Wish you were here

A few days ago, Jordan sent a text to Grandpa just because he was missing him. And it seems that Grandpa responded.

(The Minecraft chat is from last year.) I guess the explanation must be that someone else has Grandpa's phone number now, and that person responded sweetly to the random text they received from a stranger? But it's still spooky.

Objects of memory, III

This is the last post of things I found in my dad's house that I wanted to remember, but did not want to physically own. All these are made of paper.

This is a note in my grandmother's handwriting (my dad's mom), listing contact information for her husband Frank's relatives. I'm guessing this was for Dad to contact them when Frank died. Frank was the only grandfather I knew on my dad's side; my father's father died before I was born.

This note is a mix of my grandmother's flourishy cursive and my father's streamlined italic handwriting. This is information about Frank's burial. (I whited out his social security number. Does that matter when someone has been dead for twenty years? Well, just in case.)

My dad kept these simple weekly calendars meticulously for many many years. I love that he had dinner with Harris on Saturday, and Sunday brunch with the Walkers. The fact that July 31 fell on a Sunday makes it either 1988 or 1994, from what I can figure out, and it must have been 1994, because I was traveling around the world with Dale that year and scheduled a call every other weekend. In July we were in southeast Asia.

In this one (also 1994) he had a busy work schedule but also a Warriors game on Thursday, a dentist appointment on Friday, and maybe dinner with cousin Henry, who sometimes passed through town. Saturday another phone call with me; this is February so we would have been in India.

Drawer full of calendars and checkbooks.

This is a doodle of my mom's (you can see her initials in pencil on the right). She used to sketch while she talked on the phone.

Another mom sketch.

This one is me (my initials on the left just under the thumb), imitating my mom.

I found one of those "about me" books that I filled in as a kid. I refused to identify as eating like a horse, or eating like a bird, insisting that I eat like a GIRL. Heck yeah. And I did love macaroni, oh my goodness. I frequently had macaroni and cheese for breakfast.

Apparently I was six and I wanted a dollie for my birthday. Something tells me that I got one, and that her name was Molly, Molly the Dolly. She had yellow yarn hair.

This would have been from sometime around fourth grade, I'm guessing: a book report.

And this was high school French. I was darned good in French (or at least pas mal, in the eyes of my teacher). "She had been walking alone under the moon for almost an hour, saying nothing. She was not sad; on the contrary, she was totally happy at last. Everything was going to be resolved."

This is an evaluation of a math course I took through a Center for Talented Youth thing, which was completely awesome. When I was sixteen I went away to a college campus and learned number theory and set theory and game theory from enthusiastic grad students, and saw how much fun math could be. "I will remember this course for the rest of my life," I wrote, and it's true. Jeremy and Dominic, I wish I could find you now!

And this, finally, is the page from the glossy magazine offered to prospective students by the UW physics department, which is how I learned about physics education research. The thing that really grabbed me was that picture of a ball on a V-shaped track, with a graph next to it and the question, "What reasons might a student give for drawing the incorrect graph shown?" Such a great question!

This is the facing page, with Arons still the lead faculty member.

Objects of memory, II

More objects from my dad's house that I don't want to own, but do want to remember. My baby shoes.

A few books from my childhood that I cared about enough to hang on to. Go Ask Alice; Madeline L'Engle; Herman Hesse; The Lotus-Eaters; sonnets by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; 1984; Little Women; Heidi (that's the ductaped one); the Narnia series; Don't Look Back... Okay, I'll stop there, you can look for yourself.

I made this hammer in middle school metal shop.

My mom made these hilarious trays out of plain wooden trays; she pasted on the newspaper clippings with shellac.

I made this cup, but I can't remember where.

Cheese board with cracker basket.

This butter dish, I tell you what. Who has a wooden butter dish? But between the butter dish and the baby shoes, no contest. Maybe it's because I like butter so much. Maybe it's because it's so hopelessly and unapologetically seventies. Maybe it's because it had a patina of butter that went back decades (it's not like you could put it in the dishwasher, even if we had had a dishwasher, which we did not). Maybe it's because my dad liked his butter soft. As with everything else here, I don't want to own it, but I do want to remember it.

This is my dad's chess clock. He played a whole lot of chess at our dining room table over the years, and the "click"- "click" of the players hitting the buttons was one of the normal background sounds in our house. He had one dear friend who played chess with him just about weekly for forty years.

A tin measuring cup from our regular set.

A tea strainer, never used for tea that I can remember, except maybe weird infusions that Mom would make out of things she brought home from the garden. I know it was a bath toy at one point.

The original flatware of my youth. It is heavy, steel, and the handles are square on the ends, so that holding them feels a little like holding heavy square metal chopsticks. When my mom's mom died, we got the Gralenski silverware and used that instead. I now have that set, as well as the Rosenberg silverware from Dad's mom. 

This crazy hatchboard table (in the process of being taken away by the downstairs neighbor, who owns a thrift store). The tabletop was once a hatch cover on a WWII ship. It has cast iron legs and weighs a ton. When I was a kid I would always put things in the little "bowls" at the corners. They were meant as handles but sometimes people used them as ashtrays.

I thought it would be wrenching to let go of all of these things. But Dale observed, with perfect insight, that once Dad was gone it was like the soul went out of all of his things, too. Without him there to use them and arrange them and keep them and even ignore them, they were just stuff. I love the memories, and we picked plenty of other special treasures to bring with us physically.

Objects of memory, I

When we cleaned out my dad's house in April, our job was to go through the whole house from one end to the other and take the things we wanted to keep. (The brute labor of clearing out the house was done by someone else, thankfully.) There were a number of things that pulled on my heartstrings, because they called up such memories for me, but I didn't want to own them. For example, this ashtray:

This ashtray floods me with memories, because both my parents and most of their friends were smokers (of one thing or another), and many were the gatherings that had this ashtray at the literal center. But I do not wish to own it. I just want to remember it! So I am posting a photo of it here, and a number of other things. I think they will have more life here on the family blog than gathering dust on a shelf somewhere. So, in no order at all:

This small statue was a gift to our family from someone who thought it looked like me, and they were right, this is just what I looked like when I was a kid. It sat above the fireplace.

This is a historically significant artwork, a courtroom sketch of my father at the Dan White trial. He's the one with his hand on his chin; Dan White is in the foreground. My aunt kept this sketch, which is great by me.

Another one of my father's famous clients was Monsignor O'Shea, accused of molesting altar boys but convicted only of embezzlement. My dad was very amused by this editorial cartoon, in which O'Shea is saying "You got my sex charges tossed on a technicality? Thanks! What do I owe you?" The lawyer he's thanking (i.e., my dad) is a thinly disguised devil. My dad thought this was hilarious and very clever. It hung in the hall above a plaque from the Criminal Trial Lawyers' Association commemorating his retirement.

This large photograph of the Olympic rainforest hung above the couch in the living room. I loved this scene; maybe it encouraged me to move to the Pacific Northwest. It was taken by our friend Ed Beyeler. Sadly its beauty was long faded.

How about this leather sling magazine holder, which sat next to the primary armchair in the living room for my whole life? Have you ever seen anything more 1970s?

This item of furniture was always referred to as the étagère, which sounds a lot better than "shelf." It held family photos (yes we kept all the family photos) and the candy jar.

The candy jar had Hershey's kisses in it.

I made this lion-headed planter box in middle school, in shop class.

This funky little midcentury liquor cabinet held the week's newspapers on its open side; each weekend they would all be recycled. This was in the dining room and it held napkins, salt and pepper, etc. on top.

My dad kept a stash of little papers that he had prepared for Jordan and Aaron, so that when they went out together, they would have his contact information in case they got separated. He was not super vigilant as a grandfather, or a father for that matter, but I always felt safe as a kid. When we would go somewhere crowded or large like the Exploratorium, we would establish a meeting place.

This iron pagoda thingy is an incense holder; my mom used to use it. My dad had it because he never got rid of anything.

This incriminating object was a gift from friends. I will leave it to you to figure out why one would want a mirror that sits flat on the table, complete with rubber feet on the back.

SF Muni bus token, from before my time.

My dad's address stamps. Once he started doing everything electronically these fell out of use.

To be continued.

1710 Cabrillo Street

I lived at 1710 Cabrillo Street from when I was 11 until I moved away to college at 18, and my family continued to live there; when my dad died he had been there for 34 years. It is very sad to me to say goodbye to that home. But I am grateful to the landlords, who gave my family a solid base for decades, and never hassled my father about anything, and had to live with renting at probably 20% of market rate for a long time. (Rent control in SF is very strong, especially for seniors.) This will not be a comprehensive record of my former home by any means - just some pictures I snapped while we were down there moving out in April.

The house is in the Richmond District of San Francisco at the corner of 18th and Cabrillo, one block north of Golden Gate Park. It's what San Franciscans call a "flat," which means a two-unit apartment building (duplex?) with the apartments one on top of the other. The garage is on street level.

I always wondered what my dad would do about these stairs when he got old and frail; it seemed like they might be a reason for him to move to Seattle eventually. These stairs prevented my grandmother (his mother) from visiting the house for the last decade or two of her life. My mom used to keep potted plants on the side of the stairs. Dale and I put non-skid strips on them a couple years ago.

 

 The door straight ahead is the neighbor's apartment; Dad's is on the left.

 

The front door had a trick to it that if you turned the key the wrong way, you would lock the deadbolt and then be totally unable to unlock it. A few years ago I drew an arrow on the lock with a sharpie so that we visitors could stop messing things up.

 The living room, with Aaron reading a book. All the furniture is stuff my parents inherited from friends.

 Coat hooks by the front door, but if you hung too many coats on it it fell down.

Front hall. The carpets were not replaced in the 34 years my dad lived there, and he would not have wanted them to be; neither of my parents cared about material things at all, and both disliked any kind of fuss or waste. That table on the right I still think of as the "telephone table" even though it's been many years since telephones needed tables. In this picture the living room is behind you, the dining room to the left, the kitchen is ahead and to the left (that light coming into the hallway is from the kitchen), and the long hall leads to the back of the house, with three bedrooms. The floor plan of the house is very typical of the neighborhood - I had many friends as a kid who lived in houses with the same floor plan, and we ourselves moved from one house with this floor plan to another when I was 11. (We just put everything in the same place!)

It's really a fantastic floor plan - it makes great use of the space, everything is connected in just the way you would expect, and there is a surprising amount of privacy, with the bedrooms so far away from the front of the house. The boys loved the long hall; whenever we went there, their first activity was hall soccer.

Like the carpets, the kitchen had never been updated. It had the original dragging-wood drawers, cabinets whose doors were always popping open, no dishwasher. Normally one would have the refrigerator in the kitchen but for some reason we did not; instead, we had a desk that served as the main countertop, and the refrigerator in the pantry. 

There were Fillmore concert posters on the cabinets, including Joan Baez and Wavy Gravy.

Decades ago my dad asked my mom if she wanted a new stove, and she said no, this one was fine. He said, "How about a new oven handle?" and she again said no, the stub of the old handle was sufficient. 

 They had the worst knives of anyone I ever knew. We kept the biggest one, which my mother's grandmother brought over from Poland.

Here's the pantry (utility room?) with the refrigerator in it. I always called this the "cat room" because when we had cats, their boxes were here.

All the doors had these old glass doorknobs. The bathroom floors had that miniature hexagonal tile. 

My dad was a simple guy who liked his systems and wanted guests to be comfortable in as unfussy a way as possible. He made this awesome sign to tell people the little quirks and necessities of the house. Read it! Don't you think your house should have one of these too? It's really a very good idea.

 He liked to have guests, and he kept a drink menu in the living room.

 The back room used to be my mom's storage/hobby/plant room, but we cleaned it out when the boys were born to be their bedroom, and they loved it dearly. It was so hard to say goodbye to this place.