in Montana, near the Canadian border. In the typically quirky style of my family, they went east to homestead. They were not the kind of family to own modern consumer luxuries like a radio or a camers, so I have very few pictures of Dad before he was in his teens.

Dad (right), mid 1920s.
Most depression era kids are pretty good at geezering, but none could match Dad who owned the tactical nuke of geezer stories: he really did walk three miles to school when it was fifty below. He only did it once and he was one of only two kids at his school who did. Even the teacher stayed home. Fortunately, the superintendent made a pass by all the schools in the county to round up the kids who were dumb enough to go out in that weather.

Dad, mid 1930s.
Dad's about fourteen in this picture. The bathing beauties are some cousins of his. Like most rural families, Dad had cousins and distant relations all over the place. No, not that kind of cousins. Keep your mind out of the gutter.

Dad, 1942.
More than anything, Dad wanted to learn how to fly. He joined the Army Air Corps (later to become the Air Force) six months before Pearl Harbor. By the time the shooting started, he had been told that he couldn't be a pilot because of his eyesight. Still, he did his bit to defeat Fascism by running the ground crew for bombers departing for Europe. Dad's bombers blew the crap out of the Ploeşti oil fields.

Dad, late 1940s.
After the war, Dad met the love of his life...

Dad, early 1950s.
...and became a dad. He always liked number one sister best, but I'm not bitter. Nope. Not even a little. Can we talk about something else?

Dad, late 1950s.
The fifties were the Atomic Age. Dad was on the leading age of this exciting new frontier, building and breaking reactors faster than you could say, "is it supposed to be making that noise?"

Dad, late 1960s.
Did I mention we liked camping? We liked camping. Dad took us to some great obscure places, sometimes driving up dry creekbeds to get there, and gave us lessons in Western history while doing it. Sometimes we wished he would have paid more attention to the road and less to the stories.

Dad, mid 1980s.
Dad retired early afer losing half of one of his lungs. In my family, the correct follow up to that information is "think carefully, Dad. Where did you have it last?" We never get tired of that joke. Mom and Dad moved into the woods where Dad built a house for Mom using only his grit, determination, and free labor from his son-in-law, his nephew, my sisters, and his two brothers.

Dad, mid 1990s.
This is the last formal portrait I have of Dad with the love of his life.

Everyday should be Mothers' Day

Tomorrow is Mothers' Day here in the States. For over a week now, we've been listening to ads from people telling us to show Mom our appreciation by buying their stuff. Of course, for those of us of a certain age, the only way we can actually show Mom our appreciation is to raise her from the dead as a shambling zombie. I'm not sure Mom would go for that. She always liked to look her best and probably would not think having rotting bits of her face fall off was her best. On the other hand--the one that hasn't fallen off yet--she did have a flair for the dramatic and she would be a big hit at the Fremont Market where, coincidentally, I will be spending the day selling stuff that I'm sure your mother would love.

Of course, I won't be raising her from the dead as a zombie. That's impossible; we had her cremated. Fortunately, there are other ways to bring her back to life. All week, over at Facebook, people have been putting up pictures of their mothers as their profile pictures. I'm a sucker for that kind of sentimental gesture.

Mom, mid 1920s.
Here is Mom demonstrating the family squint. This squint is a precious family heirloom, passed down for generations. My sisters and I all share the squint. The squint is believed to have originated with our Scottish ancestors who, every spring, would emerge from ther mud hovels and squint at the ball of fire in the sky that they had not seen in months.

Mom, early 1930s.
Mom, as a Campfire Girl. Campfire Girls, with their great uniform, may have been a gateway drug to Mom's love of the theatrical. Because my grandfather was a camera buff, I have dozens of pictures of Mom standing on the porch or in the yard of whatever house they lived in that year showing off a costume.

Mom, mid 1940s.
Mom, (far right) undercover, fighting crime. We may never know the full extent of my mother's crime fighting activities because I haven't made them up, yet.

Mom, late 1940s.
If you can't figure out what this is picture of, you are a communist and should go back where you came from. When we were married, Tessa carried that fan and I wore that suit (the green one, not the white one). As to what that means, you can keep your dirty mouth shut, Dr. Freud.

Mom, mid 1960s.
As a mom, one of Mom's duties was to take us camping and make sure we got our recommended annual allowance of carbonized marshmallows and mosquito bites. Dad also came on these outings to act as chauffeur, native guide, and photographer.

Mom, mid 1980s.
After Mom booted that last of her freeloading kids out of the house (that would be me), she looked around for new ways to stay active. She had already done crime fighting, so she settled on roller derby.

Mom, early 1990s.
Mom, at a wedding, with some dirty hippie.

Wednesday is Dad's birthday, he'll get his retrospective treatment then.

Say happy Thanksgiving with pictures

My mom died on Thanksgiving two years ago. My dad nine years ago died on my birthday. I have mixed feelings about holidays. They make me a bit sad, but they also bring back memories of my folks. Fortunately, we are a family that likes each other and likes getting together, so my holiday memories are mostly pleasant. Earlier today I was getting annoyed a other people's snide comments about dysfunctional family holidays and decided to go look for a nice picture of my folks to post. I found the one I wanted, but I found much more.


This is Mom and Dad leaving their wedding reception. They were a very good looking couple, very good looking parents, and very good looking old folks.


This is Thanksgiving 1965 at my uncle's house. During the sixties, we lived close enough to Mom's brother and his family that we spent every Thanksgiving together, alternating between their house and ours. Here, at the kids' table, that's me on the far left (appropriately) followed by Sister. One Cousin One got to sit at the grown-ups' table (neener, neener neener). I notice my little sister has not eaten her roll. Number One Sister will probably steal it, because Mom made great bread, and we really like those rolls.


Here are my big sisters and Cousin Number Two filling their plates under Mom's careful supervision.


This is the grown-ups' table. That's Favorite Aunt on the left, followed by Grandma, putting a little sugar in her coffee, and Cousin Number One. I'm not sure who the man at the end of the table is, possibly a relative of Favorite Aunt's. Mom is on the right with Dad in the shadows behind her and another unidentified person beyond Dad. Favorite Uncle is behind the camera. While Mom smiles for the camera, Dad is busy chowing down.

It's only fair to warn my sisters and cousins that I have lots more pictures of us during the sixties. Oh, the hair. Oh, the glasses. Oh, the humanity.