I would visit you after dinner in your workshop, smelling of sawdust, Beefeater Gin and Pall Malls.
Tools covered an entire wall, neatly hung from hooks on pegboard: nails, screws, bolts, washers filled rows of peanut butter jars.
I would ask you questions, Why? And you would patiently explain how things worked. But Why? Things are, period. We never simply talked.
Books are instruction manuals for you, not gateways to other worlds. I understood allegory and psychology, what lies underneath.
Poetry for you would be a slide rule, an alchemy of logarithms, numbers transmuted into electrical circuits.
Your words are plain as Iowa cornfields, surfaces blunt as shovels. Your precise draftsman’s print filled your General Electric diary like blueprints.
Turbines and transformers your specialty, loved anything big: table saw, joiner, drill press. But drilling large holes, you held your antique brace and bit like a newborn baby.
Summers, we spent Saturdays refinishing the cottage, built from your blueprints. I can’t remember when we ever played.
You loved the idea of family but never tried to understand any of your three children.
You worked 40 years for GE, from engineer to management. Once I dared to ask, Any other dreams? None.
After my first heart operation, my surgeon said, “Our goal is to get you back to trekking.” You said, “You’re insane to think of going back to Nepal.”
I missed your funeral. The day you died, I had reached 18,000 feet on Everest.
