May 23, 2011

Fisher got up during the night of what he said was his 73^rd birthday, presumably to hit the head and return to bed.  (Navy brats like me call toilets “heads”.)

He hit the head, alright, but it was when he fell off of it after having either a heart attack or stroke and died.  He never made it back to bed, but technically, I guess he did manage to lie back down.

When Maria found him, she gave the poor old guy a little bit of residual decorum by modifying the death scene ever so slightly with the help of their oldest daughter, who conveniently lived nearby.  I am glad, frankly, for Fisher.  Hard enough to die on your birthday, and why make it harder by putting an exclamation point after the more routine processes of your humanity?

The killer is, it really wasn’t his birthday.  It was the  13^th, and for as long as any of us could remember, he said he was born on Friday the 13^th,  and that he was the luckiest guy he knew of.  I’ll buy the latter, but the former was a fabrication, at least according to his passport, which no one ever had occasion to look at before.  It showed a different date.

Fisher was a self-described genius, and didn’t object if other folks used that term with him.  He held 200 US and international patents, give or take a few.  A few of these I might call genius,  but all of them involved tobacco machinery of one sort or another.  If it were genius, it was in service to an evil god, for sure.

I met him when I was 11.  He had moved his business from the city to the county, where he and his family could be farther away from the dark peril of black people infiltrating his neighborhood.  He was old school southern; from old slave owning stock and his pedigree went way back 1000 years. His direct xxx.grandfather designed Captain Cook’s Endeavor.  Both engineering and preaching ran in the family, the preaching really taking hold after the Late Unpleasantness (the US Civil War) after which all the plantation slaves got a hall pass and his ancestors got the boot to the curb.  Religion was the refuge of folks who concluded that they had been already sent to hell.  Also, it’s a lot easier than engineering and harder to grade.  However, Fisher was the exception that proves the rule.  He was a pretty damned good engineer, though he tended to overbuild.   As a self-taught engineer, he didn’t have a scholastic pedigree, and made up for his uncertainty with large safety factors.  I do the same thing. 

As they say, any fool can build a bridge, but it takes an engineer to build one that will barely stand up.  He wasn’t the latter, but his stuff still runs in many factories, decades after his death.  Elegance was secondary to quality and price was never an object.  Tobacco companies never seem to have a money shortage.

He was over-building a house across from our new home, where my recently retired-Navy dad had installed us.   I remember wandering the tops of the block foundation of it and being amazed that there was going to be a safe vault under the front porch.  He was the first genius I ever met, until people started using the term about me.  Turns out, if you know a little algebra and can communicate, you have almost all you need for the genius club.  Some folks even do without the algebra.  Hell, most geniuses I know do it without the genius.  It’s almost a pejorative, and way overused.  Once you meet someone who put a lander on a different planet, your standards change.  It’s not enough to have run a tiny company for a few decades, but that does impress little children. 

I don’t have 200 patents, though I eventually might.  I DO plan to outlive him, and to do so by a large margin.  Keep your silly patents, Fisher.  I measure this win by length, like a walking Viagra addict.  My life is gonna be bigger, longer, and throb more than yours. Or so I’d like to think!

Fisher had a daughter, Jamie.  I decided at 11 to marry her.  Just kidding, but it did work out that way nine short years later.  I knew her before she had boobs and before I was even interested in them.  Odd symmetry, no? All of this is a long story by itself, and I may tell it later.  It’s complicated.

We played spotlight tag as kids and petted the same puppies, sometimes rode the bus together.   She had a rather large nose, until one day it went missing.  I was clueless enough not to even notice until someone told me.  Back then, girls sometimes mysteriously vanished for months after wearing inappropriate overcoats to school in the spring, but I never heard of one going away to a special home for noses?    She was always a knockout to me.  Still is, even dead.

Fisher’s two sons looked just like him, in totally different ways.  One looked like him when he was young and the other looked like him when he was older. His other daughter had his technical intuition, but not the clarity and persistence. His wife, Maria, was a fine southern enabler woman, with slight influence over his childish ways, a genre those of us from Dixie often see.  One son became a likeable and kind stock broker.  The other didn’t turn out quite as well, although he is still alive and his sister isn’t.   Life isn’t always fair and if you need more proof, I’m alive, too. QED.

I suddenly find myself wanting to jump into a explanation for an imagined son:….  “Little Abe, years ago, they actually used to build new houses and when they did, we’d play in the construction area. “  Not sure many modern kids are aware of this.  Anyway, I never thought as I balanced my way around that block foundation talking to Fisher that someday, I’d sit in the big chair at the company he founded and unravel the financial mess he was going to leave me and my in-laws.  Or, that I’d touch his dead hand and wish him back in my life just before we buried him.  Jamie and I said later, “Boy, I wish Fisher were still here to make our lives miserable.”  Sad, death is.  Like wine… all depends on when you taste it.

The day before he died, Jamie and I were lamenting our problems with the old coot, and we both said “It would be so much simpler if he would just die!”.  Next day, boom!  Now, I am very careful about these types of thoughts.

When a real character dies, there is an explosion of sorts.  Maybe its true for the average Joe, too, but it seems the characters have to have an exit with as many surprises, twists, turns as their lives. Maria immediately liquidated his several hundred car model railroad treasure and his coins and stamps.  She then set about de-cluttering the collection of a true master of consumptive excess.  Fisher seldom bought one of anything, and usually, didn’t stop at two.  But he was a generous hoarder of sorts and delighted in buying things for people he liked. 

Later, when it came turn for Maria to die, her kids did a similar thing, except they did not even wait for the final breath death rattle before removing paintings off the walls.  Debris explosion again. 

Another domino was immediately set up by the Fates, and a decade later Jamie’s cremated remains now accompany me like an admiralty flag, wherever I go.  Kaboom.  Debris is now on me like burrs on my socks after a walk.

I am still the possessor of much of her family’s history, in the form of photos, silverware, and business arcane. Also, I have about 40 years of stories to share, many of which I would certainly never have imagined when my interests were snakes, bugs, skateboards, camping, and getting out my homework assignments. (Note the absence of girls in that list… remember I was 11!)

My life became sort of a Rube Goldberg machine, with someone else’s family history the motive force.  Seen for the first time as it happened, life has been like that… amazing and for the most part, highly unpredictable. 

It now seems clear to me that we are mostly what we have been.  Instead of being snails leaving behind faint slime trails, we’re sort of slime trails rolled forward into living beings, with all the little debris and remnants of the path making up the growing shell and flesh. 

We’re forgotten conversations between ourselves and our loved ones; arguments and disagreements.  We are the places we lived and the smells we sniffed.  We’re the sounds on the phone recorder messages preserved in a box in the basement, the business logos on obsolete cards for a dead man, targets of a diploma maker’s art, scrapbooks of theatre roles we played, cancelled checks, passports with secret birthdays on them, dead ancestors, visits to a grave, cats and dogs gone on.  We are soul soup, flavored with the tang of memories other people made for us.  We’re a tale always in the telling, never finally told, told with ever increasing inaccuracy to the dark future.  Our bad bumps slowly erode, our minor gifts rapidly increase once we’re good and dead.

The guilt our survivors might have had at just speaking the truth about us dies as we do, and in many ways, we don’t get to be real until we’re no longer protectively concealed by our loved ones. 

Heaven is such a brutal fantasy.  Imagine Fisher, Maria, Jamie and my own folks, June and Ed, on the other side of a one way glass, trying to correct my typing as I remember what I want to, the way I want to, without being so kind as to allow an edit. Sorry guys… my keyboard, my fingers. My hands may hover here because of you, but the final wiggles are all mine.

It’s all a dream, anyway.  As Plato observed, even on a good day, we see through dark glass only the shades cast on the cave wall.  Even then, we’re all the light that’s illuminating the scene.