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thanateMy sweet, happy, quiet baby has discovered that it is also fun to yell. Joyously. At four in the morning. I sincerely trust this is just a phase...
Last weekend was the yearly reunion for my mother's side of the family at which my M got to meet the elder of her cousins N. We'd been hearing for some time that every third word her parents passed on to my aunt was about how incredibly cute young Miss N was, and thus I, with my cute little naturalistic baby, was completely unprepared to meet a child who looks like she was designed by the makers of Pound Puppies. Also somewhat disorienting was being in a house with two infants and trying to identify distant fussing by ear.
There was also a (highly informal) memorial service, initially supposed to be for my grandfather but extended to include my father as well, which I was less unprepared for than I expected to be. (I wanted to hear what other people had to remember about my grandfather, but am still not quite prepared to talk too much about my father in public.) Anyway, a couple things that stood out included various people talking about my father in the context of being a really good manager: someone who knew how to step back from a situation enough to get the useful insights and help people stay inspired and usefully focused and that kind of thing. I think there's some of the clarity of insight that I've got, but the people skills were something that he largely used at work and I didn't see that much of. His autobiography was going to be called "The Wrong Stuff" because of a number of standing-next-to-the-guy-who... coincidences, the wrongness of which none of us were quite convinced by, but it had not previously occurred to me in as many words that a few of the "right stuff" people may have been right because of who they were standing next to.
(also further thoughts regarding management, and the ways in which my (paternal) grandfather was a really awesome guy to know-- in the right contexts. As a WWII naval officer, he was excellent to serve under; as a relative, often not so much.)
(also also, relevant to the ongoing SFWA nonsenses, while my father never got involved in "fandom" as such, he was both an old guard SF/F fan and a far better feminist than I will ever be. He spent more time interfacing with the sort of world where hearing everyone's voices can be life & death important. But I digress.)
Anyway, the second thing was that my grandmother passed around a book for signatures & memories. I wrote our names and nothing else; somehow it always seemed to come near me at moments when I was on baby duty, so I didn't read what anyone else had to say, either. But a little while after that, my uncle said something about how he hadn't initially been able to think of what to write either. But then he thought about how as my grandfather had declined slowly over the last decade+ there were various things that he looked at and thought that they were the sort of thing he would have made note of to mention to his father: some peculiarity of the electric lines in Korea, for instance, that would once have prompted a few minutes of speculation as to why it was done that way. So he wrote that one down and said, "and so now I've told him."
I do not (yet) have a backlog of things I want to tell my father, but there are some books I would recommend, and I think he would have very much enjoyed seeing the Megatherium grow up and learn all the interesting mental connections that make up a human being.
Xposty from dreamwidth.
Last weekend was the yearly reunion for my mother's side of the family at which my M got to meet the elder of her cousins N. We'd been hearing for some time that every third word her parents passed on to my aunt was about how incredibly cute young Miss N was, and thus I, with my cute little naturalistic baby, was completely unprepared to meet a child who looks like she was designed by the makers of Pound Puppies. Also somewhat disorienting was being in a house with two infants and trying to identify distant fussing by ear.
There was also a (highly informal) memorial service, initially supposed to be for my grandfather but extended to include my father as well, which I was less unprepared for than I expected to be. (I wanted to hear what other people had to remember about my grandfather, but am still not quite prepared to talk too much about my father in public.) Anyway, a couple things that stood out included various people talking about my father in the context of being a really good manager: someone who knew how to step back from a situation enough to get the useful insights and help people stay inspired and usefully focused and that kind of thing. I think there's some of the clarity of insight that I've got, but the people skills were something that he largely used at work and I didn't see that much of. His autobiography was going to be called "The Wrong Stuff" because of a number of standing-next-to-the-guy-who... coincidences, the wrongness of which none of us were quite convinced by, but it had not previously occurred to me in as many words that a few of the "right stuff" people may have been right because of who they were standing next to.
(also further thoughts regarding management, and the ways in which my (paternal) grandfather was a really awesome guy to know-- in the right contexts. As a WWII naval officer, he was excellent to serve under; as a relative, often not so much.)
(also also, relevant to the ongoing SFWA nonsenses, while my father never got involved in "fandom" as such, he was both an old guard SF/F fan and a far better feminist than I will ever be. He spent more time interfacing with the sort of world where hearing everyone's voices can be life & death important. But I digress.)
Anyway, the second thing was that my grandmother passed around a book for signatures & memories. I wrote our names and nothing else; somehow it always seemed to come near me at moments when I was on baby duty, so I didn't read what anyone else had to say, either. But a little while after that, my uncle said something about how he hadn't initially been able to think of what to write either. But then he thought about how as my grandfather had declined slowly over the last decade+ there were various things that he looked at and thought that they were the sort of thing he would have made note of to mention to his father: some peculiarity of the electric lines in Korea, for instance, that would once have prompted a few minutes of speculation as to why it was done that way. So he wrote that one down and said, "and so now I've told him."
I do not (yet) have a backlog of things I want to tell my father, but there are some books I would recommend, and I think he would have very much enjoyed seeing the Megatherium grow up and learn all the interesting mental connections that make up a human being.
Xposty from dreamwidth.