This week, David Bowie died, and that led to me writing on Facebook about an encounter with the man from my childhood.

When I was a teenager, my family lived in Lausanne, Switzerland for a year, circa 1981-2. Bowie’s most recent album at the time was Scary Monsters, which my sister had purchased on release (maybe in Europe? I do not recall, and she is more than 25 years gone, so I can’t ask).

My father’s gig came with school for the kids, either an English-language expat school based in Geneva (about 45 minutes away) or a French-immersion school in Lausanne. Some kids of one of my dad’s colleagues (people with a famous family member as well and thus here anonymous) had chosen to attend the Geneva school, which for some reason I recall as ending in 8th grade. I find this memory suspect, however, as I was offered the chance to attend an English-language school in Geneva which I have long thought to be this school but I would have been in 10th grade in that year, and so I must state that my recollections are suspect, distorted, and based on the viewpoint of a child.

We, as it happened, chose the Lausanne school, primarily because we did not have to board at the school.

That said, the school my father’s colleague’s kids attended was also said to be attended by the children of various wealthy notables of the era, only one of whom I recall: David Bowie.

So the kids of my father’s colleague were most assertive in letting us (and presumably other peers) know that they were attending the same school as Bowie’s son. I have no recollection of anyone telling me his name, but it certainly appears to have been “Moon” director Duncan Jones.
That year, my parents dragged us from one end of Europe to the other and more intensively from one end of Switzerland to the other. The Swiss-based forced marches of course included mountain sports, hiking and skiing and so forth. Hiking was fine with me, I knew how to walk aready.

Skiing was some fucking daglo puffysuit bourgeois bullshit though, and I was having none of it. I mean, not that I knew how to ski. But that there leather jacket (that is, the one I was wearing, having worked out some sort of scam to score enough cash to buy a leather motorcycle jacket in fucking Switzerland) was *deeply unsuited* to falling down in the fucking snow over and over again in front of rich motherfuckers.

I’ll cut myself some slack here as a 14 year old, OK? You might differ, but I’ll appreciate it if you will too.

Anyway, so we went skiing – just once, I suspect due to my loud disdain for the experience. I’m pretty sure the location was Chamonix, which is relatively accessible for both Lausanne and Geneva.

I had the largely terrible time I had concocted for myself, attempting to ski in total ignorance of the activity while wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket blazoned in carefully stenciled white and red spray paint with the Dead Kennedys logo and other trenchant ephemera of 1982.

I fell down a lot, and was cold, and I was wet, and I was hostile, and actually had a great time.

Eventually I found my sister at the foot of a hill and we sought the funicular to the top of the hill. Unwinding this memory now I think that my father’s colleague’s daughters were there too, which implies their father and mother as well. At any rate we kids, no parents, piled into the pendulous cable car. One adult, a male, adorned in colorful polyfill skiwear, also boarded. I paid him no mind.

Either my sister on her own or the girls that we were with made a determination to which I was not privy. The more I think about this, the more certain I am that the other girls were there, because I was looking out the window of the car, not at the other occupants. Someone poked me and hissed, not quite pointing: “That’s David Bowie!”

I was skeptical and wanted to know how they could tell. After all, the skier was nearly five feet away and wearing a puffy suit. “His eyes,” they hissed. I turned to look.

Bowie was looking at us and grinning like a loon. The girls elbowed me to go say something, to go be a fan, or to get an autograph. In my nearly-new and sopping wet Dead Kennedys leather jacket. Without a single Bowie badge or button. Jim Morrison, sure. Jimi Hendrix, yes. Sex Pistols, of course. But Bowie? Nope. Scary Monsters was just not as good as whatever it was I had heard before (on this week’s reflection, likely Changes One), too weird and ethereal, and what’s this stuff about Major Tom, a hero of the space age, being a junkie anyway?

What was I supposed to do, tell him his recent work sucked but that he should hook up with Jello Biafra and go hardcore?

In hindsight, of course, yes, obviously. That is precisely what I should have done. Instead, I was shy, as a fourteen year old may be, and turned away, shushing the girls. I turned back to the majestic geography out the window, sneaking a glance shortly thereafter. Bowie had turned to the window as well and the moment had passed.

I have reflected on this non-event over the years and have come to appreciate the inviting and open face that he showed us in that cable car that day. He was clearly welcoming us to make social contact with him as teenage fans and I, I chose not to act and influenced my cohort to maintain social distance as well.

I, I could be you. And you, you could be me. Nothing could bring us together, not for one day.

And that is the first time I have ever even tried to write that story down. It may bear some expansion and rework. I sincerely regret my inaction and reticence. I suppose it may have later influenced my choices later in life to self-consciously select for action instead of inaction, as a regret for an action taken is less bitter than a regret for an action left unrealized.

It appears I have never posted the PDF of “The Eve of the Feast of Osiris” here. Now I have.

FEAST_OF_OSIRIS

Ken texts me that Kuma’s been traded. God dammit.

I guess it will be interesting to see if I remain interested in Mariners baseball. Based on my attendance during his 2015 injury hiatus, I’m skeptical. I suppose I’ll still look into the gift cards, easily the best deal in tickets last year, but it’s entirely possible that my interest in MLB, uh, dies with Kuma’s trade.

(Originally posted in two parts on Facebook today)

My next door neighbor and good friend Dick Mitchell passed away at home in his sleep last night, December 5th, 2015. After I bugged him for a couple years, I finally got him to go to a game with us (and his family) at the tail of the 2014 season. He told me it was the first game at Safeco he’d been to in a long time (he said 14 years, but I think that overstates it). It was the last game he attended in person. RIP, Dick. I’ll miss you.

Dick was a real interesting fellow. He, along with Ken and Tod, are responsible for my interest in baseball. He was an enthusiastic Elk and a former national chair of that organization. He was born to a single mother before the war, and she raised him alone for the first period of his life. Later she married a man, Fred Mitchell, who Dick has described to me as the head of testing at Boeing during the war – he told me about getting picked up at school and driven to the site of the testbed B-29 crash into the Frye meatpacking plant as the plant burned. I thought that crash was just before the war, but in fact it was on February 18, 1943.

Later in the forties he had some sort of connection with Lloyd’s Rocket, the former service station at the foot of Capitol Hill where it shades into the ID. He told me that “they” had a sprint car and raced it, although he never drove it, which was somehow associated with the station.

He went into the service just before Korea and trained as a SeaBee, eventually helping to build the naval base at Guantanamo before coming home and starting his life and career. He was a construction electrician and a member of IBEW 77 until his retirement. I cajoled him into doing a little bit of lighting work on our deck about seven years ago, probably the last electrical project he ever did.

In the sixties and seventies, Dick has told me that he was active in civic efforts to bring an MLB team to Seattle. He was just old enough to remember the Rainiers’ first-season PCL championship, and I was pleased to give him a copy of the recent account of the Rainiers, “Pitchers of Beer”, and a replica cap for that team which was a stadium giveaway at at Mariners Turn Back the Clock night sometime in the past ten years.

After he read the book he told me excitedly about those efforts and how his group was able to meet with the aging diamond heroes of those Rainiers teams, who were included in the local organizing hoopla for obvious reasons.

He had both lost his first wife, Ruth, before I met him and found another partner also before I met him. Betty, his wife at the time he died, is still alive, but she is very strongly affected by dementia and it’s not clear to what extent she’ll process or understand his loss.

I’ve met two of Dick’s kids, possibly all of them, both daughters a bit older than me. One of them works at Safeco and I always stop and chat with her when I’m at a game.

He never met his biological father. He was very interested in my ongoing adoption reunion. I would call him in the middle of fun or interesting games and sometimes run over and watch them with him.

When my parents were here for Thanksgiving, we all paid a call together. It was the last time any of us would see him. He has been ailing, so his loss was not unexpected. He remained in his typical good spirits every time I saw him in the past few months.

I really will miss him. He was a good, funny, kind, and mischievous person.

A conversation on Facebook led to my being pointed at a map of Anhalts, presumably assembled by Josh Feit.

It seems I have completed image-file migration, not hard at all as this implementation of the blog inhabits the same domainspace as the prior. My goodness, though, I sure didn’t exercise good asset hygiene. Well, I suppose that’s to be expected in an umpteen-year digital publishing project.

This blog’s been up longer now, about 13 years, than the entire time I lived in Seattle before standing it up, about 12 years.

Had jury duty this morning, in Shoreline. The courthouse is on Meridian at the north end of a park and I dove right by it at first. Once parked I joined a security queue and then eventually about fifty people in a courtroom. We took some forms and filled them out and eventually a court employee came out and gave us some instructions before beginning a disqualification process. First, people with medical reasons to not serve were excused (illness, doctor appointment, being elderly enough that you couldn’t hear, etc.).

Then, people with hardship commitment conflicts (childcare, self-employed).

Then, she asked everyone who “wouldn’t be paid” to star up and move to the excused side of the room. I reflexively did this because I literally would not be paid while on jury duty, with the exception of the $10 per diem.

After I had left the courthouse, I realized what she probably actually meant “wouldn’t be paid” by an extant employer. So I think although I actually followed her instructions to the letter, her instructions were flawed and I shouldn’t have been excused on that basis. Oh well.

Yeesh, just as Viv got home I went to look at the current theme and the site wasn’t rending properly at the domain root. Turns out I had forgotten that MT was on an hourly rebuild with a fixed path and it tossed out all its root-level files into the WP directory, overwriting the indexing.

Well, that’s what the bugshake is for.

Well, this is OK for now. Next week I’ll grind on themes a bit more.

Any given URLs in the form of <domain>/archives/<6-digit post ID>.html now redirect to <domain>/archives/<1 to 6-digit post ID> – I had to change the default URL format from <yyyy>/<mm>/<dd>/<post-title>, which is a shame.

But that should do it!

Skinning is next. I guess it’s OK to leave the book look behind. I suppose I’ll start by rummaging for a pre-made.