At the bookclub meeting today I talked about how I felt lucky to have been pulled in to the Fuller orbit, given all the other fun satellites I managed to connect with, a process that continues. We all know the phenomenon: shared interests bring people together in a subculture.
Python, the computer language, has been similar. In fact Synergetics is also a computer language, but in the older sense, when humans were still referred to as computers in some roles. Not that silicon circuits aren’t helping; for sure they are (I’m using them now). See: Can’t Fool Cosmic Computer in Grunch of Giants — with Ed’s blurb on the back of the dust jacket).
For example, Ed Applewhite is fresh on my mind as that what I’ve been discussing with other faculty in one of the shared channels today; like about how he and I used to hang out and compare notes.
I also talked about Kenneth Snelson, who never would have reached out to me were it not for my entering his sphere of interest. As it turned out, we became friends. Ed and Kenneth got to meet given they both considered me OK and vice versa. After the bookclub was over, I texted them both links to my Applewhites Visit Oregon web page, and to Ed’s WaPo obit, also linked therefrom.
They seemed interested, as in all these years I hadn’t told any Applewhite stories. I hadn’t met up with these retired librarians yet, when I was pals with “EJ” (I knew “EJ” and a “CJ” — both in the Fuller network).
When Ed and June were here, we hung out with Harold Long, the architect, and student of Frank Lloyd Wright. Harold and his wife Maureen were always talking about Taliesen. I’d been introduced to the Longs through the Boltons, old family friends going back to my parents’ University of Chicago days.
Ed got to meet Matt again, my travel buddy from another chapter, wherein we’d visited Ed in his Georgetown home, and he gifted me with a copy of his Synergetics Dictionary in four volumes.
Matt and I were on a cross-country car trip to take my sister’s car from Montclair NJ to Whittier CA. We stopped off to see Amy Edmondson along the way. She was still at her think tank in New Mexico back then.
I met with Ed in WDC several other times too, including that time he was packing up papers for the Stanford archives. He had an envelope stuffed with stuff I’d sent him over the years, which he allowed me to go through and redact from if I wanted.
That may have been a time when Dawn came with me and toured mall museums, the Native American one especially.
She was in remission and wanted to make sure I got back to DC under happier circumstances, as I’d been in DC earlier when we learned of her terminal diagnosis (IBC) in the first place. Yes, she had a cancer with no cure, but they still had was to extend her life and did so.
She made it to sacred sites in Ireland and England as well (it was during that tour that her symptoms returned).
Partly as a result of my bailing out of a Pycon to fly home in a hurry, with help from friends, I became a figurative radar blip on Steve Holden’s figurative radar, such that at a subsequent Pycon, in Chicago, he and I became friends.
Steve eventually moved to Portland to start his business: The Open Bastion. Then he moved back to the UK, where he was originally from. Steve is the guy who got me that gig teaching Python at the Hubble Telescope headquarters (Space Telescope Institute) at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.
