Entries Tagged as 'Personal'

Closing the Chapter

It’s time for me to move on to a new chapter.

If you’d like to keep in touch, my contact information is on the Bay Area Editors’ Forum website.

Thanks for reading, and take good care.

Tags: Personal, Random access by GD
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Looking for My Brother

Even before his death from cancer in June 2008, I had started looking around for backups. Everyone was fair game, anyone who could cast a similar eye on the passing scene, who would look over as if to say, “Did you see that?”, who could make me laugh with an arched eyebrow or make me look at the other side of things quickly and deeply.

After two years, it’s dawned on me that I’m really seeking a sense that everything is OK, everything will be well, that there are always new people to meet and connect with, to laugh and cry with. I have met them in spades since that year that he was dying. Perhaps my other brothers were always there, but I hadn’t needed to see them. Their strong shoulders, gentle humor, teasing reproaches.

You never stop missing a loved one who has died. But if you’re very lucky, others help you with the burden. Others help you see that the empty places don’t go on forever.

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Hugging the Air

As a telecommuter who works on web content, I rarely meet my colleagues face-to-face. My work world is virtual, based on emails, attached documents, and phone calls. In most cases, this suits me fine. But the recent death of a colleague I’d met only once pointed out some limitations.

I wanted to send my condolences to those closest to her. But who were they?

Google and Yahoo searches turned up the name of her high school, some Twitter and Facebook postings, her comments about an apartment she’d rented during a vacation in Paris. The local newspapers had no obituary for her.

From postings on the private blog she’d invited me to, I knew that her parents in a nearby city had helped care for her during previous bouts with cancer and that she’d found their help problematic: needed but tinged with a sense of impending doom that she greatly resisted. I knew that she had many friends. But who had sat with her in her final hours?

In the end, it was a mutual colleague who sent me an address for her parents, by email, of course. I bought a sympathy card and wrote the note, a stranger writing to strangers about a talented and complicated person, their adult child, whose death came much too early and was far from virtual.

Tags: Personal, Random access by GD
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Singing in the Choir

Singing is something that I do alone in the car with favorite CDs, preferably on a long freeway drive where no one can see or hear me. On rare occasions, I sing as part of the congregation in religious services, too many of them funerals in the last few years.

When the baritone sang a solo during a time of reflection at my father’s funeral, I remember thinking, Singing is what we do when we don’t have words for what we feel.

I joined a community chorus this month after many years away and took a chair in among the sopranos. Here’s the repertoire for the concert on Tuesday, March 16, some with video links to taped performances:

My father-in-law, retired choral director Ralph R. Prime, says this is an excellent selection, and he knows his stuff.

All we have to do now is sing it right.

Tags: Personal, Random access by GD
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Reinventing the Editor

My job used to be to read the text of an article, correct grammatical and punctuation errors, make queries to the author for clarification, go back over the revised text to fix any new errors, and shepherd the article through production. The finished article appeared live on java.sun.com. Simple, right?

Jobs change over time, maybe especially at a technology company. I still do that kind of editing and still enjoy it, but other duties are slowly coming to take up about half my time.

Newer assignments include finding blog entries by Sun employees and affiliates to feature in the blog sections on the java.sun.com and developers.sun.com home pages, gathering material to publicize updates to core Java and Java ME technologies and student-developer activities on SDN Program News, writing entries for this blog, working on lexicon entries for search-engine optimization as our developer sites move to a different search engine, identifying good material on the Web for a new developer-news page in the works (on hold since the team leader’s layoff a few weeks ago) and for the My Sun Connection portal, and working with a team of people from all different parts of Sun to provide material that will attract student developers to Sun technologies.

At times, I feel like a fish out of water, wondering how a copy editor ever got here and where this is all going.

At other times, I feel more part of a school of fish, each of us threading in and out of a group, sometimes taking the lead, sometimes filling out the main part of the school, occasionally falling behind, then catching back up again.

This isn’t the life I’d imagined for myself when I graduated college in 1981, but I like to think that some threads of that old imagined future are still present in this current life and career.

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A Death in the Family

My brother died in June 2008 after a year’s battle with cancer. I hadn’t seen him for four years before that, each of us busy living separate lives on opposite sides of the country, but we saw a lot of each other in his final 12 months. As one of my friends said, “When a person is so sick, you miss them for a long time even before they’re gone.”

His illness brought us close to his extraordinary friends. A current myth says that men are from some other planet than women, that they can’t relate and are afraid of emotion. But I watched as my brother’s friends, mostly men, came to visit him in his last two weeks at hospice. They held his hand and talked to him. They made him laugh even when he seemed half asleep. They hugged him. They sat around and watched South Park and Monty Python episodes with him.

I’ll never have another brother, but I’m glad to have spent time with Jonathan, James, Rick, Bob, Brian, David Z., David K., David C., Ofer, Francis, Alan, Allen, and even Joe, the local Target pharmacist. And there were others. Their kindness in coming to see my brother and to talk with his mother and three sisters is something I hope never to forget.

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Previous Journeys

The act of writing is a journey, and these are some of the journeys I’ve taken.

An Inadvertent Revolution: Women on the World War II Home Front. I interviewed Emily Yellin, author of Our Mothers’ War, for the Berkeley Daily Planet in 2007. Yellin was to speak at a nearby event to commemorate the work of women known collectively as Rosie the Riveter, or sometimes Wanda the Welder, during that war. It’s a very fine book, informative and easy to read.

Chevron Access Needed for Richmond Bay Trail Link. This news article for the Berkeley Daily Planet began as a failed travel piece on the unexpected beauty of the part of the Bay Trail that moves through the beleaguered and much maligned city of Richmond, California. A few days after this story’s publication in Berkeley, the San Francisco Chronicle published a related story.

A Flashing Heaven of Luck. This interview with publisher John Martin of Black Sparrow Press was published in the North Bay Bohemian. I had wanted to walk into Martin’s publishing company to apply for a job for years while living in Santa Rosa, California. I finally got the courage to talk to him after landing the interview assignment, as the press was closing its doors for the last time. Martin was very gracious.

A Patriotic Act: The U.S. Patriot Act’s effect on booksellers. This article, written for OP magazine (later renamed Fine Books & Collections Magazine), was my first political piece. It required hours of research and interviews. What amazed me was that professionals — lawyers, booksellers — were very willing to talk to an amateur with almost no press credentials, simply to get the word out about an issue that they were passionate about.

Word Surprise: Gertrude Stein. I wrote this thesis over two long years, writing five pages by hand at my desk every day, in hopes of putting an end to my career as a perpetual student at San Francisco State University. One Saturday afternoon, a friend called to ask if I’d like to go see a movie with her. I declined, saying I had to work on my thesis. “When is it due?” she asked. “Two years from now,” I answered. She told me that was the worst rejection she had ever heard from anyone. We went to the movies.

Related post: Introduction: Background and Context

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