in memoriam

{i didn't know you. probably never even shared the elevator with you. what i do know i learned from google.}

you were born in 1936. you started collecting old photos after a woman in an antique store gave you a handful upon learning that you collected nothing. that collection grew into over 150,000. you wrote more than 60 books and 300 articles. one of your recent collections was women in photography before 1871.

{my parent's weren't even born in 1936, but you are not quite old enough to be my grandfather either. i collect tea pots and kitchenware and music and books and other random pretty objects. not sure that any of it will become my life's work.}

you were not just some random man out walking his dog.

your dog's name was max, and it is reported he ran back to the building and is responsible for alerting security of the accident (corgis are good dogs). the person responsible is still at large. it is believed he stopped and then sped off. he is described only as a white male with black hair between 28-38 driving a ford taurus. i am sure he is sorry and probably living in great fear.

{it's coming back to me, where I was saturday around 7. we were in emeryville, at the store. it was very quiet when we arrived back home. it makes sense now, but doesn't either.}

you had a passion. you loved life and you lived it. you touched many, and i am sure you will be missed greatly.

{you were my neighbor, but we didn't know each other, and that's sad.}

look both ways (or meanwhile, just outside my front door....)

I found out about this today while riding on the elevator. It was posted in the updates as a "Safety Alert". The rummage sale, however, is still the lead item; this was second to the last. These priorities just seem wrong.

B tried to console me saying that perhaps they didn't want to overwhelm people. But I think that one should be overwhelmed if it isn't safe to walk across the street outside your front door. Especially when you consider that they are trying to make this a town in which its residents can walk across the street and shop, eat, catch a movie, or hang out.

I want to do something, but I am not sure what.

from MSNBC
EMERYVILLE, Calif., 7:09 p.m. PST January 14, 2003 - Police are asking for help in finding the suspect in a deadly hit-and-run crash in Emeryville.

The accident happened Saturday on Christie Avenue, near Powell Street in Emeryville. Peter Palmquist was crossing the street with his dog when he was hit by a car.

He died two days later.

Police say the driver stopped for a moment, then pulled away.

At a news conference Tuesday, Palmquist's fiancee pleaded for help in finding the suspect. "Our family is very sad. We want to get this person out from behind the wheel so it doesn't happen to anyone else," she said.

Police are looking for a light-colored Mercury Sable or Ford Taurus, probably with front-end damage. Anyone with information is asked to call the Emeryville Police Department.

and so it began

About five years ago (almost exactly), I created this little web site (what's amazing is that it is still there!) to see what I could create using switchboard's interface. (This was before blogs, but it is where I came up with the idea for Life on the 27th Floor.) Within a day or so I received an email from a young woman who said she liked my site, was thinking about getting into web design, and wondered if I would answer some questions. She said she was 17 and lived in Maine. She said she was adopted.

My initial reaction was flattery. How cool, I thought, I had a little fan. [Timing is important here. You see, this came on the tail of somehow without my even really knowing what I was doing, having the first site I created being awarded "top 5% of the web" by Lycos (and saved me (at least temporarily) from being fired).] So, yes, my ego was feeling quite stroked.

But then another email came, and something didn't feel quite right. The questions she was asking. They were a little off. I told someone of my suspicions, and the response was that I was just being paranoid. Relax. It's okay. You'd make a good mentor.

Remember, this was five years ago. Instant Messaging was just really coming on the scene. You were lucky if you had 56k. So one day I spied my "droopy" little fan on AOL instant messenger (note: you could use it without being an AOL member, as I wasn't), and we chatted. It was President's Day by this point.

Started off as a pretty normal conversation. We talked about what she was doing on her day off from school, the weather, etc. Somewhere along the line I mentioned that my sister used to volunteer working with the elderly. That's when she typed those words.

"What if I said I was your sister?"

I remember removing my hands from the keyboard, and just staring as she typed and things came flashing across the screen that only the two of us would know. Sisterly secrets. Some deep, all dark.

How do you reply to something like this? I wasn't totally surprised. It was what I had suspected. It also seemed like little had changed in over the decade since we had seen or even really spoken to each other. Lies. Deceit. Manipulation. (She was more like 28, lived in New Jersey, and wasn't adopted.) Did I really want to go down this path?

And yet a part of me was curious. I couldn't deny that I hadn't typed her name into a search engine or two. Why was she choosing to contact me? And why like this?

We actually messaged each other back and forth for a couple of hours that day. Somewhere the transcript exists. It was scary almost seeing how two people who grew up in the same household can have such different memories.

I remember one of the things she asked me was about the quote in my signature file at the time: you wonder how different your life would have been if just one thing, just one little thing, hadn't happened -- Finn, "Great Expectations."
Secretly, I think we all know what I was thinking.

rummage sale alert...file under "good intentions, hell bound"

I want to believe that their hearts are in the right place, but sometimes you really must wonder about the brains of social committee*. (Perhaps they are a little too social when they hold their meetings -- that isn't coffee in that flask is it, Mildred?) Case in point, the upcoming rummage sale.

Sounds like a good idea. Bring the community together, with the added bonus of getting rid of some unwanted junk, um, I mean items, that might be cluttering up your space. Solid start that goes downhill quickly -- hold onto your luge!

To begin with, this is a "closed" rummage sale. That means that only tenants and owners can participate in both the selling and the buying. So much for getting rid of the junk. Let alone the potential issues this could cause: "knock, knock, this toaster you sold me that you said works, burns my bagels -- gimme back my six bucks." [Remember, these are the folks that need security to get involved when they do their laundry and had the radio from the gym removed because no one could agree on a station. Oh yeah lets sell our junk to our neighbors, sing along.]

Of course, they have made arrangements for sellers to donate unsold items to a local charity, which leads me to my next point. If you should sell your stuff, 25% of the sale goes to said charity. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for giving to the needy, but this seems like one of those barriers to getting people to participate. I mean, haven't they heard of eBay? I could be wrong, but I don't think their take is anywhere near that much. Also, this could backfire. What if you sell nothing? Then the charity gets nothing either. Why not make a set fee ($5-$10 like most places do) to set up a table. (Of course as I write this I realize that if you sell nothing, and had to pay $10, it would suck -- but hopefully the idea is to sell stuff.)

I just have a bad feeling about this. There is something about living in close quarters. Psychologists have studied this in great detail. The bottom line is that the more you know about said neighbors, the less you want to socialize with them. So seeing the 70's era lamp that the guy on twenty wants to sell, or his cd collection, or knick knacks (or oh my god, please tell me those aren't his knickers), let alone haggling for a stained sweater from a woman on six, probably isn't going to increase the likelihood that I want to say hello on the elevator, let alone invite them over for tea.

Plus, and here's the real scary thought, there's just something weird about selling stuff to people you might see again. Let's say as an example, that a woman on three sells her pants to a woman on seventeen. One day while walking the dog, the seller sees the buyer in her old pants, except she looks so much better in them! Is this going to make the woman on three feel better, or might security have to hold her back as she lunges for the woman on seventeen?

Of course, this could be marble magnet heaven. Cha-ching! I am so evil, sometimes.

*I know that this could be read, and I could become quite hated in this building. But you know what, part of me really doesn't care. Some people find this funny in a hee hee sort of way. I write for those people that get it.