Wednesday

Aug 1, 2001

glad to be alive

Some days you are just glad to be alive. Can't say as I appreciated that as I should have today. And every day. But others did. FFP. My parents.

I get up and drag myself off to work. I'm feeling a little helpless and overwhelmed there. But I have something I have to finish. That's good in a way. A deadline.

I have lunch with my parents. They are having pimento cheese sandwiches, salad and fruit. They are trying to lose weight. Mom only eats half a sandwich. Dad, too. Dad's shirt is threadbare. It's cooler than his nicer ones, he says.

I help Mom with the Pinball game. I point out some other things to her. Later she will call me at home and ask about a window in her Outlook Express view disappearing. She didn't do anything, of course. Or doesn't realize she might have 'x-ed' a window. She tries to dial out while talking to me on the phone line the modem is connected to. One day she will master it, though. And she does get e-mails sent.

They say that I should take a picture of the old mailbox Dad has that a primitive painter decorated for him. The mailbox was put up by his dad when they first started getting rural postal delivery. I'll bet you didn't know that there wasn't always such. But my grandfather, John William Ball, would have remembered going to town to get mail. In a horse and buggy, too. I shoot some pictures with my digital camera of it, in the blazing sun of the driveway.

At the end of the work day, I'm not quite through with the work I needed to finish. I have had a meeting and an impromptu advice session for a colleague. I talk to Forrest and tell him I'm going to stay until I finish it up.

He says, "Can I have a pizza? I feel like celebrating not being shot thirty-five years ago." All day they have been doing bits on the anniversary of the Charles Whitman UT tower shooting on TV. He's been recording them. I think FFP feels that if he blinks his eyes the last thirty-five years of his life could be blasted away with those of that day's victims. He's written about that day, as most of you know.

"Sure," I say, "Pepperoni, pineapple, onions and garlic?"

"Sliced tomatoes and achovies," he says. All of it, he means. It's a good thing we are married. We are the only two people alive who would eat this pizza.

"I'll open some wine, too." he says.

When I get home, the pizza is there. A salad, too, from Conan's. And a nice red wine. I eat too much pizza and drink too much wine and get a bit of indigestion before retiring. I hate that when that happens.

We recently found old newpapers and clippings during our closet cleaning activity. Seeing Forrest's picture in the August 2, 1966 newspaper, over nine years before I met him (which is over twenty-five years ago now), is so impossibly strange. I'm glad to see that he showed up the next day ready to study, though. Look at that pile of books.

I'm constantly amazed that people see that the world is irrational or silly but they think that only they see through it or only they are affected by it.

The old mailbox, decorated with a farm scene.

detail from the painted mailbox

himself, thirty-five years ago tomorrow photographed by The Austin Statesman

Cut line read: "IN THE AFTERMATH - A visitor to The University of Texas campus Tuesday morning did not have to look far to find this scene repeated over and over: a student sitting alone, reading a newspaper, within view of the tower. Forrest Preece of 4703 Sinclair, a junior student, sat on a wall in front of the Texas Union, reading--but perhaps, like others, not yet fully comprehending--the details of Monday's 90 minutes of terror and tragedy."

JUST TYPING

sniper SWAT swagger swarm smarm sweat swift