getting back on the horse
Lights in London
I promise not to subject you to a bunch of home movies — especially as aged as these images have obviously gotten — but I couldn’t help myself with this one.
When the Dallas Symphony went on its first European tour in 1997, Mark was hired as second tuba. I went along for the first half of the trip as an orchestra groupie. We had a blast.
We left the kids — Sam was 9, Michael was 6, and Paige was 4 — in the capable care of my parents. But we took the camcorder to capture things we thought would interest them on our return.
The videos sat in a box for years after our VHS player died. I borrowed one from my parents this summer and, with the help of a Pinnacle Dazzle, have begun digitizing the handful of family videos we have.
We made this little ditty in London when we realized how much fun Sam would have had, if he had been there to play with the light switches.
This was the first time I’ve heard Mark’s voice since the week he died. I’m not sure who was grinning bigger tonight when we captured this first “movie,” Sam — re-living a favorite childhood memory — or me, remembering the sound of the love of my life.
Out Like a Lion
Sam got sidetracked with his plans to write an app for iPhone that restores some contact-sorting features he used to have on his Nokia.
Sam works on an old Dell a dear friend gave us, so any app work is going to happen on my Mac. He started amassing the resources he needed and then came to me to say the final step was this: we need to upgrade to Lion OS.
I consented to this upgrade without asking probing questions — completely, utterly stupid on my part.
Ever since I got my first Mac in 1988 and we made the leap to System 7, I’ve known it’s never simple. System upgrades are like taking off down the autobahn without tying down a bunch of your stuff in the back of the pick-up.
(My mind is in funny loop just now, imagining pick-up trucks on the autobahn racing past Benzes and Beemers.)
What flew out of the Wolfe family pick-up, you ask?
All my financial records (yes, Intuit let the weenies rule over Quicken). Sam’s amazing fixes for our family computer network — including a peripheral switch for our printer and our portable back-up drive. The entire Microsoft Office suite.
I sooooo knew better.
Major backtracking today.
But I’m proud of Sam. He downloaded Open Office. That’s fixed. And knowing Sam, we’ll be true contributors to the community.
Then, we pulled the Quicken data off portable back-up and he’s going to use Paige’s laptop to help me convert to iBank. That should be fixed tomorrow.
Right now, he’s writing the manufacturers of that peripheral equipment and asking for patches.
See Sam Go.
The Second Biggest Mistake Ever. Or Not.
For a graduation present, I bought Sam an iPhone.
Second only to buying him an old car for Christmas, it was shaping up to be the biggest mistake I ever made.
Family members, friends, and all the AT&T retail sales reps and guys from the Genius Bar at the Apple Store down in Texas have been getting an earful about the Bad Decision Apple Made, one that makes it impossible to assign properties to your contact groups.
It was something his old Nokia phone could do, and he warned me (and has reminded me repeatedly the past four days that he warned me) that without that feature, it was a deal-breaker.
It didn’t matter that he could turn on the navigator to help find an alternate route to the airport today, or to the Apple Store. It didn’t matter that he could play his favorite music on it. Because he couldn’t tell his phone to ring one way for a call from a family member and another way for a call from friends, the phone might as well go in the trash can.
He tried finding apps. He tried work-arounds I found on various help sites. He could create the groups in Outlook, but Outlook wouldn’t cooperate with the sync. Even if he gets that to work, he’d still have to program each individual contact with his preferred ringtone.
A waste of time, Sam said. He’s right, of course. But I told him that if it’s really that important, he’s spending an awful lot of time figuring out the work-arounds. So much time, in fact, that he probably would already have had all 60-ish of his contacts programmed.
Yes, he said, but why should he have to waste his time because of this Bad Decision Apple Made.
Then it dawned on me. He could write an app for that.
We had an animated discussion on the way home from the Apple Store about it. I told him a lot of people learn to make a good living by solving problems people want solved.
His perspective changed. Or he at least stopped saying I made a huge mistake buying him the phone. He recognized developing an app as a project, and one with some big hurdles, but he’s on his way.
When we got home, he made his first “alert tone” in Garage Band, one that he used on his Nokia that he’s upset wasn’t on his iPhone. And we looked up resources for app developers.
This could be an interesting summer, especially as the job hunt begins.
Just a Little Radioactive
In one of the dozens of “grief books” that friends gave me after Mark died, I learned a helpful lesson. When something bad happens to you, people around you may react to you as if you are a little radioactive.
Granted, I probably was. People want to show that they are compassionate, but most aren’t ready for a deep walk in the emotional woods with you on a moment’s notice. It’s a strange place to be, socially. People circle around you to help insulate and protect you, but if you need someone to be with you in a big way, the list of those capable is pretty short.
And even the capable ones have their days that they just can’t.
That’s good to know. I was pretty tender-hearted back then — and still am often — so it helps to know that I scared people even more than I normally do, and to not take it personally.
I ended up spending a year with a grief therapist. I could have joined a group and got the same kind of support from others, but I recognized that my level of introspection (some might call it navel-gazing) would probably scare the people who could see the thestrals, too.
The perspective is helpful as I look back on Sam’s early childhood. People are especially challenged in supporting you because it’s not a true tragedy. As the years go by, I’m finding it easier to lay a lot of those experiences to rest, knowing that some people were trying, but what I might have been seeking was more than they had to give.
Yes, Virginia, sometimes there isn’t a Santa Claus. But, you’ve got a spine, and prayer, so you’ll be fine.
We’re going through another round of that “radioactivity” in our lives. I’m pretty savvy to it — the list of people who can tackle the topic is small, and I have had to re-arrange my life somewhat in acknowledgement of that. I’ve even overwhelmed my family from time to time. Most of the time when friends and acquaintances push for information, I tell them it’s really not suitable for polite conversation.
But I forgot that little social rule today, and shared too much with someone who just seemed endlessly curious and capable of the conversation until I got the look. I knew that look, it was the get-me-out-of-this-conversation-this-lady-is-radioactive look.
Overheard in the Wolfe House #22
Uncle Matt: How’d you fall off the horse, Sam?
Sam: I was trying to canter it.
Uncle Matt: You were trying to canter when you fell off?
Sam: Yeah. I fell off because it was a bucking horse.