windowpanes preferred

this past weekend i had the rather astonishing experience of meeting up with an old friend, and by old i mean from way back, the single-digit years, what we might have referred to as "short pants days" in another era (i wear shorts more often now than i ever did, however). although he was a year older, he was my next-door-neighbor and we were inseparable until around junior high, when everything begins to change. his family moved away after eighth grade and i had neither seen nor heard from him since, although i wondered not a few times what had become of him; living my whole life in this town affords me numerous opportunities to reflect on things like where the fuck did everybody go?

the occasion of his second visit to ann arbor in 30+ years was a reunion of the sixth grade class at burns park school. this is one of those crazy things that the internet makes possible, and while i had gotten wind of it, i had no plans to check it out; to be sure, i was not invited (recall that he was a grade ahead of me). but when i returned home during a lull in our activities with our palestinian houseguests and checked the answering machine, there was this message from this guy, and in 90 seconds he described just a few of the insane parallels between our lives, based on conversations with my older sister who was also a member of this class, parallels that included barely escaping high school and playing jazz saxophone for a while before going back to school and studying engineering and getting into environmental consulting and...well, it was striking. and his dissertation (grad school was where we kind of parted paths) concerned fluvial geomorphology, which to us (in this office) is a sort of vast, uncharted research wilderness that holds the keys to understanding all sorts of contaminant transport problems that are currently difficult to solve, and to which we marshal our richest creative energies, that is when, as consultants, someone will pay us. which is not often. but here is a guy with whom i used to roam the burns park neighborhood, pulling a wagon and collecting dead batteries that we would then line across the street so cars would run over them and we could see what was inside them, and this guy is leading research in this important field. this sort of thing renders uninteresting, to me at least, any discussion of fate and predestination.

rather than go on with other arcane details (both of science and of my early childhood) i will reprint here a biographical sketch he submitted while the reunion was being organized. the detail of his memory is simultaneously surprising and unsurprising; together we were able to fill in many gaps between us.

>=.=<>=.=<>=.=<>=.=<>=.=<>=.=<>=.=<

Hi Everyone! Here are some more memories, at least some of them unique. And in anticipation of many wonderful hours together catching up on the last 41 years (6 at BP plus the 35 since), I’ve included a brief life story (which I wrote to ****** when he first contacted me, back when this crazy reunion thing was just a bright gleam in his eye). I look forward very much to seeing you all in just a couple of days! *** (wife), ***** (son, 4) and I will be flying in from London tomorrow, so we might be a little dazed on Friday night from the 5 hour time change. (******: I guess we don’t win the “came the farthest” award because we are stopping in Ann Arbor on our way home to California, but how about an honorable mention?) First Grade: Mrs. *****. She broke her hip over the summer and we had another teacher for several months of the fall. I remember liking her and being glad when my little sister ***** was in her class 5 years later. It’s funny what one remembers from being six years old. One of my strongest memories is of a rainy day when there were hundreds of earth worms on the sidewalk between school and Wells street. I wondered where they all came from. Another vivid memory is playing with ****** ***** in the tiny back compartment of my parents’ VW bug. We called it the Gee-Gee car and were happy being crammed into that little space together for what must have been hours. I also remember spending long hours standing outside my house on Prospect St., watching street crews install new curbs (or was it a new sewer?). That’s where I first got to be good friends with my next door neighbor, [cicadashell], and his big sister *****. My house number was 1234 Prospect Street. I remember on the first day of school, when some adult asked if I knew my address, they didn’t believe me when I just started counting up and stopped at four. It was really easy to remember. Then there was the time I was down by Burns Park on a weekend, at the drive way into the parking lot off of Wells (off by myself at age 6, hard to imagine now), and there was a hole in the pavement protected by a sawhorse. For some reason I pushed the sawhorse over and moments later a bigger boy appeared on a bike (he must have been 8). He told me I was a vandal and that he would turn me in if I didn’t bring him a quarter right away. I had no idea what a vandal was but I knew I was in big trouble. I ran home and told my mom I needed a quarter (which was a fortune in those days, I hadn’t even started my nickel-a-week allowance yet). When she got me to confess why I needed the quarter she told me not to worry about that big boy, and that she wouldn’t be giving me any change. Well, I probably did worry about that big boy a lot, but I also got the idea that whatever vandalism was, it wasn’t so bad. Second Grade: Mrs. ********. My happiest (and only) memory of second grade is the Valentine’s Day post office we made. It was so exciting, everyone had a mail box, and I got all these wonderful valentines. The whole project seemed to last for weeks. I don’t recall if we were required then to give valentines to everyone in the class, that’s the way it works in my son’s pre-school now. Third Grade: Mrs. (***? *******? *********? Can’t remember). Third grade was tough. Life got much more serious then, and scary. We used to have wild “soccer” free-for-all madness at recess. Whoever had the ball would get chased by everyone else. It was exhilarating but dangerous. I recall the game was also called “Smear the queer”... There was another game we used to play during recess where the boys would hide on the back side of the big hill, and wait for the girls to venture onto the hill, whereupon we would jump up and chase them back to their hill (the little hill of course) and then occupy it until recess was over. One day this game of implied violence got real for me when the girls decided not to indulge us, and we lay in wait for what seemed like an eternity. I finally decided that I didn’t want to play this game anymore, and got up to leave. ******** ******, who was our leader, took this as a great personal offense and, happy to have someone to chase, led the pack in chasing me down and delivered a rather brutal punishment for my insubordination. Back in the classroom he was outraged that I had told on him and promised to beat me up again at every opportunity. From then on I tended to stay close by the teachers at recess and became best friends with the somewhat less cool guys, like ***** **** and ***** *****, who already stayed close to the adults to survive recess. Fourth Grade: Mrs. *****. The Tigers winning the world series that October seemed like one of the biggest events of my life to date. I recall listening to the games in class, first secretly with an earpiece from a transistor radio, and after we got caught by Mrs. *****, being allowed to do it openly so everyone could listen too. Most of my memories of her are not so good. There was the whole fight over the Christmas Pageant being converted into a Winter Festival that year. Some parents got together in the PTA to shift our big holiday event for the parents from re-enacting Jesus’ birth to just singing a bunch of secular songs about good times in the snow. (I think ***** ****’s mom *** was a ring leader). Mrs. **** was very upset about this, and had me and some of the other Jewish kids stand up in the front of the class while she explained that it was us and our parents who were responsible for taking Christmas away. (**** **** wasn’t Jewish actually). Needless to say, after that I didn’t feel that she had my best interests at heart. She also had me stand in front of the class that spring, along with ***** *******, when we both wore brand new flowered bell-bottoms to school (probably purchased at Middle Earth). I liked those pants and must have sought the attention on some level, but she clearly hoped to scare us out of our hippy tendencies. I recall dreading the penmanship lessons, when she would grip my hand so hard it hurt, and move my stiff arm around to write in script. I never did learn to write script and have had nearly illegible handwriting ever since. (Thank goodness for word processing on lap tops!). Another memory from that year is being introduced to musical instruments by the music teacher (can’t remember her name) who showed us cardboard pictures of the instruments. I chose the cornet but when my parents took me to the music store downtown to rent one, they pulled out a box with strange black things in it. Turned out they had heard “clarinet” (probably wishful listening, considering the difference in potential volume), and coerced me into “trying” it. I ended up playing the clarinet in the band the next two years, next to ***** *******, who was first chair. Fifth Grade: Going to Washington DC with my family and ***** ****’s family for the big “moratorium” march against the war. I really liked the sex education that year, girls’ bodies were so interesting and complicated! My strongest memory from the sex education experience was feeling BIG. Somehow, knowing about hormones and puberty confirmed that we would actually grow up some day, that all the effort of being a kid and striving to be a “big boy” was worth it. I recall jumping and being able to touch the ceiling in my room for the first time, shades of hormone overdoses to come. Sixth Grade: The drug education assembly had a big influence on me - I decided to try drugs after that. I left school a month early the spring of 1971 to go with my family to Japan so I missed whatever graduation ceremony there was. Random memories of the school: - Throwing wet toilet paper wads onto the bathroom ceiling, where they stuck to form mini-stalagtites. - Climbing up the outside wall of the school, in the narrow slot next to the classroom that stuck out. - Ice skating in the big rink, skating full speed to the edge and jumping into the snow banks. - The sound and smell of vast piles of leaves in the fall, walking through them on the way home from school. - Loving the library, which was my sanctuary in fifth and sixth grades. Somehow I got excused a lot to go there and read, and escape the classroom. Random memories of Ann Arbor. - The Bluefront, getting comic books and red pop there. - Football games, the sound of the drums from far away, running through the crowds pretending to be halfbacks. The agony of the rose bowl, the collapse of our team in the warm California sun. (now I live in California) - The arboretum. The trails through the trees. The river and the railroad bridge. The sledding hill. - Student riots, over the war, and over the county sheriff’s rule. - Middle earth, the hippie store. Buying peace sign medallions there, and black light posters (Having a club house in the basement with a black light and cool posters). - The record store on state street, getting my first record of my own: Chuck Berry’s greatest hits. - Going to the movies at the State and the Michigan (every Saturday afternoon?). All those 60’s silly movies like the journey into the body, James Bond, etc. Sitting up in the balcony. - Also watching movies at the Y. (I spent a lot of time at the Y, swimming lessons, chess club, Judo) - Passover at the Hillel, Jewish Cultural School on Sundays. - Pizza at Bimbos, birthday parties. - Easter egg hunts with the UofM History department. - Blizzards on Easter and Halloween. - So much snow we couldn’t open the doors and had to climb out the window to start shoveling. A brief account of my last 35 years (written for ****** when he first contacted me). - After Burns Park I went to Tappan for two years, where I got very involved in radical politics (farmworkers union, Human Rights Party), and dropped out in spring of eighth grade to try to live a life of a 20 year-old stoner activist (e.g. hitchhiked to New York and then to Iowa to attend Yippie “smoke-ins”). Perhaps not coincidentally my parents split up that summer and I moved to Boston with my mother and sister, where I refused to attend any school, got a job washing dishes at MIT, and pursued new ways of rebelling. After a year my mom and I moved to Los Angeles, where I landed in a tiny alternative school that saved my life (“Horizons center for the creative arts and humanities” - 65 kids in 4 grades) . There I got deeply committed to jazz music, and discovered other positive aspects to life (hiking, poetry, girlfriends). After two years (10th and 11th grades), the school folded and I moved to New York City to live with my dad (prof at NYU) and be in the jazz capital of the universe. I managed to get accepted into the Friends school in Manhattan (long haired Californian = diversity) for my last year and actually graduated from high school in 1977. I wasn’t interested in going to college (what could they teach me?), and spent the next couple of years studying the saxophone, playing in bands, and working crummy jobs (like bike messenging in Midtown). I finally did enroll in City College, but took only music classes, so after a few semesters they wouldn’t let me register unless I started taking all the other stuff so I dropped out. My music career came to an abrupt halt when the band I was playing in imploded (we got screwed by our coke-dealing manager) at the same time that I got a carpentry job fixing up tenements on the lower east side, which I really enjoyed. One thing led to another and after a couple of years I had a contracting business, specializing in museum exhibition installation. At 25 I realized that going to college might not be the worst thing that could happen to you, and started at NYU (where I could go for free). All along I had been involved in various political causes, and decided that I wanted to be an engineer so that after school I could go live Central America and rebuild all the bridges the guerillas were busy blowing up (after the “inevitable triumph” of the revolutions...). It took 3.5 years of remedial and basic classes in science before they would let me transfer into the engineering program (Cooper Union really), but I finally got a bachelors degree (two actually) at the age of 30. I then moved to Berkeley for grad school in Civil Engineering, and decided not to move to Central America after the Sandinistas got voted out of power. After getting a masters degree, I got a job in San Francisco with an engineering company working on river and wetland restoration projects and then started working for a small non-profit called International Rivers Network, which helps people in developing countries fight big dam projects. I worked at IRN for a few years, traveled all over the world, made lots of trouble at places like the world bank, but missed the student life and the joys of mathematics. So I took a class at Berkeley in Geomorphology (earth surface processes) and had an epiphany. I quit my job and spent the next nine years being a graduate student and learning to be a scientist. My PhD dissertation was on how rivers erode through bedrock, cutting canyons and valleys and limiting how high mountains can be. I developed a theory for how the sediment that rivers carry influences the erosional process, tested it with lab experiments using miniature rivers, and applied my ideas to field sites in California and Taiwan. My first year in my second tour of grad school I had another epiphany, that I loved and wanted to marry a woman I had met years before doing Central America work (luckily she felt the same way), and we got married in 1996. *** moved to Berkeley and a couple of years later went to Stanford, where she got a PhD in environmental science and policy. Our son ***** was born in 2002. Being his dad is the very best thing in life! Now I’m a professor of geology at San Francisco State University (having turned down jobs at a few big research universities to stay in the Bay Area) and *** works at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Berkeley, organizing scientists to change climate policy. At 45 [now 46] I’ve finally reached adulthood, house, kid, job, and I like it very much. I’ve got my hands full right now - I’m responsible for too many people’s work: 11 student researchers at SFSU and 6 at Berkeley and other universities, a post-doc, 3 lab technicians (the lab has grown into a huge affair spread over three buildings), and a bunch of other collaborators clamoring for a piece of my time. Hopefully I’ll find a way to calm down soon and enjoy more time with my family, camping and strolling along the beach...

>=.=<>=.=<>=.=<>=.=<>=.=<>=.=<>=.=<