Skiing Downhill

89

By the Summer of Nineteen Ninety-One, my brain was working at its peak. Like a long dried out sponge it completely soaked in every bit of every moment. I had never experienced life like this. I did all of the same things I always did, but I could now see how each nuance added up to the end of each day in complete detail. When Daina and I would make errand runs for her and she wasn't sure where she had seen something, I could recount to her in complete detail all of the stores we had been to each day, each item she had looked at and which location of the store it had been at. Hours after the drive from the stores to my apartment, I could recall which lights had been green and which ones we had to wait at. I could work on my computer while watching the the cable news and keep complete track of them both without pause. One time Daina called and I placed the television on mute and continued working on my computer project, watched the silent picture and discussed the next day's plans with Daina and never lost track of any of them. Daina openly wondered if I was transcribing our conversion as we talked given my typing and I assured her I wasn't but instead working on something else as we spoke. She expressed annoyance at that and asked that I not do it anymore. So I stopped my typing but continued to think of the code I needed to do next while following the television and talking about the next day's plans.

I was running Daina ragged with frequent hikes now that she was on summer break from teaching. Never wanting to take the same trail twice too closely together, we had started to scrounge for trail maps and seek more obscure parks just to continue with the variety my mind desired. On one of these hikes, Daina just couldn't continue to the peak and wanted to turn around but still zested by my regained health I wanted to continue and she reluctantly agreed to wait where we were and I could finish on my own. I thought it would take me fifteen more minutes, it ended up taking just under an hour and Daina was very angry with me for keeping her waiting that long. I apologized and then suggested a faster way down rather than using the trail.

In the southern rocky mountains there are spillways of little crumbled rock which form a relatively smooth slope. One time when we had to cross one, I realized my feet would sink in if we took slow steps, but they would slide along the top downhill when one moved quickly. I recommended that we 'ski down' the straight spillway rather than take the serpentine trail back to the bottom. Daina was game after I showed her how to start and watched as the tumbling little rocks rolled beneath my feet as I slid down the first tens of feet quickly in large steps, then tilted my heels back to let my feet sink into the slope and bring me to a stop. Daina gave it a try, but more often came to a stop than slid along. I presumed it was from my past experience skiing where she just needed some practice and continued my way down, quickly descending a few hundred feet in little over a minute. Yet Daina kept sinking in and thus had to pull her feet out of the slope of little broken rocks more often. When she finally caught up to me a few minutes later, she wanted to return to the path for the rest of the descent and I agreed. We sat briefly on a large rock to pull off our shoes and pour out the jagged little bits that had fallen inside before we continued.

One time we reached the bottom of a path and her car was in sight, she suddenly cried out. Turning to look, she had been paying attention to the sight of her car, not the branches of the tree she was passing, and one jabbed her in the eye. Her eye swelling up and painful, she swore for a bit and then debated what we were going to do and then asked if I could drive her to the emergency room. I noted that I didn't have a drivers' license as I gave it up due to my declining health, but as I was now feeling great again and fully able to pay attention while driving, I was game for it as long as it was all right with her. I remembered in New England that a kid without a license could practice driving when an adult was in the car, so I assumed the same would be true for Colorado.

It was great being behind the wheel again and the emergency room doctor found that Daina's eye was just bruised, not punctured, and would be fine with some time to heal. He put a gauze cover over it and I drove Daina back to her condo where we visited for a bit, and caught up on previously taped shows. When it was time for me to go home, though, she didn't feel up to driving and told me I could just take her car. I agreed, but with some trepidation as this time I knew there wouldn't be a legal fig leaf for my driving without a license. Especially as it meant I'd also have to drive back the next day to return Daina's car. Still, I made sure to drive home perfectly and then flawlessly back so as to not gain the interest of any police cars.

For my birthday this year I decided to get a fresh driver's license. The bureau had moved in the six years since I had gotten my last drivers' license, but while in a bigger space handling more people, they still had the same driving test evaluator as my last time. I hoped I could just renew my old expired license and thus avoid dealing with him again given how our last experience had gone, but after my photo was taken I was told I'd need to have my driving re-evaluated given the number of years since I was last licensed to drive. This meant joining the long line of people waiting for driving tests and given the estimated wait time, Daina left to run some errands while I waited there. A half hour later, only having moved about a third of the way down the line, my name was called to the front desk. Arriving there, they handed me my license. Did this mean I didn't have to take the driving test after all? I decided not to ask and left the building. I figured I could always say I didn't know better if they came after me, or called me at home about why I hadn't stayed for the driving test. But they never did.

I realized how much writing computer code was like skiing downhill. The computer was the skis, the user was the skier and the computer program you wrote was the ski slope. If you wrote the code correctly, the program reached the end and the user was happy. If the code wasn't well written, the user had some surprising bumps along the way and, at the worst, crashed and had to get up and start over again. As I coded, I thought of the ski trail, the side paths one could take as an alternative to the main slope, add program checks to make sure the process wasn't going too fast or losing control, and then the satisfying crescent moon stop to bring the experience to a close.

Knowing I was cognitively back and raring to code something, Jeff put me in touch with the head of the 'Front Range Firefighters Association'. While fire fighters & stations could dial into Jeff's online site and stay abreast of the Fire Fighting message forums, there were too many of them jostling for a chance to connect to one of Jeff's incoming land lines. The solution was to create a point-to-point message system which would allow the various fire fighters to download the forum mail straight to their own computers, read and reply at their leisure, and then have their computers upload their messages back to Jeff's site for inclusion and distribution. Checking into the process, I found there were quite a few shareware pieces already available to do this, but each piece had its own configuration file format and they had to be laced together to get it all done: One program to handle the dialing, one program to perform the eMail exchange, one program to allow the end user to read and respond to the messages, and then a chain program to run all of them in sequence and trap errors between them.

I told him I could do it and agreed to in return for a pizza once I was done. Rather than write everything from scratch, I just wrote an installation program and a configuration manager. The installation program ensured all of the shareware pieces were properly placed on the destination computer and then the configuration program asked for and managed all of the configuration info each program might need and wrote it out in their specific file formats once it was entered or updated. For this, I used the FlexBase system I had developed seven years earlier as a universal online site hosting system. It allowed the user to define the appearance they wanted through a simple type-it-the-way-you-want-it-to-look system and let the code handle all of the behind the scenes work to make it happen. By using this preexisting code library of mine, I was able to just give it the template for the user screens and the templates for the various output configuration files and the FlexBase system handled the rest. Ultimately the most work I had to do was code up the 'download now' or 'read messages' choice screen and repeatedly test the system to ensure it wouldn't crash on the various types of IBM PCs and clones it might be installed on. Given that Jeff's machines and my own made a varied lot, it gave me plenty of chances to make the package fail and learn how to improve it.

After only a couple of weeks, the combined installation package was done and I uploaded it to the head of the association to distribute to his members. While I stayed in touch with him for the subsequent few months in case there was a problem to address, there never was and the package became quite popular and I even made variations of it for other online sites in town. It was my first major coding project since my health had returned and I was thrilled with the result!

Though I forgot to take up that pizza... Probably too late to ask for it now?

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Hiding Dead Bodies

72

By the Spring of Nineteen Ninety, the friendship between me and Daina had grown with our partnership running the local science fiction club and the subsequent regular dinners she had been treating me to a few times each week. She had also been inviting me on occasional errand trips when they involved passing my end of town and with the warmer weather she noted that she liked to hike. Having grown-up with the ski area my father managed, I was used to hiking as well and this soon became a Saturday morning routine for us. Sometimes it would be in local parks, other times on the edge of the mountains with steeper, but more scenic terrain. And we'd spend this additional time talking about ourselves.

I avoided all topics of concern such as my 'situation' and my problems with the medical community. I would later find out she was holding back on some issues as well. So we talked of our family backgrounds and previous jobs. In her case, growing up in Denver, she had concluded to be a teacher in her final years of High School and, as the awareness of the need for Special Education grew, she had decided to specialize in it as did her two closest sisters in age. She was a student teacher at a Denver public school as part of her last year in College. She then moved to Yuma, Colorado, where she had landed two part-time jobs as the special education teacher for two rural schools, spending half a day at one school, then the other half day at the other. She noted how one of the school's gave her a room, but the other gave her the back of a semi truck in the parking lot. One school paid for minimal supplies while the second insisted that cost was included as part of her pay and she should buy what was needed for the students. Daina quickly found herself using the supplies of the better school to squeak by with the other school. After two years of it, the better school offered her a full-time job and she didn't look back.

For the next seven years of her life she lived in Yuma while teaching at that one rural school. As all new teachers starting out, she had formed part of a group of new girls in town and then one by one over the years each of the other girls found a local boyfriend and eventually settled down to marry and make a home. But in Daina's case this didn't happen, she didn't explain this much other than how she had gradually become lonely as these friends she used to do things with were now focused on their husbands and coming children and no longer had time for her. By her ninth year living in Yuma she had decided that there would be no future for her there, beyond what she already had, and decided to let the school district know she was leaving at the end of the school year.

She assumed she'd find a replacement teaching job pretty easily in the Summer of Nineteen Eighty-Six but soon discovered that school districts had been locking up new special education teachers from the coming college graduates during the Spring and by the time she started looking in the Summer, the job openings were few and far between. Often, if there was still an opening it was for a reason, a bad administration or job location. She finally had her first solid job nibble in Commerce City, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. It served as the city's industrial district and according to her had all the ambiance of a polluted gravel pit. The interview went well enough and she soon had a call on her answering machine saying that they wanted to hire her. Rather than return the call that day, she decided to wait until the morning.

When morning came, she got a call from my town for an interview at one of our school districts and she accepted it and was soon there. She liked the neighborhood and the interview went well and she was offered a job on the spot. She accepted, then returned home to let the Commerce City school know that she had already accepted another offer. And that was what brought her here. She soon joined the other new teachers who had started at the school that same Fall and one of them, Rochelle, had decided to explore the social opportunities and had stumbled across a listing for the science fiction club and brought Daina along...

How about me? She wondered. What about me? I bounced back. She was curious about my own personal history and social life and I pretty much told her about my computer programing skills and being part of the club, but offered little else that she already didn't know. Remembering how much fun it was to discover the thoughts my high school friends had about me based on what was in our year book, I instead asked her what she thought I was like, and up to, in my spare time?

I soon discovered that Rochelle had been talking about me as part of her long line of past boyfriends as if I were another notch on her bedpost. I found that very funny and assured Daina nothing of the sort had happened. For if it had, Rochelle would have had a much bigger story to tell about me! I laughed to myself. I wanted to know what other rumors were out there about me. Daina didn't have much else other than to share that I seemed to fit the profile of a serial killer.

This brought another laugh for me as I was curious why. Well, my being a single male, the feel of the 'trashy tale' I had written and brought to the Writers' Group as my first submission, etc.. All seemed to fit the preconceived notion of what a serial killer would be like. ''And so you decided to spend more time at my place and take up hiking with me?'' I asked with a huge smile. Well, she had concluded that I probably wasn't...

''Probably?'' I echoed back and then spent the next couple of years during our subsequent hikes pointing to little copses of bushes & tress, gaps between large boulders and saying to her, ''That'd be a good place to hide a body!''

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The Three Best Things I Got From My Father

24

As I had started during the nights when I first went to bed at the age of thirteen, I would reflect on a part of my life as I waited to fall asleep. Often it would be about the events of the day and what meaning they might have on my unfolding life. In the case of my third full year in Colorado, I decided to consider what were the three best things I had gotten from my father. In the case of my mother, it seemed pretty clear: Honesty about my mixed race background, Gutsiness to go out and try something new, and Resolve to continue on a path even if the day-to-day isn't fun.

While my mother and her father had kept their Native American ancestry a secret and denied it whenever their background was questioned, mother raised me to be accepting of my mixed race background and open about it. I had. And on the whole it had been a good choice. While a very few had made fun of that heritage, being open about it only gave them a specific label to use when they would otherwise have made fun of me for something else. It's better to be made fun of for something that is true rather than for something that is false, isn't it? Also, not being in denial about it never lead me into the trap of trying to prove to others that I was less accepting of mixed race people than them thus assuaging any suspicion about my own ancestry.

While I had not always been thrilled with my mother's choice to move to Colorado, leaving my New England childhood environment behind, I had to admire her courage. Her first move out of the family home during my parents' separation had been to a nearby town that was closer to where she already worked, not a big change in the scheme of things. But to move to Colorado in her mid-fifties without any job lined-up, no friends to welcome her here and help her get settled, that was inarguably gutsy and I had to admire her for it.

So too, for the resolve to see it through. I could tell by August of her first few months in Colorado that she was having second thoughts, fantasizing that someone from New England would come out and carry her back to the only homeland she had ever known. But as she had made the choice to move to Colorado, she steeled herself to stay and make that new life work, even if it didn't seem like the best decision during the first couple of years. Sure enough, after years of perseverance, she had found herself a better job than she had ever had when it came to pay and benefits, she had made new friends to replace the ones she had left behind, and had even had a string of new lovers, though ultimately none ever panned-out to that second chance of a lifelong relationship she had hoped for.

And now for my father, what had he given me...?

As I lay in bed racking my brain, I realized just how much of a discounted role he played in my life, with the negatives easily overshadowing the positives I was looking for, but then came the most obvious: A love of Science Fiction. While never intentionally introducing me to it, I grew up in a home with plenty of exposure. From science fiction television shows which tickled the imagination, to the many books on shelves of possible future lives, some aspirational, some forewarning, some simply an escape from the daily grind of today. All called to me and my heart answered back.

And a second thing?

I had to acknowledge one day in my later elementary school years when my father had taught me a valuable lesson. My friend Pete and I were practicing shots at the basket ball hoop in my family home's driveway. As we did this, Pete was teaching me a new rhyme he had learned at camp the previous summer that we could say in rhythm to the bouncing basket ball as we got ready for our next shots. I don't remember it now, but it was something about the relationship of whites and blacks and used the N-word as part of the rhyme. My father was home that day and bustling about the yard and over-heard this and called me over. He quietly explained to me that the N-word was a racist putdown and I shouldn't use it, even casually as part of what seemed a playful rhyme. It was not simply because it was a put down, but by using it and other racist terms in my life, it would limit the people I would meet and come to know and I would be the poorer for it. When I returned to Pete he asked me what that was about and I simply told him that we shouldn't use the rhyme anymore. Yet, following my father's advice, I've kept use of racial terms to a minimum, only when discussing matters of those terms with friends, but never casually for fun and never as a put down to anybody.

But what was the third lesson I had gotten from my father which had the most impact on my life?

I could only think of the time when I was with him at the ski area during the off season and he was discussing some new ideas with his boss. While my father managed the day-to-day activities at the park, he actually did have a supervisor of his own, appointed by the owner, to keep an eye on things and consider ways of enhancing the property. As his job wasn't hands-on, this supervisor was rarely there on site, at least during my years passively observing the operations of the ski area. I would hear about him from time to time, right down to how my family's first home had been across the street from his own before I was born. But his office was almost always vacant and I saw him maybe a total of five times in ten years. This was one of those times as he was in and wanting to discuss an idea he had for expanding the use of the ski area.

My father would listen to his idea, the pros & cons he had thought of on his own, and then asked my father for his thoughts. My father just reflected back the pros & cons the supervisor had already stated and asked the supervisor what he thought. I was surprised as, when asked for his opinion, my father had ended up adding nothing and tossed the question right back like a hot potato. The supervisor juggled the returning balls of the idea and the pros & cons he had already thought of for a bit, but then really wanted to know what my father thought. This time my father talked at length about the pros & cons the supervisor had expressed, debating each one in the same way the supervisor had then, after a thorough recounting, asked the supervisor what he was thinking, again adding nothing at all to the debate. I was appalled as my father seemed to lack either any original thoughts of his own on the matter, or lacked the courage to express them. Either way, even if the supervisor was holding his cool, I was feeling the frustration for him. He again restated his idea and how it might help or hurt the park and again asked my father for his thoughts on the matter. My father simply again waffled, rephrased, and ultimately gave nothing back.

I concluded at that moment that I would never fear giving my opinion about something I was asked about and to always be decisive and not wishy-washy when I had enough facts in front of me and a decision needed to be made. And I have stuck to that tenet and never regretted it.

Though I have since learned discretion...

While the three best things I had gotten from my mother were positive if sometimes hard learned examples, I've always been haunted that to get three out of my experience with my father, I've have to include a lesson I learned despite his example, not from it.

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