Hiram's Jahrzeit

Hiram Arthur Hansen II (1940-1988)
R.I.P. Dad
I love you.

I admire many of the rituals of Judaism, though many seem strange to me. One important one is the tradition of lighting a Jahrzeit candle on the anniversary of a loved-one's death.

My father died 14 years ago today. I miss him. I feel sad that he never got to meet my wife or my children. I feel sad that he couldn't come to Milo's little league game today, even if just to see his grandson strike out twice. I feel sad that he died so suddenly and that none of us had a chance to say goodbye.

Most of all, I feel sad to find my memories of him slipping away. I remember that whenever I saw one of the office buildings he'd worked in, I would think of him. I don't do that any more.

Now that my mother's selling the homestead, that place, the last roof I lived under with him, will go away. They'll bulldoze the house he died in.

My memories, my connections with him slip further and further away. Would we could shift time forward 25 years and he could be sitting -- like me -- at a keyboard, typing at his blog. I wish I could go back and search his archives, see what interested him, what he commented on.

But in a way, I've begun to do just that for my children and their children and theirs. If they care to, my thoughts will be there for them. Dave has a feature called Mail to the Future that lets you send an email to a specific address on a specific date sometime in the future.

Blogs amount to both notes to the world today and also to the ever-expanding archive. We write to the future.

And to the past.   

9:06:07 PM  comment []    

Cardinal Law Under Fire

Switching to a different religion.... Has anyone else wondered about what they offer the female suicide bombers? Dozens of virgin boys doesn't quite have the same allure, I imagine.   

8:34:11 AM  comment []    

I couldn't leave well enough alone, so I modified the style sheet to have use ems, rather than px or pt as the font size unit. I do this so the text size feature in your browser will work. I have perfect vision, but tons of sites are virtually unreadable because the fonts are too small and can't be changed.

Netscape sucks. There's no good answer.

Actually, there is a good answer. Upgrade. Netscape 6.x makes it look fine. Of course it looks OK under IE.  

12:44:09 AM  comment []    

When is being told you've got five years to live good news?

When you thought you only had two.

It's amazing how relative what constitutes "good news" versus "bad news" can be.

We're all dying of something. Most of us just don't know what.  

12:12:40 AM  comment []