Praise – Carl Grau
When I married Julie in 1991 I married her family, too: sister Ann, nieces Kim and Laura, father Carl, our Dad. Carl and I admired each other; we had a lot in common. I related to his adventures, his wanderlust and his engineering career. And from Carl Grau, engineer, hero, friend, and Dad, I heard the Elder Praise I needed so much in my younger years. Read more
Elder Praise
I was raised in a family where the Lord, Jesus, God, Heavenly Father and all the rest of the deities were much praised; but where we children rarely received recognition. Enthusiastic Child Appreciation was not the fashion those days as it is now – perhaps that was due to British “reserve”; but likely not. Still, I do not recall pining for recognition as a child. I do remember the joy of minor triumphs stunted by “You should have done better”. Once, a decent school report was defaced by my father’s written recommendation: “This boy needs a good thrashing”. Although thrashings, negative Child Appreciations, were the fashion in those days, I was not caned often at school. That was just as well, since bruising punishments (to flog Satan from my soul) were rendered at home, ending only when I became angry enough in my early teens to fight back, and when my parents separated. Read more
Drs: Suck Your Lollipops
Last Sunday Pablo S. called me to tell me that he is now Dr. Pablo. And he thanked me for steering him firmly to his PhD in Civil Engineering at Stanford University. It was sweet of him to thank me for encouraging him. He is shy to use the Dr. bit but I told him to roll the syllable around his mouth and his mind for a while to savor it.
My friend Adda Z. was was lollipopped today. She walked down the long corridor of the Graduate Division office at Sproul Hall at the University of California, Berkeley to file her PhD dissertation. After a few minutes of rifling through Adda’s lovingly crafted stack of typewriting, the lady behind the counter (no doubt) beamed her smiling approval that Adda’s manuscript conformed to the University’s format requirements. And then the kind lady gave Adda a lollipop in reward for her 4 years of hard labor. So, Adda is now a Dr. of Civil Engineering cum Lollipop. Read more
Rowdy Repulse, with Raw Caribou and Randiness
It was summer, 1970 and I was a member of a Scintrex crew comissioned to fly a geophysical exploration survey in the North West Territories of Arctic Canada. We were based at tiny Repulse Bay, an Inuit hamlet on the Arctic Circle, at the root of the Melville Peninsula. My first impression of Repulse Bay was repulsion. A strong smell of rotting meat blew through the just opened door of the aircraft that flew us into the village. As I soon discovered, the putrefaction wafted from the carcasses of whales, narwhales, and seals strewn on the shore. Narwhale were hunted for their long, twisted tusk, actually a tooth, and used for carving. I once watched a man hack a tooth from a narwhale carcass with an axe: the memory is sickening still. Read more
