A Life Lived Well

I'm not real big on the idea that you're only supposed to speak well of the recently-deceased. Fortunately, in my father's case, there's really not much in the way of ill to speak of him. 

My father was an amazing man. He was part of the team at Texas Instruments who developed the world's first hand-held calculator, he could play almost any musical instrument with strings ("except the violin" he would claim, but he played the violin just fine too -- it was just that his father was a virtuoso in a way that's a bit hard to compare oneself to), he was both a teacher and a perpetual researcher, and he was a warm, loving support to everyone around him. 

Shortly after I went away to college (an experience that, in hindsight, was traumatic for all of us in different ways -- but that's a story for another time) one of my closest high school friends had a falling-out with his mother. The issue, at least as I understand it, was that he had graduated high school and wanted to move out and pursue a career in art -- while she wanted him to remain at home. He moved in with my parents while he attended the Art Institute, which is why he's our third brother instead of a very close family friend -- kin instead of kith. 

Dad was a lifelong fan of music and musical instruments -- listening to music, playing music, repairing instruments, and sometimes building them from the ground up. He learned by ear, and essentially didn't read music; music was all in the sounds, for him. His particular quirk was the hammered dulcimer, which he played right up until his eyesight got bad enough that he couldn't make out the strings anymore. Guitar, zither, mandolin, cittern... even piano. He sang, too, as anyone would know after even a brief acquaintance with him. I distinctly recall my mother warning him that if he brought one more musical instrument home he would have to buy them a new house to make room for it.

If I had to try to sum him up -- an impossible task, but what else is an obituary? -- I would say that the three great through-lines of his life were his love of music, his love of discovery and invention, and his fundamental kindness and charity. He taught computer science when I was in high school, and various other sciences at various other schools afterward. Possibly his greatest joy in that was when he could get a student newly interested in some particular study, or problem to solve, or project to undertake. When he could get someone hooked on exploring new ideas or new knowledge. Nor did it have to be academic knowledge; he was a Scoutmaster for several Boy Scout troops, and took just as much pleasure in helping someone learn how to set up a tent or cook food over a campfire or tie a new sort of knot. Have you found a weird bug? Great! How do we figure out what it is?

His funky little research projects always kept him fascinated -- could he reproduce Space Invaders on a Timex Sinclair computer kit? (This was, I don't know, 1982 or so?) (We saved the program to a tape cassette.) (Yes, I too am very old.) Could he write a program that would generate a randomized maze and then -- and this was the tricky part -- have a simulated mouse that could find its way to the center of the maze? 

He also liked to build things -- often in a similarly experimental fashion. Back in the 80s, McDonalds had themed happy meals that included the Space Raiders and Monster-nauts -- rubber figures of aliens, spaceships, and monsters. All of them, my father noted, were cast from two-piece molds. So we took some Plaster of Paris, made molds from the figurines, and recast them in lead from old tire-weights. I don't have any pictures handy, but I still have several of those figures. He also did larger projects: for a while we had a zip line from the tree in the front yard. (That one... did not end so well.) We grew up with a hand-made fort in the side yard. His workroom was usually full of half-completed projects. 

My mother, as I've noted previously, had paralysis as a result of childhood polio. Dad crafted a leather purse that was directly incorporated into one of her crutches; he also designed, built, and installed a hand control so she could drive. (The hand control worked the pedals for her -- squeeze to accelerate, push forward to brake.) He re-married a few years after my mom died, which was deeply weird for me -- but, as I said at the time, that wasn't a complaint against his new wife; it was distinctly a Me Problem. Dad's Wife pulled him back into having a social life, doing music again, attending church -- though after a bit they gave up on the Episcopal church of my childhood and moved to attending her Unitarian Universalist church entirely -- and probably extended his lifespan by nearly a decade. 

 I feel like I'm kind of rambling at this point, so I'm going to leave off here... but I'll likely come back to this at some point, only with a bit of alcohol to grease the gears. And at some point soon I'll have to pull this together into remarks for the service.