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)

Today was beautiful.. The Valentine’s day snowstorm lasted until early this morning. .by the time it ended we had between 3 and 4 feet of snow. This is more snow than I remember having in the last 10 years. It’s surreal.  Everything has come to a graceful halt. All the world’s sharp edges are rounded by the snow cover. Sounds are muffled. What little traffic there is slow and quiet. People are off from work, kids are off from school. Appointments are canceled.  I know it may sound funny, but the post storm lull reminds me of the period we had for the several weeks after Sam died.. Everything slowed down.. all the things that kept us so busy before and were so central to our life just pulled away. Looking back, everything seemed kind of muffled and gauzy. On our walk this afternoon Diane and I were talking about another parallel between the snowstorm and our own lives now..    We are realizing that you have turn into and face our grief just like you sometimes have to brave a storm. You just have to go through it…just keep shoveling. You can sometimes find beauty in it as well: today we found that someone had put flowers in the ‘Guitar Sam’ sculpture despite the deep snow..

      We braved the snow tonight to go see an absolutely fantastic State Radio show at Higher Ground. State Radio is a band out of Boston that does both fun and socially conscious music. They were able to make it up from Boston.. but their back up band was not That went a double set from State Radio which suited us all just fine. There were so many of Sam’s friends at the show. I think we took up about a quarter of the packed room. I felt so welcome at the show.. The crowd just parted for me when I went down on the floor. I’d like to think that they knew I was connected to Sam.. but it just might have been because I’m a spooky old guy wearing my son’s (max’s) blinking tweed jacket.

..

At one point Chad, the lead singer dedicated the song ‘Keepsake’ to Sam. That had me dancing and crying at the same time. .. Max and I tossed some Sam buttons up on stage and all three band members put them on.   Hree’s a picture of Chad with his Sam button on.

We also passed them some SamStones to toss around on their tour. After the show, the band was passing out material about the situation in Sudan. I love their spirit. It was a great, great evening.. and I felt you  there with us smiling tonight,  Sam.

-jc