Peeking into the rock

Most of you only know that the person your condoling me about is important to me: maybe you've gotten snippets over the years of my life with him, something he said, something we did together. I think since you're all being so very kind to me unconditionally, you deserve to know something about the guy. I'm not about to sanctify him, I'm just remembering him. Honestly, he was a grump and a slob (like me), and he could be socially awkward, and he dressed like a hobo no matter what I did. My children's friends remember him as the pantsless guy -- when he didn't actually have to go somewhere, he would frequently walk around the house in just a t-shirt, bare from the hips down, just pulling the hem down over his crotch when he had to pass in someone's view.

Gunter Grass said in The Tin Drum that a story really ought to start with a person's grandparents, so I'll tell you: his grandparents were, respectively, Austro-Hungarians who arrived in San Francisco ready to to take advantage of the building boom after the 1906 Fire and Earthquake, and on the other side, North Dakota Norwegians who broke away and came to Oregon to live like real Americans. Ted wasn't the first in his family to go to college. That would be his Aunt Elsie who did so withought her father's blessing or cooperation, and in fact against his prohibition.

Ted's a Peninsula boy, raised mostly in Menlo Park when that was a pleasant comfortable working-class suburb with an almost rural feel to it: in a house his father built. His father was a union carpenter, a job foreman. His mother called herself a secretary, but her job at the Alaska branch of the Geologic Survey was more like being the chief editor for a cadre of the researchers there, without the status (but with the respect). The Trollmans were the kind of people we wrestled with during the Vietnam War. I mean, they came out of World War Two convinced that the United States had a job to do, keeping the world safe for democracy, and staunchly supported every adventure the government got us into. By the time I met them, around 1971, they had changed their minds.

Ted's mother grew tomatoes, green beans, and Meyer lemons in her backyard. She canned the green beans and tomato soup each year and made apricot-pineapple jam from a lug provided by a friend with an apple orchard in San Jose (different times). She was the sharpest, most efficient woman, kind, and stoic. His father developed a twinkle in his eyes in retirement, but I heard he could be stern -- nothing compared to his father. Ted vowed when he had children nobody would say "wait till your father comes home" as a threat, and he would not be the disciplinarian. And he wasn't.

There are all these really 50s-looking photos of Ted and his older brothers. They all did Boy Scouts right into high school, they made cars for the Pinewood Derby, they went on Jamborees. Ted breeded guppies and worked at Nippon Goldfish as a kid, and collected comics, and got good grades. He went to UCSC, fully intending to graduate cum laude in history and go to law school,work in corporate law until he had enough money to retire, adn then live a life of enjoyment with his fish and his comics and his friends. Shortly after I met him he decided to skip the law school and corporate law part. Only it ended up being orchids he raised. He did graduate cum laude, with a major in Modern Russian History and a minor in Ancient Greek History. He kept on reading history his whole life. A lot of the books he read were about wars and the technology of war -- he called them "war porn," but there was nothing pornographic about his interest. Frank inherited this keen interest in history and politics.

I met Ted my first week at UCSC. He was a junior, I was a freshman. He was doing an all-nighter even though it was only the first week because one of his teachers had assigned a forty page paper to be done by the end of the second week. I was getting up extra early to work in the UCSC Garden. As I passed his dorm windowq, I saw his candle guttering in a scary fashion, threatening to catch his curtains on fire. We had a conversation about it, and later we saw each other again, and eventually, we agreed to see each other over the summer. He had a girlfriend that school year, and I had two boyfriends -- my high school sweetie had talked me into getting another guy to frolic with so he could justify sleeping around back home. But that summer I extricated myself from the other guys and went to visit him in Pacific Grove (basically Monterey). We went to see the squid run at the COast Guard DOck, we bought a bag of cherry tomatioes and we made iced cherry tomato soup out of them, and of course we ended up in bed together. He courted me with the little toads at Lake Lagunitas by the Stanford campus, with foraging for abandoned fruit in vacant lots (yes, this town had lots of vacant lots right then), with stargazing and comic books and a magnificent voice which I will never hear again.

Practicalities: the last I heard, Ted's body had arrived at the coroner's office from the tissue donation center, but tomorrow is Friday and then there's a weekend. So the ashes won't be back until Thursday or so, which entails running up against Labor Day weekend, and I really won't do anything that weekend that entails peoplde driving into Santa Cruz. The weekend after that is the weekend before avid arrives. So I've decided we'll do the memorial on Sunday, September 14. The Henry Cowell Park Walk will be in the morning, and the Lighthouse Field event will be in the afternoon. This also gives us a couple of weeks to sort out logistics -- tablem, chairs, etc. I know my brother says he has a couple of long folding tables, and I know my friend COnnie has stacks of chairs. If you're interested, let me know and I will see that you get plenty of warning as to the time and place -- parking, carpooli, es

I'm brainstorming the soundtrack of Ted's life, and I'll get someone to make a compilation for me and we'll find someone with a portable CD player. I haven't faced up to the photos yet, but I think that will be possible tomorrow, if it's quiet around here. When we send out directions, I'll suggest some favorite potluck foods of his -- suggest, not direct: nobody has to bring anything, let alone what I tell them to.

I'm quite literally falling asleep at the keyboard, which I hope means I'll be sleeping tonuight. I have a prescription waiting for me for some kind of sleeping aid, but I won't take any unless I really need them.

I met with the crematorium people today. They'll take care of procuring death certificates and a few other little tasks. I sprung for a biodegradable box: an astonishing expense, compared to the cost of the stupid unrecyclable standard plastic box, but not much more money in absolute terms, and I figure it's worth it to get what I want, and to not have another thing to put into the land fill. The other thing I ordered over the basic package was a bead. They take a pinch of the ashes and they cook it into a dollop of beauitiful glass, and then they want you to buy a chain or a stand for it, but all I wanted was the bead, which looks like seawater viewed from a specific angle, or like certain leaves when the sun shines just so.

The undertaker, or whatever he is, is a very kind man, very clear and not pushy (though he would have liked to have sold me more if I had been in the mood). He wears a tie made of a piece of "Starry Night." -- the Van Gogh picture, of course.

It's hard to believe in for more than a moment at a time. I keep thinking "I should save some fo this strudel for Ted," or "I should get back home, Ted will be wondering where I am."