Today finds this part of Arizona poised on the edge between spring and summer. It was slightly cool these last few days but in between the coolness are the bursts of heat and bright sunshine that let one know that the hot days are not long in coming, and then it will be six months before we see coolness again.
Last week I did my Spellbreakers podcast/telecast on California, southern California in particular, as I was just traveling there. I flew to Burbank on the 1st, on a late Friday afternoon, and then flew back to Phoenix on the afterrnoon of Sunday. In between those flights was an Uber ride from Burbank to downtown Pasadena, where I checked into the Pasadena Hotel and Pool for two nights in what amounted to a pleasant room in a pleasant hotel in a pleasant part of town.
On Saturday morning I went to the memorial service of a man I knew for many years. He was a pediatrician in Fort Collins, my hometown in Colorado. He was, however, a native Californian, born in 1929 in Orange County, when it was a very rural place. His temperament marked the men of that generation, a quiet acceptance of duty, and the recognition that life is unfair and difficult, but complaining about it is counterproductive. He became a doctor via the Air Force and lived in Thailand with his wife, and is his eldest daughter was born there, in the late 1950s. Then two more children were born, another daughter in the early 1960s, and a son in 1965.
I know all of his children, and I adored his late wife, their mother. She passed away just a week before my father did, at Christmas time 2015.
The man whose memorial service I went to had passed away in November in Austin, Texas, just after his 94th birthday. He had been in assisted living. He had moved down to Austin at the insistence of his son, who had been living in Austin since the late 1980s. He had been living a splendid old age until recently taking a bad fall.
His son flew his ashes to California for the memorial. His two older sisters live there as well. His oldest sister went to splendid well-known East Coast schools, got a law degree, and became a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles for years. His second sister became a school teacher and taught in Pasadena until retiring.
So it was natural to have the memorial service there. It was a Presbyterian Church in the nearby community of San Marino, which is just south of Pasadena, as the neighborhoods get nicer and more expensive. Later I learned that San Marino is where George Patton grew up, when it was rural. He rode horseback on the open hills that became the fancy houses. In the second World War h was our most feared commander by enemy, and perhaps the respected by his men. He remains the face of American military prowess and victory on the battlefield. In San Marino, I thought how Patton was a phenomenon of those times, and nothing like him will be seen again.
The memorial service included a video presentation of slides by his son, who has taught film production at a community college in Austin since the 1990s. Before that he went to graduate school in film at the University of Texas.
Before that he went to the University of Chicago, and other institutions of higher learning, doing the Gen X college switcharound that suddenly became epidemic among my cohort, even the high achievers.
Before that he graduated from high school in Fort Collins, and before that he went to junior high and elementary school there, all while his father ran a pediatric practice across Lemay from the hospital, and attended regularly in the maternity ward, as they used to call it.
Later he left Fort Collins and worked for vaccine manufacturers. He also worked for the CDC. He helped develop one of the vaccines that babies are now given. I learned his from his nephew, who is a pediatrician in southern California. He spoke a long encomium of the deceased in the reception in the other wing of the church (a nice complex, as one would imagine). The deceased should be known to history for what he did, said his nephew. The rest of the family, his three children and other cousins, spoke not a word in response, but politely accepted the accolade of their father and uncle. It was as if they knew the deceased would be uncomfortable hearing himself described as such, out of modesty.
I got to attend two nice evening dinners with his family, on Friday and Saturday, where I sat next to his son, who is my old friend dating from junior high school in Fort Collins.
We talked about old times. He has photographs of two of us taken by his father at Mile High Stadium in the summer of 1983. The three of us went to see the first championship of the USFL, between the Philadelphia Stars and the Michigan Panthers. It was mostly local football fans in the stadium---Broncos fans who were rabid for a championship. The deceased and his son had gone to many Broncos games together. The end game, between two teams nobody cared about, was exciting and ended on a heroic play at the last minute. There was such a release of emotion among those in attendance that they stormed the field and tore down the goal posts. The Denver Police were called and dispersed the crowd with incendiary devices of some kind. The three of us beat a retreat. Like me, his son is mostly the type to recognize a bad situation and leap out of it. Definitely the deceased was like that
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