Face of Chaos

Where to start when something comes to an unequivocable end?

At the beginning? I met Bob Asprin in the early spring of 1976 at Lunacon, a New York City science-fiction convention. We hit it off pretty much from the moment we made eye contact.

At the end? Bob died yesterday afternoon (May 22, 2008). A peaceful death, by all accounts, dozing on a sofa with a Terry Pratchett book still open in his hands. Unexpected? yes. Surprising? no, not really.

We’d married in 1982, separated in 1992, and divorced in July of 1993, which was the last time we were face-to-face. We talked, not often, over the years since, usually about unpleasant things. We didn’t, after all, get divorced because everything was just perfect. It took a long time to work through my anger, mostly because it took a long time to work through the financial chaos that surrounded Bob for the last twenty years of his life. (I don’t think he had a philosophical objection to paying income tax, he just never considered it something that had to be done.) Once the anger was gone, I worked my way through the other named stages of grief and mourning. By 2005 I was pretty sure that I was actually looking forward to seeing him at DragonCon in Atlanta. I imagined that we could put something together that was, if not an actual friendship, at least professional courtesy.

A few days before DragonCon, Hurricane Katrina made landfall and the meeting never took place. Instead of seeing Bob, I saw some then-recent photos, which overrode my imagination with reality: the man had known and loved, married and divorced was gone. Years of hard living in the French Quarter had ruined his teeth and transformed his wild black hair into scraggly, straw-colored tendrils. If he had been there, I wouldn’t have recognized him. It wasn’t just that he had aged…we’re all showing quite a bit of mileage these days…but that he looked ill and defeated. I warned myself and his daughter, who’d joined me for the convention: Bob doesn’t look like someone who’s going to see his sixtieth birthday.

I was wrong. He saw his sixtieth and his sixty-first. Bill, who successfully defied conventional wisdom and remained a close friend to both of us, told me that Bob had cleaned up his act, cut way down on his alchohol intake, and started writing again. He had a new book on the shelves and others in the pipeline, there was talk of a movie deal, and–from the “there’s no end to life’s ironies” department–he was once again out from under the IRS cloud having made his final penalty payment about twenty-four hours before his death, five weeks shy of his sixty-second birthday.

It’s tempting to imagine that he woke up yesterday morning, looked in the mirror and saw a second act shining brightly before him. And I hope he did, but the Bob Asprin I knew was deeply ambivalent about good fortune. He tended to see it, along with all the other “good” things that came his way, as betrayals-in-waiting. His world-view meant that he had to be on guard at all times, ready to defend himself against attacks that were sure to come. It was an exhausting way to live…for him and for everyone close to him; and I can’t help but wonder if the sight of new horizons wasn’t more intimidating than inviting.

Bob was a fantacist: no matter the plots or characters, he wrote about worlds that might or should be. The over-arching theme to all his novels was friendship: reliable, unquestioning, intuitive friendship. His characters are there for one another. They rarely misstep or misspeak, zig when they should’ve zagged. It was a very fine myth, indeed.

Everyone who knew Bob has indelible memories of his friendship.

These are some of mine…

One of the things that I’d always intended to do with my blog was make notes about what I’ve been reading, because it’s a rare writer who isn’t a voracious reader.

I usually have at least two books in progress: one fiction, one non-fiction. Fiction by my bed, non-fiction in the bathroom. (I find it easier to read plotless books one or two pages at a time

Last week I finished Victoria Finlay’s Color: A Natural History of the Palette (Random House; 2004; ISBN0-8129-7142-6)

My favorite kind of non-fiction is wryly written and makes connections between things that I wouldn’t have connected. Color is very much one of my favorites.

At heart, it’s a collection of ten essays, one each for ochre, black/brown, white, and the seven colors of Newton’s rainbow. So, right from the start, there’s something unexpected, because I always thought there were six colors in the rainbow: red, yellow, orange, green, blue, and violet. But, no — Newton, who, let’s be honest, thought of himself as an alchemist and only did “science” when the alchemy didn’t work, had a thing for the number seven: seven planets, seven days of the week, seven musical notes. Okay, he was wrong about the planets and the notes, but when he looked at his prism’s light he was pre-determined to see seven colors: red, yellow, orange, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

Which was nice, because seven colors gave Finlay the go-ahead to write two blue essays, one that ranges from an unfinished portion of one of Michaelangelo’s earlier (and less successful) paintings to a remote region of Afghanistan right before the Taliban blew up the thousand-year-old statues of Buddha and a second one about indigo, the plant.

It seems that Finlay’s day job is (or was, at least) as the Arts and Travel writer for the South China Morning Post and the essays mix travelogues and art history with some thoughtful commentary on the role that particular color have played in various cultures.

The ochre essay that begins the book starts off collecting rocks in Northern Italy, but it’s mostly about Australia and the complex role that color plays in Aborigine culture. The black/brown essay ranges from the Lascaux caves to the Pencil Museum in Keswick, UK, to the difficulty of making a truly permanent black ink to a recipe for creating mommia, a brown color much favored by 17th century painters, from a water-logged (and preferrably red-headed, young, and male) corpse.

White is a story of poison and impermanence.

Red is mostly about bugs–and reminded me of hiking here in Lake County a few years ago. When you think of Florida, the plant that comes to mind is a palm tree, or maybe citrus, but that day I found myself surrounded by prickly-pear cacti. My hiking partner cut off a “leaf” to show me a light-colored, blistery thing attached to it which leaked bright red liquid when he pinched it between his fingers: Cochineal — Spanish Red: the dyestuff that revolutionized the way Europeans dressed in the 17th century and remains one of the few reds that the FDA allows in foods. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Speculators have been trying to get-rich-quick around here for centuries and cochineal plantations were just another way to lose money in Florida.

Orange is about amber and varnishes and the travels of Giovanni Leonardo da Martinengo, an exiled Sephardic Jew and lute-maker, who wound up teaching his craft to a pair of Italian brothers by the name of Amati in the Italian city of Cremona.

Yellow is another tale of poison (the best colors, one quickly learns, are usually deadly), a failed quest for pigments distilled from the urine of sacred cows, and fields of crocuses.

Green ranges from President George Washington’s dining room to Emperor Yizong’s dining room.

The blues I’ve mentioned, and violet is an essay that starts in Phoenicia and winds up on Mexico’s western coast.

None of which captures the breadth of Findlay’s travels in her search for color or her skill in weaving her research into a charming narrative.

It’s been a long couple of weeks, not to mention an expensive couple of weeks (Who ever heard of a $150 bottle of cough syrup?) but I’m finally starting to feel like myself again. I’ve stopped coughing from my toes and when I go to bed, I no longer think that there’s a Geiger Counter going berserk in my lungs. (Very strange…for all the congestion, I never had a problem breathing–my nose wasn’t clogged–but the noise, especially when I was trying to go to sleep, was ridiculous.)

Anyway, I’m still taking my antibiotics and taking it slow. My body’s telling me that I’m one, maybe two, stupid moves from a complete relapse.

There are things to be said, though, for spending a couple of weeks not getting out of my chair without a really good reason. I did some reading, some dozing (the Geiger-Counter effect was less noticeable when I was sitting up), and I figured out how to knit socks.

I’ve been knitting since I was about six when my grandmothers taught me the basics…which was a life-changing experience in and of itself: my dad’s mom, who was English, taught me the English method where you carry the yarn through your right hand; and my mom’s mom, who was a woman of the world, taught me the Continental method where you carry the yarn through your left hand. It kinda blew my six-year-old mind to realize that you could produce the same thing in two very different ways…also that it wasn’t really a good idea to knit the other way with the other grandmother. Eventually, like when I was in high school, I came up with what I thought was a completely original method of holding the needles and carrying the yarn…only to eventually discover that knitters in the Greek islands had figured it out hundreds of years ago.

Still, I looked at socks and said, no way…all those needles, turning the heel, grafting the toe…just didn’t sound like fun at all. But knitting has changed in the last fifty years. It really isn’t my grandmother’s knitting any more. My friends up in Gainesville are sock mavens and the Brilliant Lawyer had sent me Sensational Knitted Socks (which is less about socks as patterns than it is about socks as a math/engineering challenge) for Christmas, so I was primed, but until I got bronchitis, I hadn’t taken the time.

No more…I’m a two-sock veteran now…

(That’s Feather giving me the evil eye between my toes.)

I started another sock, because socks, apparently, are like that: once you start, it’s all over, you’ve got to make more. I’m using yarn that the Brilliant Lawyer sent along with the sock book. It’s what they call a self-striping yarn in a colorway called 1776 — which is to say mostly it’s red and white stripes with an occasional blue-and-white stripe. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with patriotic wool socks come July in Florida, but I’ll have them…probably…now that I’m feeling better, it’s time to get back to work…writing work…

I’ve got bronchitis. This is nothing new; according to my doctor, I’ve had bronchitis for over a month now. Back in February I came down with a cold, or maybe a type-B flu, either way, I dutifully waited seven days before going to a walk-in clinic for some antibiotics, because there’s no sense in wasting drugs on a rhinovirus or a type-B flu (though one could have wished that they’d done a better job with the 2007-2008 version of the vaccine.) The clinic doctor confirmed what I suspected: I’d had a cold, or maybe a type-B flu, but it was sinking into my chest and going bacterial. He gave me ten days’ worth of cheap (actually FREE) antibiotics and told me to check in with my regular doctor if I didn’t start feeling better.

I started feeling better by the time I’d taken two of the antibiotic pills and, though I dutifully took all thirty of them, I didn’t check in with my regular doctor. In retrospect, I have to admit, yes: I was feeling better, but no: I didn’t feel great. I’d stopped feeling sick, but my proverbial “git up an’ go” had “got up an’ went.” On the other hand (in my defense) it’s the height of allergy season around here. My normally forest green car is more of a pea green, thanks to the regular (and thick) dusting of pollen it recieves from the local oaks, cedars, and cypress. I’ve been known to run a fever during the spring allergy season, so I wasn’t all that surprised that I was feeling draggy.

Then last Friday I made a major deposit into my karma account: Sandy, a friend of a friend for whom I’ve been doing airport runs for the last year or so, was finally ready to move closer to her daughter. Frankly, this is something that she should have done last summer after she had an automobile accident. The accident wasn’t serious, but it was an undeniable signal that the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune had gotten to be too much for her. Of course, trying to sell one place and buy another is a bit of a challenge right now (the selling moreso than the buying) and several months were lost on that account; and then her son, who’d been going to come down from Atlanta to help her through the final phases of the move suffered a cancer relapse and is going through a grueling round of chemo.

I could tell there were too many moving parts on the board for Sandy to handle comfortably, so I told her that I’d be glad to drive her car from Leesburg to Ft. Myers and she seemed quite relieved. A date was set, I made return flight reservations, Sandy’s original moving company surprised her with $1000 in extra charges when they dropped off the boxes, so a new moving company had to be found. The new company couldn’t come on Thursday, but they swore they’d be at Sandy’s by 7:30AM on Friday, have her packed out by 10:30AM, which would still give me enough time (barely) to drive the car to Ft. Myers and make my flight back to Orlando.

Which I did, barely, but I was exhausted by the time I got home. Saturday, I felt lousy and Sunday I felt worse…and was croaking like a frog. I should have stayed home, but it was my Embroiderers’ Guild board meeting and I had reports to make, so I showed the flag and then went to my parents for our usual Sunday-dinner pizza (though by then I knew I was going down at the stern and was careful stay at arm’s length.

Sunday night my temp. shot up to 101 and stayed there until yesterday morning when my mom drove me to see my doctor who didn’t even need her stethoscope to diagnose bronchitis…and to offer her opinion that I’d been incubating it since mid-February. No cheap antibiotics for me this time but something called Biaxin which, even in its generic form, weighed in a $101 for 20 pills. To get a jump start on the healing process, my doctor added some steriods too the list and, to give me some rest from the hacking, a cough suppressant that has got to be made with precious metals.

I went to bed after my first round of meds and pretty much stayed there for 24 hours. When I got up this morning, my fever was down (and so was my weight — by three pounds, YEAH! — it’s an ill wind that blows no good, right?) but I’m hardly myself. Simply taking a shower left me woozy and leaning for several minutes and it still feels and sounds as though I’ve got a Geiger Counter buried somewhere in my throat.

I’m disgusted with myself for letting my health get out of hand, though I truly did think that I’d thrown February’s cold and was dealing with nothing more serious than allergies. I’ve really got no choice but to take it easy for a few days…I don’t have the energy for anything more exciting.

All for now…