This Memorial Day, Viv and I walked up to the least-known military cemetery in central Seattle, the Grand Army of the Republic cemetery just beyond the north end of Lakeview Cemetery, to the north of Volunteer Park, overlooking Montlake and Portage Bay.

The small cemetery went through a period of extreme neglect, which it’s recovering from. RootsWeb offers a database of the interred, although it’s noted to be a work in progress. A community group, the Friends of the Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery Park, has spearheaded the restoration effort.

The first time we stumbled into the park, several years ago, walking among the graves was a deeply puzzling experience. Many stones were practically illegible, and many bore severe scars from hurried, clumsy power mowing, blades lopping off large chunks of blackened, acidified marble. The gaping scars revealed the original beauty of the stones, gleaming white contrasting with the dark, mottled greys and blacks of the aged and neglected monuments. Walking along the rows of closely spaced graves was unsettling in many ways, because it was apparent that the coffins below the soil had largely rotted away, and as one stepped upon a grave, it was quite spooky to feel the soil shift and collapse downward.

Most of the stones were obscured though weathering and overgrowth. Today, the overgrowth is gone, and there are clear signs of regular visitors. The inscriptions remain difficult to make out. There are four clear periods of design visible among the stones. The earliest are elaborate monuments now laid into the soil, often obelisks in form. The next period is represented by low, marble stones carrying a shield embossing dating between 1880 and 1920, more or less. Following that are small, simple concrete stones carrying a name below the letters G. A. R., generally dating between 1920 and 1950. After that time, a mix of flat stones, some in a contemporary military style and some in the style of flat family headstones from any contemporary cemetery are apparent.

When we first wandered into the cemetery, I was quite puzzled. This was clearly a military cemetery that had nearly been abandoned, something which surprised me. What war did it commemorate? Perhaps the Spanish American War, given the provenance of Volunteer Park’s name?

The dominant obelisk in the small cemetery answered my question. GAR Cemetery Park is a Civil War veterans cemetery.

Among the flat, contemporary headstones is that of a Medal of Honor winner (page search that link for Frank E. Bois). Interestingly, Bois was an emigrant from Canada. His grave was rededicated in late May, 2001.

On this Memorial Day, I found two other interred who had served in Indiana companies. While we were there, a woman was intensively gardening near the large obelisk. Three other people came and wandered around as we were there, one leaving several freshly cut roses on many graves throughout the cemetery.

We’d brought no flowers, but the cemetery is shaded by towering white oaks, the golden leaves of which have been used as garlands to symbolize honor, wisdom and valor in both American military decorations and elsewhere. I found one or two stems of these leaves and placed them on graves. In other parts of the cemetery, the stones are partially covered with crushed acorns and acorn caps. The tree was widely planted in the parts of Indiana I lived in as a child and being near them, smelling them, is a deep-seated sensory experience for me which increases the reflective experience of visiting a cemetery.

Viv and I attended the soiree for Donnie Darko at Consolidated Works on Saturday night. Free drinks, nibbles, etcetera. We ran into Karla and her husband Diego, and Gillian and Kristopher. I saw Brad go by but didn’t run into him again, which is too bad. At any rate I had gallons to drink.

At one point I overheard two people, possibly writers, discussing the coverage of the festival they were doing. I’ll describe it in greater detail at the Siffblog, but the highlight of the conversation was when one described Gillian’s “great gig.” As he understood it this constituted of writing about the SIFF-related parties on “some blog for Tablet.”

I hadn’t considered the blog a ‘gig,’ exactly, but I suppose that’ll work.

We adjourned from the party to close down the Lobo in the company of a batch of punk rockers who were singing drunkenly along to what I think was Iron Maiden, and noticed a rave in a back yard across the street. They wanted money to get in though, so we skipped it. Walking down the hill to Kris’s house, we went by yet another loud party, this one filled with eary twenties yutes sporting all the variety of pot smoking fashion this year. Kris adamantly desired that we should not go into the party, even though a band was just getting set up to play.

Naturally, Karla dives right in to the scrum, Diego close behind. In the kitchen, Diego saw a refigerator sporting the charming sign “Do not even think of opening this unless you own it, bee-yotch.” Naturally, he grabbed the last can of Pabst and we split.

I spent today recuperating.

I spent much of the day to day viciously malleting slot-and-stem industrial shelving together, only to find that I had done so, for all six shelving units, upside down and backwards.

My arm is quite sore. It’s heavy work for a keyboard jockey, I assure you.

Yesterday was a record day for rainfall in the region, and we discovered that our 2000-square-foot basement warehouse space is unsealed. My friend Dave, who works for the city in environmental affairs and consequently has an encyclopedic knowledge of City of Seattle watersheds and flow patterns, tells me that there is an underground stream that runs parallel to Airport Way, in the shadow of I-5 as it runs south of downtown.

That stream was once a surface tributary of the Duwamish, but when the mudflats were raised to create today’s near south Seattle industrial district, the stream was filled and covered. In certain residential sections of Georgetown, houses that were originally built along the banks of the river can be identified by their considerably lower floor lines. In some locations, I have seen side-by-side houses with a lawn elevation difference of about seven feet.

What we found yesterday was that that stream runs close enough to our warehouse that a trickle of water entered the room in one corner, and pooled before running down the very slight slope of the floor to the rest room. Careful inspection revealed salt-like stains around every crack in the floor of the entire space – meaning that the floor level is probably only inches above the water table.

So, you know, the shelving is important. Eventually, we’ll have to build a rasied floor for the work area as well. Thankfully, one thing that exists in abundance just north of Georgetown is pallets. Fourteen pallets will fill a bay; we can build a work floor with little expense. Does plywood come sized in multiples of four feet?

As predicted, I spent a major portion of my day at Boeing Surplus, which is having a sale this week. We came away with about five simple slab-style desks, a round break table, two quite nice task chairs, and four nice conference chairs. The task chairs are fully ergonomic, solidly built, and cost $10. The conference chairs cost $2.

Each desk was $13.50.

We also picked up some metal inboxes and a ton of hanging file folders ($1 for 40). I picked up a BNC-to-oldstyle Mac video cable and a very nice black laptop bag for myself. I deliberately did not investigate the coputer and printer offerings, but I did notice at least two wrapped pallets od SGI hardware, acres of laser printers, and paused to consider the potentially disastrous relationship implications of a sign which read “20-inch or larger monitors $5; smaller $10.”

There was no wrapped white letter size paper by the ream, but there are boxes and boxes of fanfold. I did not get any of the 15-cent pressboard magazine holders, to my regret.

The other items that I gazed on with lust but left behind were the incredible variety of wooden flightcases, in many sizes, all with interesting stencils, silvery hardware, and convenient metal handles. Purses? Gig case for musicians? Mic case for bands?

We arrived before they opened and joined the small crowd clustered under the awning, seeking shelter from the day’s rain. When the doors opened, the portly men who entered first ran-slash-waddled to their destination, somewhere in the copious technology-related material arryed on the tables.

Alas, though, for the old-“Boeing”-logo mouse-pads available in quantity were uniformly stained and schmutz ridden. And alas alack, for the lightweight metal storage cabinetry on offer was uniformly gunky and banged up, as well.

We did not pick up low, single-person filing pedestals, however, something I think I may regret.

Evil toxic awful stinky floor sealant next door that the damn floor refinishers didn’t think to inform anyone in the building about is FLAVORING MY FOOD LIKE SHARPIES.

I went into the apartment to tell them to stop it and get a floor sealant that won’t KILL BABIES and this tiny Vietnamese teenager who spoke no English was applying it by hand to the floors wearing a cloth dust mask and no gloves that I recall.

I read the label on the giant multi-gallon drums cheerfully decorating our courtyard. Over half the label space was occupied with warnings about such topics as permanent neural damage and the necessty to wear rubber gloves and full-on respirators wile in use.

My eyes are burning and I am hearing some high-pitched sounds in my ears. I’m sure it’s just me wanting to slap whoever hired the refinishers silly.

UPDTAE: I blaim all mispleeings on nerve damaj.

My folks were in town a bit unexpectedly this week for a couple days. While there, my dad and I finally went on the biplane that offers quick little hops out of Boeing Field at the Museum of Flight. My dad’s first degree is in aeronautical engineering and he passed his love of planes directly on to me.

To my surprise, this was not only my first flight in an open-cockpit plane, but his too. It was a total blast.

On Sunday afternoon, at Dixon’s Used Furniture, we found a fully-ergonomic office chair for Viv’s home office.

The chair is a Teknion Adovcate, and it’s very comfy. I have a significantly older Herman Miller fancypants chair (pre-Aeron, but still the cush), and I’m slightly jealous.

Word to the wise: it was $40, an outrageous bargain, and they have two left, one without a back and another high on an inaccessible shelf.

I’m not sayin’ nothin, I’m just sayin’, is all.

On Sunday, after some appropriate dawdlesomeness (regrettably including bowing out of a sketched-in plan to visit the celebrated Kubota Gardens, bummer) Viv and I ran a furniture errand (about which more later) and ended up at Costco.

It was a the usual monthly weekend visit, part of the fabric of Northwestern (and, increasingly, the nation’s) as long as I have lived here, and it was uneventful as usual.

While walking slowly through the aisles, one of the other people who appeared to be on the same general schedule as us was an older black woman, dressed sharply in a matching blouse-and-miniskirt ensemble, but, I hasten to assure you, not in a lapse of judgment. It looked good on her. She was apparently alone, but appeared jaunty and energetic.

We finished our shopping list at about 4:30, and faced the huge lines that accumulate in the cavernous front at the end of the weekend day. I was happy to stand in line and shuffle slowly forward. Lately, I’ve developed a recurrent sciatic nerve pain that at least affords me the pleasure of amazing jolts of endorphins, which is a nice consolation for the blue-and-white spots that dance in front of my eyes as I walk.

I was vegging in line, vaguely wondering what to make for dinner when an exclamation from my wife followed a quiet thunking sound and a rising susurrus of exclamations prompted me to turn around.

The older woman was cradled in the arms of a young Asian man, in obvious physical distress. He’d quickly placed his small selection of goods on the ground, and caught her before she could completely lose consciousness or drop to the floor. I believe when her legs gave way, she slumped forward onto her cart, affording him the opportunity to catch her.

She was speaking to him but he clearly was not following what she had to say, leaning in close and admonishing her to stay with him. As he did so, she began to collapse completely. He turned as he accepted more of her weight and told a nearby helpful person with a cellphone to call 911. As he did so he began to lay her on the floor.

As he lay her down, her chest heaved dramatically as she apparently began to hyperventilate. A tall, dark-skinned man dressed in the open shoes, sweater and corduroy that I associate with East African emigrants in the Puget Sound region stepped forward, and tenderly tugged the lower hem of her small skirt as low as it would go before rejoining his family, seeking to preserve her modesty. I was struck by the simplicity and complexity of his gesture – he acted with tenderness and compassion, but in response to a set of values that might very well be somewhat at odds with those of a woman who chooses to wear a miniskirt in her sixties. Did he disapprove of her wardrobe choices as they passed in the aisles, under the crushing weight of all that Costco abundance?

Not that it matters very much; it was a gesture of respect and tenderness in the context of the moment. Shortly after he’d straightened her clothing, a growing puddle of urine on the shiny concrete floor raised new questions of dignity and propriety.

By now everyone in the lines near the stricken woman had begun to watch in concern; calls for assistance from the store’s staff were answered by non-checking-lane personnel hurrying forward. The checkout lines themselves continued to move, effectively unslackened by the mortal drama. Checkers and boxers called instructions and warnings to one another:

“They better not move her.”

“…fired…”

“…sue everyone who was working…”

Clearly not well trained for the event, they focused on what they did know how to do, which was to check people out. I suppose that that may be what they had been trained to do in such an event. This is not to say that they did not experience and exhibit feelings of compassion and a desire to help; they did. But in the absence of training for a situation like this, fear of losing their jobs predominated in their reactions.

A young Costco worker moved the woman’s cart, her purse in the basket away from both the woman lying on the floor and the line she had been standing in. Someone had produced a pair of towels for her. One draped along her legs, the other was under her head. More managerial Costco people showed up, one confirming the address with a 911 dispatcher on his cellphone.

The woman had rolled on her side, out of the puddle of urine, and the young Asian man was now holding her in a half-hug, half-cradle that conveyed a desperate compassion. I suppose that in one way he was demonstrating what it is to hold on for dear life.

As I began to unload our cart onto the checkout conveyor belt, the young worker who had moved the woman’s cart out of the way began to wheel the cart farther away still. Viv suggested to me, “They should check her ID.”

I repeated the suggestion to the young woman, saying that she should check the woman’s ID for medical information. The young woman immediately began to dig through the purse, finding not only the stricken woman’s wallet but also a prescription asthma inhaler. She went to inform her coworkers near the huddled figures. I don’t know what the response was, but she immediately returned to the cart with the materials, put them in the bag again, and began to wheel the cart away.

The person behind me in line attempted to interrupt the operation, saying it was important to keep the purse with the woman, in case “they need to call someone.” The young worker moved the cart, and bag, away anyhow.

As we checked out, our checker mentioned that her husband had epilepsy, and that he would sometimes “let go,” as she put it, referring to the urine. By the time our cart was loaded, and I had wheeled it away from the end of the checkout lane while Viv finished paying, two Seattle Fire Department paramedics had arrived. I was not wearing a watch, but I doubt more than three minutes could have elapsed from the time the woman collapsed to their arrival.

We wheeled the cart to our car, somewhat shaken. As we reached it a second Fire Department ambulance parked behind the first. I held Vivian very closely for a long moment before we began to load the groceries into the trunk.

Giant power wows are hitting my neighborhood, so the server might go down.

*womp*

Blinken lights, radio static. Makes me wanna run out to look at the donner und blitzen.

Today I got in touch with my inner tard, by attending a film for review and SITTING IN THE WRONG THEATER for an hour.

Sigh. I will restrict my activities for the rest of the day to non-technical pursuits.