Music: Since The Last Time

 Lyle Lovett: 

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.

And now he's gone

My father has died. It was, as these things go, relatively quick and gentle; he went into a hospital on a Wednesday to seek treatment for COVID-related difficulty with eating/keeping food down, developed trouble breathing while he was in the emergency room, and coded out while they were trying to intubate him. They got his heart started again, and put him on some meds to keep him unconscious (critical when you have a tube down you throat and a respirator forcing your lungs to work) and try to dissolve the blood clot (COVID, again) that were causing the issues with his breathing. My brother and I waited up until he was placed in a room in the Intensive Care Unit, while my brother's wife drove Dad's wife back to their house. 

I pause here to observe that Dad was, technically, a DNR. He'd said for years that he didn't want to end up on a feeding tube, and he didn't want people working to try to keep him alive if there wasn't a reasonable chance that he'd wake back up with his faculties intact. However, at this point it looked like we had a pretty good shot at that kind of outcome. 

By Thursday, that was looking a lot less certain. Despite some truly excellent medical professionals, the drugs were damaging his veins and doing horrible things to his liver, and dehydration was damaging his kidneys. 

I took off early from work and went down to help Dad's Wife look over some medical paperwork that they wanted her to sign. This was when we found that the nutritionist wanted to start putting food in through the feeding tube; it was also when we got a better impression of the way his health was teetering. The doctors were patching holes as quickly as they could, but sooner or later the dam was going to give way. 

So we called it. My brother and his wife came down to join us. My wife had just flown back in from a family event (her sister's retirement) and the first she heard of all this was when I called her on her way back from the airport and asked her to detour to the hospital instead. 

The five of us talked it through, and concluded -- pretty much unanimously -- that the best thing to do was to keep him off the feeding tube, get Third Brother up to visit from Austin first thing in the morning (he didn't feel that he could safely drive up, having heard the news, and if his wife was going to drive then they needed to prepare their girls for the trip), and notify everybody that this was happening.

We also figured out how to adjust the music, so we could turn off the pop that was playing. My dad was not a horrible music snob, but I really didn't think he'd want to leave this world to the tunes of Katy Perry. Instead, Beautiful Wife brought in a bluetooth speaker and used her phone to play hammered dulcimer music for him on Saturday. Third Brother and his family came up -- we really need to find happier reasons to see them -- which was, I believe, critically important for his mental health. Other folks were farther afield, including some who were actually out of the country, but we gave anybody who wanted it a chance to say goodby via Facetime -- with the understanding that Dad wouldn't really be able to react them, of course.

About one o'clock on Saturday afternoon, after talking with the ICU doctor about likely outcomes and what Dad would have wanted, we told them to cease care. They turned off the respirator, extubated him, and switched from the cocktail of medications to a gradually-increasing dosage of morphine, to keep him unconscious and pain-free. 

I don't remember when we left on Saturday. 

We came back on Sunday, and this time we played folk music. We could track how his vitals were slowing down, but the man had constitution of a musk ox and it wasn't until 10:45 p.m. that he finally drifted off. Like, I watched his blood pressure get down to 14/14 and he was still going -- but we all knew at that point it wouldn't be long. His wife curled up beside him on the bed, until his breathing finally jerked and stopped, and the nurse came in and called it. 

So that was how my dad died. Next time, I'll tell you how he lived. 

StV: Another Attempt

Sophia Antonius stepped out onto the sidewalk, holding her bag and glancing back to make sure her boyfriend...

...was missing. Cedric was missing. She reached out for magic, found it, called it into herself. Then she extended her senses, reaching out... 

Cedric was just behind her, unconscious and invisible on the floor just inside the doorway. Two men she couldn't see were moving towards her, one coming out the door while another approached from the street. 

Her brother would have just murdered them, but Sophia was trying for a less lethal outcome. That didn't rule out making it painful, though.

"Cedric?" she called out, doing her best to sound confused about where her boyfriend might have gone. Under her breath, she was muttering rapid phrases and shaping energies... 

You'd better not have hurt him, she thought, as she wrapped them both in what would normally be shields and began to squeeze.  

Both men had apparently just come to a halt in the street, and were having difficulty breathing. Sophia held her grip where it was, waiting, and after a moment they were both visible to regular sight. So was Cedric, collapsed across the doorway... bleeding. 

Sophia clamped down with her shields, and heard the wet-wood snap of breaking bones. She hurried over to Cedric, and activated the general-healing spell that she'd stored in her necklace. Healing spells weren't her most-practiced area, but keeping one prepared in advance gave her time to think through the movements, phrases, and techniques she'd need... and kept her calm enough to use them.  

I may have overdone it

Looked at my To Do list on Monday and pushed through a whole bunch of it, and between that and everything else I am exhausted. And every time I think I'm starting to pull back out, it turns out that no, no I have not. 

 In the last six-or-so weeks: 

•  Secondborn started school and promptly got sick. 
• We got Firstborn into his dorm room, met his new roommate, and made it back home. This part, I'll note, while hectic, actually went pretty well. 
• I spent the next day working from home (as expected) and then was sick as a dog for the next week and a half (not as expected, and probably with whatever Secondborn had picked up at school).
• Just as I was starting to recover from that, I went into the kitchen and realized that the light fixture above the kitchen sink was dripping. This is not the sort of behavior I like to see from an electrical appliance.  
• The roofing guy came out and looked at it, and sealed some likely entry points on the roof. 
• Four days later a 2' x 2' square of the ceiling above the sink filled with water and collapsed, scattering insulation everywhere.
• My dad went into the hospital on a Wednesday for an inability to eat, developed an inability to breathe, and passed away that Sunday.
• After a certain amount of back-and-forth with the insurance company, we got the roof replaced. I do not, in all honesty, remember when exactly this happened; this particular bullet point may not be chronological.
• Beautiful Wife started a new job, at a good company with a good team and an absolutely batshit CEO. 
• The cat escaped on the following Friday night. We found him in the yard late Saturday night, but he escaped again. On Sunday, I put out the medium live-animal trap with some cat food and tuna. We captured a possum, and while we were trying to figure out what to do with that the cat meowed from just outside the fence. We managed to recapture the cat and release the bonus possum -- do not get those two reversed -- and then went the hell to bed.

It's just one damned thing after another, I swear.  

Duendewood: Children of Ruin, part twenty-one

It was a trio of gnolls that came towards the break. Two of them stopped thirty strides out; the the third, armed and armored, continued forward. 

When Jacques stepped out of the trees, it stopped, grunted, whined... and then dropped back, motioning the robed gnoll forward. 

Jacques continued forward, putting himself will within bowshot -- and both of the apparent guards were armed with crossbows -- and stopping just two strides back of the robed gnoll. "You're the leader, here?" he asked. 

The gnoll ducked its jackal-shaped head. "I am," it growled, then raised its head to study him. "I am Graznir Toothtaker, researcher and scholar and accidental wizard."

Jacques grinned, but kept his teeth covered. "Jacques Fontaine, firstborn son of the King, and Baronet of Caristhium. I won't say it's a pleasure, since we came here following reports that you were raiding the local households, but I'm given to understand that while your recruiting is... unconventional... most of the captured locals will consider themselves satisfied if you pay whatever you've promised."

Graznir regarded him. "Are you a scholar, Jacques Fontaine?"

"A dabbler," Jacques demurred. "I was trained for the Court -- a bit of this, a bit of that. I have been reminded that the gnolls are descendants of the Formorians, who once controlled a puissant magical empire in what is now the desert not far from here."

"Just so," said Graznir. "Legend -- our legend -- has it that there was a vault, sealed away, that contained the core of our magical knowledge after our empire turned on itself. I have spent my life tracking down clues and references, and I believe that it is here."

"This temple?" asked Jacques. "Or beneath it?"

"Beneath it," the gnoll said, his voice soft with reverence. "If it proves true, we could reclaim the desert, reclaim our ancient cities, and perhaps restore the entire area to the life it once contained."

Jacques considered that. "That land technically belongs to Sol Povos, and thus to my father. Would you be willing to negotiate with him? A gnoll -- or Formorian -- barony within Sol Povos is not out of the question, but given the current state of the kingdom I wouldn't like to see it mistaken for some sort of rebellion. We have other, more meaningful, fights to undertake."

 "The elves have their own kingdom, in alliance with Sol Povos. Would your father consider something similar for a small kingdom of Formorians?"

Jacques chuckled. "Knowing my father, he would definitely consider it. Whether he could make it stick with the other nobles... I don't know. But if you keep a low profile and don't let on that there's anything here worth finding, I suspect he could play it off as a concession to someone who would keep order."

The gnoll's face twisted in a way that Jacques thought reflected a frown. "You are the Baronet of Caristhium? You are far from your home."

"Father's orders," Jacques said, and offered a small shrug. "And my friends came to deal with the raids... but if you aren't truly raiders, then another approach seems called for. So... do right by the ones you have working for you, let us help you, and let's see what we can manage together." 

"I think we have little choice," Graznir replied after a moment. "I had hoped to manage this without being noticed, but since you have come... Yes. Very well. Bring your people, and I will show you what we do here."

Duendewood: Children of Ruin, part twenty

Jacques slipped up to the doorway. "We're here to rescue you," he whispered. 

"You're what?" It was male voice, grumpy at being awakened, but still quiet so as not to awaken anybody else. 

"We're here to get you out and let you get back to your farms."

"We won't get paid if we do that." The man had risen, solid and stocky, light-haired in the darkness. "The gnolls promised us a reward if we helped them dig out the temple and the complex beneath it."

"They did?" Jacques let his surprise color his tone, audible even though they were whispering. "And you believe them?"

The man shrugged. "They didn't take our children, or our elderly. There's one of them can speak Common, and he says they're studying the ruins, hoping to find something under them."

"But they did kidnap you," Jacques pointed out. 

The man nodded. "They did, and there're some here as might resent that... but they've promised us payment once they get access to their temple, and so far they've been straight with us. No whips, no torments. Hard work, but no harder than running a farm. And if they find the gold they've promised us, well... we'll be well-repaid for our labor."

Jacques considered that. Beside him, Skyflower was frowning. Yvette asked, "You'd trust them?"

The man straightened, and his expression sobered. "I'd be lying if I said we weren't all a little concerned for our kids... but they know how to take care of themselves, and how to keep the farms in basic order.  Ellia had a newborn; they took her husband but left her behind with the kids. They aren't monsters, s'far as we can tell. They just took us because they needed help and had no other way t'get it."

Jacques made a decision, because there was no safe way to consult with the rest of his group. "Very well. Ask the one who speaks Common to come towards the treeline in the morning, and I'll meet him -- or her -- there, so we can talk."

"Just to talk?" asked the farmer, suspiciously. 

"Just to talk," Jacques reassured him. "I want assurances that the gnolls will pay you and release you when you're done digging for them, and I want more information about what they intend here. I don't intend bloodshed unless they do."

"Aye. All right, I'll tell 'im. You go your way now, before you bollix this whole thing up."

Jacques nodded, though he doubted the human could see him, and motioned for the others to back away. They slipped back out of the camp just as quietly as they'd entered, leaving one -- hopefully -- unconscious gnoll, and a pen with its door wide open.