Posted on by mwhybark

Worry

Oh, man, I’m bummed! A favorite author, who I now count as friend, is suffering some serious diabetic complications. He’s alert and in his usual sardonic good humor, but he’s suffering and it kills me to know it. I do not identify him by name not to draw privy curtains over his illness – I have learned all this through his website – but to permit me this little wail apart from the encouragement and good thoughts I have shared with him on his site.

Funny, maybe I’ll go back and joke with him about my concerns; I bet he’d get it.

Posted on by mwhybark

The Weight and Lightness of History

Ages ago I put together a post on the loss of the USS Shenandoah, a rigid airship of the US Navy, over Ohio in the 1920s. I did so simply because dirigibles fascinate me and the end of the Shenandoah’s career is a whale of a yarn. After I crafted that original post, the wisdom of the internets began to produce a truly amazing stream of Shenandoah-related information, from remarkable first-person anecdotes of the ship in flight and/or the wreck to photos taken on the day of the ship’s end by curious locals to songs, sheet music, and lyrics.

Today, out of the, um, clear blue sky, a correspondent forwarded a cache of family pictures showing the tail section of the ship on the ground. The pictures are tremendous, in my opinion, and I need to do some research to do justice to them. I am so interested in how this sort of thing happens. I post about something I’m intrigued by, and from nowhere, from everywhere, people with direct first hand knowledge and amazing family heirlooms share them with me, and by extension, with you.

The nation, and the world, is filled with striking events which generated news and passed into history. Each one of these events affected countless lives and families directly. I’m deeply affected by the multiple opportunities I have been afforded to act as a catalyst for the gathering of such histories. Every time a new contribution bubbles up, I’m overjoyed and amazed.

Posted on by mwhybark

Circa

Recently, I was prompted to rummage through the back of a memory drawer by a MetaFilter thread on the circus. In the thread, a poster noted that the classic big-top incarnation of the American circus ended with a terrible and deadly fire in the 1940s.

I found this very puzzling, as I have distinct personal memories of having attended a tented, saw-dusted, circus. Horse acts and elephants parading, Clowns in a car and trapeze artists and tumbling acrobats. A top-hatted master of ceremonies and a uniformed brass band in the bleacher seats.

Interestingly, I also have a memory of attending a public concert given by a uniformed brass band on a gazebo-like bandstand, a memory seemingly ripped from a Ray Bradbury novel. However, my father, an inveterate gadgeteer, actually taped this concert on a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder he had purchased for use as an innovative correspondence mechanism while we spent a year abroad. I have both tape and machine and have listened to the brassy strains of that summer afternoon within the past five years. I began an audio-capture project on this and other tapes about eight years ago, but it was just before hard drive costs went into free-fall and space constraints caused me to abandon it.

Given that one improbable time-traveling memory should prove indisputably real, it stands to reason that another might as well. Yet, the circus impressions I retain are clearly early-childhood memories, so I had assumed that the recollection might have been crossed wires derived from a media-based experience such as a movie.

On today’s drive in to the airport with my parents, I had the early-morning presence of mind to ask them if I had ever attended a tented circus.

To my surprise, they said that I had, during the year we lived in Chile over 1968 to 1969. Dad said the circus set up their tents in a dry riverbed near the town we lived in, Vi&ntlide;a del Mar, which held some futbol pitches. His mention of this conjured up another layer of lost sense-memory – a panoramic hubbub of yellow dust, the bustle of the midway and crew, the tent itself looming up against a midsummer backdrop of browned bluffs above the riverbed.

Mom and Dad did note that they don’t recall the tent as a true three-ring wonder, and I guess that jibes with my recollections as well.

(Posted at the boarding gate from the phone with the intent of adding links later, to Viña del Mar and to the MeFi thread, among others. UPDATE: link’d!)

UPDATE II: Things has an inspired essay on the developent and practice of the English Victorian spectacle, a close cousin to the circus.

Posted on by mwhybark

Joel

For reasons unknown to me, this guy that used to work at the Safeway on 15th for years and years just popped into my head. He had had some kind of operation that left him without an ear, and generally wore a bandage over it, and a brown, broad-brimmed hat. He also wore a device in a holster on his hip that I took for some sort of obscure grocer’s stocking tool. He was always at the store. I recall thinking he must have been working 60-hour weeks on a regular basis.

The last time I saw him, we spoke briefly in the checkout line and I believe I mentioned having a cold or something and working while sick. He laughed, and in a slightly slurred voice said he had been there.

Just after Viv and I moved off the hill, we stopped back by the store on our way up to the far northern reaches of the city, and there was a memorial display. He’d passed away, probably due to cancer. In my mind, I have an imaginary narrative that fills in all the dots – the cancer, the missing ear, the holster, the incredible work hours – and my feelings toward the deceased are deeply respectful and tinged, of course, with regret.

I have no idea why he popped into my mind.