Face of Chaos

Another year headed for the record books. I turned 60 this year…that alone made for several surreal months. A friend of mine tags all his emails with the line “Inside every old person is a young person wondering…what happened?” I have asked myself that question many times lately.

Things got off to a good start when my step-daughter and I spent a January weekend together at a science-fiction convention in Chattanooga where I was the guest-of-honor. It was cold while we were there, and I was delighted.

And healthy. I didn’t come down with bronchitis until I was back in the Sunshine State. By the time I was back on my feet three months later, 2008 had taken a turn toward the grim.

Those of you who’ve been getting the previous installments of this journal know that there was a time when Bob Asprin and I were happily married and a time when we weren’t. In May, Bob dozed off while reading and didn’t wake up. Bob was never the sort who paid much attention to his own well-being. Everyone who knew him worried, but no one was prepared.

Wives become widows; Ex-wives become…more than a little bewildered.

Midway through the fourth Indiana Jones movie, Harrison Ford seemed to be talking to me when he said, “We seem to have reached the age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.”

The year didn’t really improve after that epiphany. I’ve held on to my family, but lost too many friends-close friends and younger friends, which is simply wrong.

Factor in a year that has been economically challenging for everyone and it should be no surprise that I find myself in a cautious mood as the year winds down. (Or that I’m late with everything, including this letter!)

Maybe I’m finally old enough to start appreciating poetry, or maybe just the poetry of Robert Burns and the Days of Auld Lang Syne.

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Considering that the first time I visited the county where I’m now living, we were still living in the era of separate fountains, restrooms, and schools and the elected sheriff made no secret of his Klan sympathies, I never imagined that I’d have the opportunity to help deliver Florida to Barrack Obama.

Honestly, I hoped, but I never truly believed that I’d have the opportunity to vote for an African-American who had won the nomination of one of the major political parties. And I never dared hope that I’d live to see the African-American candidate for whom I’d voted become the president-elect.

But it has happened and I have cried tears of joy.

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 I 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.