Yesterday I skied at Santa Fe Ski Basin. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to ski while I was in the Pacific northwest: they didn’t have any snow and I didn’t have nearly enough time. The Ski Basin has quite a lot of snow now, over half of their upper mountain is open. It started snowing a few minutes after I showed up and snowed lightly all day, putting about two inches of snow on the ground while I was there (and making the drive home interesting: the truck in front of me slid off the road, and I saw one big long truck that had clearly done a bunch of circles before ending up in a ditch.) The highlight of the trip was when I got to start fullfilling a New Years resolution: “Learn to talk about my work and physics in terms which are understandable and exciting to the layperson and don’t make me sound like an elitist.” The subject of my first such rant was a yoga instructor who wanted me to explain to him quantum gravity. I gave him this nice beautiful spiel, and just as we were about to get off the lift, he told me about how he was trying to use the concept of a graviton in his yoga: he figured that if you set your body up in the right position you could send out gravitons which were well balanced with the gravitational field of the earth.
The Fireplace
A little over a year ago a massive snow storm had blanketed northern California. The kind of storm that hits the area about once every ten years. Upwards of three feet of snow had fallen in the area around my parent’s home in Yreka, stranding holiday motorists in the metropolis of Yreka because the pass over the hill to Oregon, the Siskiyou summit, was closed. After the roads had opened, my dad decided to check on our cabin outside of the small hamlet of Etna. My dad was always active. Not in that hyper way that shouted out that he needed attention, but in the manner of someone who must have woken up some morning and thought “gee there’s a lot of good stuff to do!” So before my dad left to head over the Forest summet to our cabin, he halled in some logs and kindling from outside, crumpled up newspapers, and set our fireplace ready for a fire. He didn’t light a fire, he just set it up in case my mom or sister might want to start a fire to keep warm.
A year ago today, my dad never returned to light or find a lit fire. He had a heartattack when he arrived at our cabin. It’s a cliche to say it, but there’s not a day that I don’t think about him. My dad was, in many ways, my spiritual mentor (certainly one of the reasons I am not a religious person.) In my parent’s home (my home) until today, we never lit that fire my dad set ready.
Today, as you can surely imagine, was destined to be a tough day for my mom. So she had a brunch with some our close friends and she decided, after a year, to light the fire. At first I was sad for the loss of the symbol of my dad’s love for his family. And then I began to laugh. A good laugh straight from the belly. Because I thought: while many men’s fire goes out the day they die, my dad cheated and his fire got an extra year on life.
Connections
When you are bored, you do silly things. Today I discovered that on quant-ph, I am a coauthor with 18 people who are in turn coauthors with 295 more people.
Happy New Year
If you survive ’til two thousand and five,
I hope you’re incredibly thin.
For if you are stout,
you will have to breathe out,
so the man next to you can breathe in. – Pink Floyd