Legalectric

Got the call that my father died this a.m., which given he was in renal failure is the best we could hope for, he wasn’t suffering long. Odd, I can’t find the pile of photos, and found only this one, and from the date on it, I’m wondering if it’s after his father’s funeral, when this was taken he was my age… gulp… hard to believe. As a kid I learned to read playing with his boiler catalogues and Consulting Engineer, of course had to learn to read upside down so I could read plans, and also backwards and in the mirror. He made desks for Chucky Greenberg and I out of orange crates and we’d spend days in the basement playing “Engineer.” (though we weren’t always engineers, we also spent an entire day making paper airplanes and flying them over the wall between the joists into his office, a very concentrated long day of making paper airplanes, hundreds, thousands of them…) Anyway, you can see why I’m so demented about these EPRI reports and utility infrastructure. In first grade he set me up with a drawing board and I was working on a huge, probably 5×3 at least, perspecive drawing of downtown skyscrapers. I got my driving jones from him, on weekends we’d cruise around and tour infrastructure, like all the Locks & Dams, even a South Dakota coal plant, though I could have done without the Fort Peck Dam, what a hell hole that place was, the ranger with his gun and a bag of dead rattlesnakes, cactus, a rusty wagon half submerged. And he always enjoyed visiting with the grandkids, in our family all of them have four legs, tails and weigh at least 45 lbs., and he always brightened these last months in the nursing home when Krie would wake him up, last time both Kenya and Krie were there. He perked up to hear about coal gasification, and was so tickled to know that Ross Hammond, P.E. and I were working on the Mesaba Project — he’d worked for Ross’s father for at least 20 years, could it have been 25 or 30??? and Ross said he was “an Engineer’s Engineer,” that he was really good at his job. Ross used to go with his father and mine to South Dakota when they were working on the Mitchell plant, and I remember now and then my father would bring home Tommy Hammond’s fancy Lincoln, blue I believe, power windows, (is that right, Ross?) and take my grandmother for a cruise. I’m very grateful for what I got through genetics and osmosis, well, other than the pilonidal, athlete’s foot and terminal dandruff, because that background has opened a door for me to do the most satisfying work imagineable, work I didn’t even realize was an option until I was doing it!