Woke to another beautiful morning. Waking today was different because it’s the first day in 3 months that I know that some aspect of my work ended up in my dreams along with Sam, .   I got outside as soon as could and snowshoed up through the loop that Diane and I trailblazed yesterday. Once again, Chai was too wary of the deep snow to come with me.  It was much easier going with the packed trail As always it was beautiful and peaceful in the woods. At the top of the loop, I decided to make a another snow angel,. (This one clothed.) .I  launched myself backwards into the snow. And took this picture…

Picture taken I tried to get up to go home.. It was about 5 below.. so I was getting pretty chilled.. Lo and behold .. the snow was so deep I couldn’t get up.. I flailed around for several minutes until I was able to pull myself up on the packed trail I can imagine this is what it’s like being a moose on one of these snowbound days. Anyway.. once free.. I managed to catch a picture of the snow angel just before I dropped my camera a foot deep in the snow..  

I recovered the camera just as I received a work call on my cell. I don’t know why I took the call but I managed to have a good short technical discussion while standing out there in that beautiful queit place. Was that good or bad ? I hung up and  spent another 10 minutes stomping a large version of Sam’s name in a snow bank  At that point I had to hightail it home since my hands and feet were frozen and I was late for work.
   I got to work and spent the entire morning trying to come up to speed. .. No matter how hard I tried.. I couldn’t get beyond first gear. I found myself apologizing to many colleagues about my spaciness.  I started asking myself today if I am using my reaction to Sam’s passing  as an excuse  at work. not to other people.. but to myself.  I know that no one would begrudge me any time I need .. All  the same.. I’m wondering if I have lowered expectations on myself more than I should at this point.  I just know that my capacity to focus is really diminished.
   I had an early luch with my very good friend Kerry. Kerry is a real mench.. a really, really good guy. He’s been really looking out for me. He’s also been hatching a scheme to construct a memorial sculpture for Sam.. He’s managed to pull together quite a network of artists and artisans who are interested in helping us build some sort of fun memorial to Sam. We were going to have our first meeting on the project on Wednesday. But turns out I need to go out of town. He’s got so much energy for this project. His energy and passion for this are an incredible gift to our family.
    The end of the work day came mercifully early.. I zoomed home for Diane’s 6PM yoga. It was just what I needed. Diane brings such a sense of peace when she’s leading a class that you an almost forget that your hamstrings are about to snap. Early in the class she commented on the view of the moon outside the studio window.. It was a close conjunction of the planet Venus with the crescent moon (like this)
   I could see it from my yoga mat. The particular alignment of these two jewels  of the night sky really hit me.. (now this will be hard to explain)   About two years ago I was doing a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)  session with our friend Marcia. During the session I came up with a ‘picture’ in myself of the balance of my mind and my heart. My mind is a bright white light to my upper right.. and my ‘heart’  is a moon shaped thingy to my lower left.. They are connected by a straight line that pivots around my center. My normal configuration is like this.:.
which means to me that my head always rules my heart.  (note: I am also in touch with my inner pirate)  Tonight’s conjunction of Moon and Venus is the opposite.. as in .. heart dominates head..   I took it as a message to follow my heart for awhile.. I also took it as an excuse to lay flat on my back  and stare out the window. while the other folks in the class were grunting through  difficult yoga postures.
    After Yoga, we had dinner with my friends Leon. Anne Marie and their three very   beautiful kids: Emmanuel, Melissa and Fredrick who were up from New York. These kids are pretty amazing.. They all speak three languages.. (English. Dutch and French).. even the two year old.  They all took SamStones with them to take to their Grandparents houses in The Netherlands and France..
   Sam.. you’re Stones are really getting spread all over the word. That’s pretty cool
   I’ll end tonight with a poem called ‘The Dash” by Linda Ellis. Diane found it today.. please take a few mintes to read it.  

The Dash by Linda Ellis

I read of a man who stood to speak
At the funeral of a friend.
He referred to the dates on her tombstone
From the beginning to the end.

He noted that first came the date of her birth
And spoke the following date with tears,
But he said what mattered most of all
Was the dash between those years.

For that dash represents all the time
That she spent alive on earth…
And now only those who loved her
Know what that little line is worth.

For it matters not how much we own:
The cars…the house…the cash.
What matters is how we live and love
And how we spend our dash.

So think about this long and hard…
Are there things you’d like to change?
For you never know how much time is left,
You could be at “dash mid-range”.

If we could just slow down enough
To consider what’s true and real,
And always try to understand
The way other people feel.

And be less quick to anger,
And show appreciation more
And love the people in our lives
Like we’ve never loved before.

If we treat each other with respect,
And more often wear a smile…
Remembering that this special dash
Might only last a little while.

So, when your eulogy is being read
With your life’s actions to rehash…
Would you be proud of the things they say
About how you spent your dash?

Sam.. ou had one hell of a good dash my son.. I love you
-jc

We had a great day at home this morning. I managed to sleep until 9:30. I woke realizing I’d been talking to Sam in my dreams. I lay there awhile resting in that feeling. I finally dragged my lazy bod out of bed and downstairs. Diane had been up and buzzing around for a few hours. After breakfast we pushed ourselves outside into the beautiful morning to snowshoe. The snow is still amazingly deep.. Even with snow shoes it was very slow going.. It was like working out on nature’s Stairmaster with the resistance turned up high. It was such hard going that our original goal to do the lower loop in the back woods with Chai had to be revised to a much shorter loop.. without Chai. Poor pup fell into her belly whenever she went off of our trail. She finally gave up and went back to the yard.   It was so beautiful and quiet up in the woods.. nothing was moving, there was a light snow falling No wildlife  about but  I managed to catch sight of this elusive creature… Beautiful, no ?

   We huffed and puffed our way up one of our shorter hikes .. Basically taking an hour to do what’s generally a 15 minute hike on a normal day.  As we were coming down we were talking about the mindfulness that Sam’s passing has given us. I’d been beating myself up a bit over the last week in my conversations  and in this  blog about having trouble resisting the rush and distractions of my old life.  Diane pointed out  that I may be holding myself to the wrong standard. She said that being completely grounded just wasn’t me.. that I needed to be a little spacey and distracted to really be ‘me’.  maybe shooting to be the Dali Lama was the wrong goal.. she suggested that I aim to be someone that the Dali Lama would find fun to be around.. Now that’s a fun thing to ponder.  Diane is a good and wise soul.
   We got back to the house around noon and the kids were still sleeping. We woke them up and had a great family breakfast. After that, Gabe and I retired to the Lab to work on  a school project, while Diane and Max worked on his Pratt coursework. Max is going back to Pratt in a week to start finishing off some of the make up work he has from leaving mid semester.
   Gabe’s project is a ‘motion machine’. A kid contrived contraption that illustrates the laws of motion. Working on this particular project brought back great and strong memories of having done the same project with Max and then with Sam. I really love seeing how these kids think . They are all so creative..  Each one has approached the problem with a different style. I remember how adamant Sam was about using a golf putter to swing in a certain was and hit a ball. It took him hours to get it set up.. but in the end it worked great. I was thinking about Sam as we worked today..  Sam would sometimes call me on his school projects when my own impatience would take over. He had a good and  way of telling me  when I  needed to lighten up. I made it a point to listen more and be more patient while working with Gabe.
    Gabe had some really cool ideas on what he wanted to do for his project. We spent most of the day working out the mechanics of a pretty complex gizmo that had one marble hitting another marble which rattle through a funnel, into a pipe  which  then launched it at a stick, that pulls a pin that releases a blade that ….cuts off a clay figures head…  So much for not letting them watch scary or violent movies as small kids. 
   I loved working all day with Gabe.. he’s creative and very good with his hands.   He did all the cutting, grinding and welding on his project himself.. I certainly couldn’t do that stuff at his age… Here are some pictures of the young inventor at work.

He  did his  first complete test run of his project at about 10:30 tonight.. and  I’m happy to say.. it works pretty well.
      Sam. .. I realize just now that I never taught you to weld…   I hope you  were watching us today…

-jc

 ps. never trust a spell checker 🙂

I had a  most peaceful day.  As I said yesterday I needed to spend some more time to get back into balance this weekend and that’s exactly what I did. Max and Diane were at a at Reiki training session with Marcy and Gabe was up at the mountain in a competition.
   I began the day with a science show for the girl scouts in Bristol . It was a smaller crowd, than they expected (about 19 vs. the 80 they imagined_ but I really enjoyed doing the show anyway. It turned out to be a mix of girl scouts and a few boy cub scouts. .  That was OK.. but I had been looking forward to doing an all girl show. I notice that when boys are present the girls feel less free about volunteering and shouting out answers.   Not sure why that is.. Anyway, the show went well. Igot a little misty eyed when I dedicated it to Sam at the beginning. But once I started I was great. It felt really. really good to be doing another show.  Here’s me with the girls
  
   By time I got home from Bristol after unloading my gear at IBM it was about 1PM.. I had lined up a list of things to do around the house today.. Id’ also received a generous invite to  learn TIG welding at my friend Bruce’s… but I realized I needed some down time..   Instead of doing anything, I sat in Sam’s room and thought about him for awhile. While I was in there , I heard our friends form the band Skanky Green practicing. In the barn.I heard them playing their new ‘Captain Sam’ song they wrote about Sam.. It’s such a fun and beautiful song  I was laughing and crying hard to hear it performed live..   I love the chorus to that song

Relax a bit, you might just have some fun
Don’t take it all so serious
You’ll never live it down
Take the plunge, you might have to take a dive
‘Cause that’s what he would have done
if he was still alive

    Hearing that song inspired me to go back in the house and do something that I had been putting off  for many weeks. I transferred the last phone message I got from Sam on the day he died to my laptop. I had been hitting save on my cell phone now 3 times.. each one saves for 20 days. I new it was coming up again. Each time it came up it was very hard.  I had no choice whether to listen or not. No matter where I was or what I was doing. The last time I heard it , I almost drove off the road…I’d really been putting it off. In the spirit of ‘turning into the storm’: I recorded it on my PC. . It was much less painful than I expected it would be. I was hurting pretty much as I recorded it.. but the more I listen to the message in the course of editing, removing noise, balancing the volume,.. the more I loved listening to it. I was going back and forth on whether other folks would want to hear the message. I talked about it with Diane and she said ‘go for it’.. I’m going to post it here.. but you may want to think before following the link. He sounds so ‘there’  in the message.. it may be hard  for you to listen to.. or you may love it.. just think about it first. . It’s really a perfect Sam message. You can hear the fun he’s having in his voice.
   By the time I’d finished editing the message and listening to it 30 times or so.. it was getting pretty late. Martha and Kevin came over (Kevin driving :-%). Kevin drove me up to his house to get his dad and his dad’s snow blower to clear our driveway. They are really good friends to have helped us do that. Joe and the beast made quick work of our driveway. We’d been at it with snow shovels, but we might well have been using a teaspoon for all the snow that was there.  
    As soon as the driveway was done my family all piled in the car and headed out for our big concert night. First we went to Sakura . We ordered an extra miso soup for Sam. It’s starting to be a ritual. We get enough of them we can start our own religion.: The Samarians ? Here’s a funny thing; as soon as the soup came, three of the overhead lights in the restaurant went off.. Sam had come to eat with us.
From there we went downtown to the Flynn to see The Pink Floyd Experience.. a cover band on the 70’s band  It was an excellent show. Our good friend Gina had helped us find the last five tickets to the sold out show.   They played the Pink Floyd stuff note-for-note…. They were so good that I remembered that I felt that Pink Floyd songs come from a cold and cynical place.. they seem to have this ‘look you’re a slave to money’.. or ‘ time is passing you buy’ kind of message… no warm and fuzzy stuff in their music.. That’s ok for the right mood.   I think I’m a warm and fuzzy guy now, though. As much as I loved the show.. I managed to fall asleep during the song ‘Money’.. If you know me.. I have just two speeds.. Zooming or sleepy.. and tonight I was sleepy. I only slept for a few minutes, but I managed to have a dream.. I dreamt that Sam was alive and my family was whole in some different parallel dimension. The thought made me happy.. I sent that family in the other dimension some love as I woke myself up . The concert had some pretty cool visuals including a radio controlled flying pig.. Now that would be cool to build.  Here’s the pig:
  
   We ran into many folks at the concert tonight.. We were happy to see our friends Tim and Ivy . Ivy has been writing me long beautiful letters. In her last she included this very cool picture of her and her dad. Check out the Sam stuff..

Gotta sleep now. Good night my son..

-jc

Not much to report today. I had a too-busy day and it frazzles my brain. Diane found me at 8 this morning still in bed with a cell phone glued to my ear, listening to a work call and typing a note at the same time. She laughed at me.. The rest of the day was just like that, back to back meetings, driving, talking on the phone. I can see that it’s so easy to slip into old bad habits of too much to do, too little sleep, to little time to think, to laugh, to create stuff, to just hang out. These are hard lessons I’ve learned from Sam  about the importance of taking life a little slower.. I’m hoping to work on that a little this weekend.. I don’t know if I’m getting the best start at that though…. I have Jolts and Volts science show for a bunch of girl scouts in Bristol tomorrow at 8AM. That should be fun though.
   Mercifully, tonight was as peaceful as the day was hectic. My friend Katsu from grad school came buy with his wife Naomi and there young kids Marie and Ricki. We hadn’t seen Katsu since 1995. Gabe had just been born and Sam was about 3. We spent a few hours catching up, talking about old times. He first met Max when he was 3 months old. When Max walked in it made us both realize how long we’d been friends. We spent a some time showing them all of Sam’s pictures and his room.. I’m still so proud of Sam… I always will be.
    Around 8 we went up to the Townsend’s to help cheer up Matt who broke his leg a week ago.  Some help I was, I fell asleep on the couch !. I did happen to notice that the Townsend’s had a very beautiful and fully functional mitten rack on which to dry my mittens (had I remembered to wear them) thanks to the Wonderful Wild Welding Women or Richmond (see here for that story)
   Speaking of stories, Max and Jessie just came in and told me a really cool Sam electrical story from last night’s State Radio concert.  If you’ve been following Sam’s story for the last few months you might remember that his energy sometimes comes through in playful energy surges: e.g.  lights blinking, electrical malfunctions, etc. Last night someone tossed a Sam Stone up on stage as the band was playing. Chad, the lead singer, picked up the stone, looked at it, smiled and placed it on his amp. Immediately, his guitar feed dropped out. I was in back of the room, all I saw was that the sound guy rushed to the stage and he and Chad fiddled with the amp,. In doing that they knocked off the stone.. Presto.. Back came the guitar.,, Chad then saw the stone on the ground again.. Picked it up and put it back on the amp.. And guess what ? .. No guitar again. At that point, Max, Avery, Carolyn and a few of Sam’s friends figured out what was up and shouted for him to put the stone in his pocket. . As soon as he picked it up off the amp, they were back in business.   Stranger than fiction.. That’s my boy !
-jc

Ps. Here’s a picture that Max and Gabe (and Sam) made for my birthday the other day

… and here’s the 5 interlocking  hearts that Gabe, Max and I made for Diane for Valentines day. The boys did all the welding ! (it’s not just girls that can  weld)