I am banging this out just to pass on some quick info to someone so you’ll forgive the lack of proofreading. You know who you are. This post will self-destruct in the near future.

After giving it some serious thought, my favorite quote would be a lyric, if that is allowed. It is from Time by Pink Floyd and the lyric is:

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but its sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in the relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

It sounds a little fatalistic or morose, but for me it really sums up the larger message of the song. The complete lyrics, by the way are:

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an off hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but its sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in the relative way, but youre older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the english way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought Id something more to say

He is really talking about the same thing I was in my very first post: You look away for a moment and ten years have slipped past. You can’t wait on someone to tell you to start living. The specific lyric I like paints a picture for me of the daily chase of going to work, racing home, little time left before time to go to sleep, only to do it again the next day; in other words, a rut. In that existence, before you know it you’re at the end of your time here and have nothing to show for it. I don’t mean physical things, I mean emotional ones. Something that will let you die fulfilled, not wanting. I’m not planning my big exit anytime soon mind you but, like retirement, if you don’t plan now there won’t be a later.

So, for me, the song is a motivational one. It reminds me that life can be short and I have to make my own future. Noone is going to do it for me.

Now, on to plane crashes… A little back history first: I’ve been flying light airplanes as a hobby for a number of years now. I am a predictably by the book pilot and consider myself a safe one because of it. I fly the numbers, as they say. I don’t push the envelope unless I have to because the cost of falling outside the envelope is, well, often the highest cost there is.

In aviation there is a longstanding tradition of the “$100 hamburger” It is basically something you do when you just want to go out and fly but don’t have any reason to. You fly to another small airport and grab a burger at the airport restaurant. Airport restaurants usually have *really* good burgers, by the way. The joke is that you pay $10 for the burger and $90 to get there, hence the $100 hamburger. Well, on a nice April day 6 years ago I decided I wanted a $100 hamburger.

My home airport is Briscoe Field/Gwinnett county Airport (LZU) mainly because it is very convenient to where I live. 10 to 15 minutes depending on traffic. I was going to go up there and fly down to Peachtree DeKalb Airport (PDK) which is only about 30 minutes from my house in the opposite direction. Rachel wanted to go along with me. I should add that her mother, who is deathly afraid of little planes, really didn’t want her to go but acquiesced after my barrage of safety stats on aviation showing how safe it was. She still didn’t like it.

My original plan was to rent a Cessna 172 for the flight. I was and am still good friends with Matt, the guy who taught me to fly, so I called him up and asked if he’d like to come along. In the time since Matt instructed me he’d gone on to become the chief pilot of a small charter operation that operated out of LZU. He agreed and suggested I take their Piper Aztec, which is a 6 seat twin engine craft. You see, small airplanes are all air cooled and their engines run at near maximum output the majority of the time they are running. As a result, they can be a little finicky. I mean, if you get it running it rarely quits, but if you leave them sitting unused too long they tend to give you problems starting. Gremlins love an idle plane. Since the charter operation had a Queen Air which is a cabin class aircraft and the Aztec, the Aztec almost never got used. It was really more of an emergency backup in case the Queen Air was out of commission unexpectedly or they had a scheduling conflict. Since the Aztec hadn’t been flown in almost two weeks it really needed to be used. So Matt suggested I take it on a ‘stir flight’ instead of renting a plane. Basically, it just needed to be flown.

Delighted at the turn of events because (a) My burger cost just dropped back down to $10 and (b) multi-engine time is hard to come by as a recreational pilot, I accepted his offer. Rachel and I went to the airport a short time later, pre-flighted and off we went. Since PDK is very close and the Aztec is pretty fast we were there in no time.

An important tangent here is that I hate flying into PDK. It is the second busiest airport in the state, behind only Atlanta Hartsfield International (which holds the record as the busiest airport in the world), but some of their controllers are inept in my experience. This isn’t unfounded either. They’ve given me bad instructions a couple of times before, the worst of which was clearing me to land on a runway that they’d already cleared a Hawker jet to land on. I turned final while the jet was still out of sight but it didn’t take him long to catch me. My approach speed in a Cessna is around 65MPH, his is closer to 200. Luckily he saw me and aborted his landing. He passed so close over me that I could hear his engines over my own and could have done a fairly thorough inspection of his aircraft if I coulda kept up. In other words, they came close to killing both me and those in the Hawker.

One other important note is that the Cessna is a fixed gear aircraft, meaning the wheels are always down, they don’t retract. The Aztec, on the other hand, has retractable gear.

So, anyhow, we call into PDK tower and get landing clearance to runway 20L, also known as their “long runway”. Unfortunately, in their ineptness, they’d cleared us in too close behind a much slower airplane. They only noticed this when we were a touch over a quarter mile out. Considering my approach speed was in excess of 100MPH, that isn’t very far. I’d dutifully done my pre-landing check list earlier which included, among other things, pulling back power, rolling out flaps and dropping the landing gear which includes checking for “three good green” lights that show they are down and locked.

Well, when the dummies in the tower realized their mistake they quickly told me to give them a ‘right 360 for spacing’. In other words, fly a big circle off to your right to give the other guy time to get off the runway. The problem with that is that I’m already at almost treetop level and I am set up for descent. That means that I have power pulled back to nearly idle, and the plane is flying dirty (an aviation term for wheels out, flaps out which increase drag which slows you and makes the plane aerodynamically ‘dirty’) which makes even leveling out and holding altitude impossible, much less turning. So I had no choice but to retract gear and flaps as I shoved both engines to full power to arrest my descent. I flew the 360 they requested but now came out at 1/4 mile from the threshold with no landing prep done. In retrospect, I should have called no-joy and gone around, but hindsight is always 20-20, isn’t it?

So as I leveled out from the turn I did a VERY rushed pre-landing checklist. Basically power back, wheels down, full flaps and carb heat on. I heard the gear cycle out so I moved on and didn’t wait for the 3 good green; I didn’t have time to anyhow. That should have been my first clue this landing was dumb. You should always have time to check those lights if you do nothing else.

I am crossing the threshold as I complete the rushed checklist list from memory and I settle in to land. Takeoffs and landings are statistically the most dangerous times in any flight by far even under ideal circumstances. Under mine, it was ridiculous. I bled off speed and began to flare and ease onto the ground. Since the Aztec is a low wing plane (wings are under you, not over you like in a Cessna) the tips of the props are not much more than a foot off the ground once you land. Well, I’m doing 100MPH over a very large expanse of featureless concrete so depth perception can be tricky.

At about the time I though ‘Wow! I must’ve really greased that one on. Didn’t even feel the wheels touch’ I heard the first prop tip strike the concrete. I knew immediately what it was and went into oh-*#&% mode. Once you have a prop strike, there is no way to get back of the ground. You are committed. I shifted my concentration then to keeping the plane on the runway center-line since, getting off in the grass gives the plane things to dig into and start flipping. Not good. As various parts of the plane came into contact with the ground it yawed wildly from side to side. My only defense was the huge rudder on the Aztec so I pushed those peddles like my life depended on it, because it might. While we are sliding down the runway (we went close to 2000 feet and it felt like it took about 45 minutes!) Rachel (13 at the time) was going “daddy, is this normal?” to which I gave the universal not now hand signal.

As soon as we came to a halt I grabbed Rachel and almost threw her out the door (which was on the right side of the fuselage) and rushed out behind her. I grabbed her and ran several hundred feet since all the fuel is stored in the wings that I’d just drug for 2000 feet or so. And since we’d had a very short flight they probably still held around 130 gallons of quite flammable avgas. I don’t need to describe what would happen if it ignited. It didn’t. Fortunately the fuel cells held and we had not so much as a drop leak.

That few moments (as well as the next couple of hours too, I guess) was surreal. I stood on the grass beside the runway looking at my airplane sitting on the ground, the last 8 or 10 inches of each prop blade bent straight back. There was complete silence for a few moments before hearing the distant drone of the fire gear being rolled out. Moments later there were two large airport firetrucks bracketing my plane and people were asking lots of questions.

It was 4 hours before the plane could be moved because the FAA and NTSB had to send investigators out before anyone could mess with it. And it was Friday afternoon. And I’d just shut down the long runway for the rest of the afternoon. And the long runway is the only one long enough for most of the business jets there to take off from. And it is the second busiest airport in the state. Yeah, I made a few people mad.

There is an old saying in aviation: “Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing. Any landing where you can use the plane again is a great landing.” While I did manage to honor the other big pilot’s adage “shiny side up, dirty side down” I failed miserable on the “great landing” test. The airplane never flew again.

I called a flying buddy of mine while I was standing out there waiting and it went like “Hey, what’s up?”, “Oh, I’m down at PDK”, “Oh? grabbing a burger?”, “Weeeelll. That was the plan anyhow”, “huh?”, “Well, I just had my first landing that was good, but not great.”, “?!?!?!?!”

While standing there I looked up and saw the channel 46 news chopper hovering a mile or so out with their cameras trained on us. Great. Last thing I need is for Rachel’s mom to see us on the news over the heading ‘Plane crashes at PDK’. I dreaded that call, but I made it.

Second only to that call was the one for the ride home. We called the owner of the airplane (who I’d never met) and he headed over to pick us up. I wasn’t looking forward to that. At that point I could only assume I’d forgotten to deploy landing gear in the rushed pre-landing setup and had just effectively totaled a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of airplane. And the owner of said plane was coming to pick me up. Hmmm.

He arrived and ran out to where we were, which was illegal. The runway he crossed on foot to get out there was an active, in use one and the tower was far less than amused. I don’t think I had them in a good mood to begin with. Again, oops. Well, the owner was gracious and more concerned for our well being. I thought “Man, what a magnanimous guy”. At least until we got to his car. There he turned almost jubilant. Yeah, that’s right, he was happy. Turns out he’d been trying to sell the Aztec for close to eight months and I’d just effectively sold it to the insurance company for him. Never know what life is gonna throw your way, huh? Walking out through the flight ops center full of people gawking at my plane as it was hauled in on a 4 wheel dolly, all of them assuming it was my mad skillz that put it there, was a bit of a walk of shame, but nothing I could do about that.

I was much relieved when the investigation later revealed that I had deployed the landing gear but, due to a hydraulic pressure leak they only came a few inches out. They were still almost horizontal. They did just enough to let me hear the thump and ensuing wind noise to make me think they were down. They wrote it up as an incident rather than an accident which will keep my insurance rates from going up. Yay. I only had to go fly a couple of touch and gos with an FAA inspector in a retrac aircraft to satisfy them that my cockpit management abilities were sufficient. He passed me after the first. Ironically, the only one to get into any trouble with the FAA was the owner of the airplane for his running into a controlled movement space without clearance. Go figure.

I guess I can mark plane crash off my to-do list. I later tried to tell Rachel’s mom that now she was really safe flying with me because, statistically speaking, the odds of that happening twice were almost nil. I am the safest guy in the world to fly with now. She wasn’t buying. I flew Rachel anyhow. Just how life is sometimes, right? I’ll say this much; at least it was a memorable day.

/g

There is nothing like a good old-fashioned road trip to break up the daily doldrums, at least not as far as I’m concerned. I’ve had the mixed good fortune to take several lately for work. I say mixed because, while I had the fun of the trips, they each involved a few days away from my family. Negatives aside, I have to say that getting paid to spend the day driving and chillin’ out is rather cool. It is on one of those trips that I got the idea for this post.

As I’ve mentioned here a few times before, I like music a lot. And though I’ve alluded to it, what I haven’t said directly is that I like my music loud. Really loud. If my mirrors aren’t vibrating with the bass line I’m not entirely happy generally. I like it that way so much that on one of those recent trips I managed to cook the voice coil of a rather substantial subwoofer. Oops. So for me road trips are a rolling concert, hold the lights and crowd. I’m generally in a great mood when I arrive and sometimes wish the drive were longer.

I just cruise along and move from song to song, style to style, depending on my mood. At any given time I may be listening to anything from any number of metal bands to Suzanne Ciani to Moonlight Sonata and anything between. And as much as I pick my music to match my mood though, I find the inverse of that to be true, and perhaps moreso; music sets my mood to a large extent.

Reggae, for instance – in particular that of the steel drum variety – never fails to put me in a good mood. A lot of new age music, like Enya for instance, leaves me in a quiet introspective mood and upbeat, happy songs like Colbie Caillat’s Bubbly tend to cheer me up unless I am in an especially bad mood. Similarly, any music that really tells a story tends to draw me in and carry me wherever that story goes. If you’ve ever sat and listened – really listened – to The Wall from Pink Floyd then you know what I mean. The entire album tells a story. It takes you on a roller coaster of emotions. Unfortunately it spends a lot of that time in a dark, despondent place and tends to leave me there so I don’t listen to it now.

Then there are songs that affect me more profoundly because of specific memories associated with them. Songs that were out during an especially good or bad time in my life tend to bind to those times and encapsulate those emotions. Each subsequent time I hear those songs I relive those emotions to varying degrees. I am working on another post specifically about those, in fact.

Then there are songs that impact me the most because they resonate with me so completely. Much like acoustic resonance, those songs play to some natural tendency in me that, in turn, amplifies the feelings associated with the song. They find me where I live. With Arms Wide Open by Creed became one of those songs when my son was born. Specific lyrics in that song (“With arms wide open, Under the sunlight, Welcome to this place, I’ll show you everything” and “If I had just one wish, Only one demand, I hope he’s not like me, I hope he understands, That he can take this life, And hold it by the hand, And he can greet the world, With arms wide open…”) strike a chord in me. They remind me of my responsibilities as a father and make me want to spend more time with Justin. It reminds me at a level much deeper than the specific lyrics that I will be the one who defines for him the things that a man should be. What an awesome responsibility.

And, having two daughters, I didn’t stand a chance against Bob Carslile’s Butterfly Kisses. I had to pull off the road the first time I heard that song on the radio (literally) and I’ve never once gotten through it with any less than sniffles; and I’m not an especially emotional person. I can watch Top Gun or Rudy either one without shedding a tear but with both of my baby girls bedtime really has always been that sort of quiet time where you just get to be together and talk that means so much to any father. The fact that both of my daughters gave (give) me butterfly kisses and the fact that, while saying their nightly prayers with them my prayer, without fail, has silently been one of thanks, only makes it worse. And now, I am looking at my beautiful 19 year old who is spreading her wings and stepping out on her own even as I write this. I look back at her childhood and try to hold on to the many warm memories while fighting back the regrets; the woulda, shoulda, couldas. And the thought that I will have to walk each of them down the aisle one day nearly kills me, but I digress. Had I the been given the gift to write music, that song is exactly what I would have written. Exactly.

So, factoring in all of those different effects music has on me, I’ve learned to be careful about what I listen to and when. I know that sounds silly, but its true.

Not only does music set my mood, but one one of my many road trips I accidentally discovered that it seems to control my truck as well. Well, indirectly, anyway. I should share credit for that discovery with officer Davis of the Simpsonville, SC police department, who first noticed the phenomenon and stopped me to point it out. It seems that some songs to make my truck go faster while others seem to slow it down. It was the former effect that officer Davis initially observed. I haven’t quite worked out the physics around it yet, but I feel certain the work that CERN is doing with the new Large Hadron Collider will probably yield the final pieces of that particular puzzle. I can hardly wait.

Since they will probably work on discovering the Higgs boson and working out that whole supersymmetry thing first, it could be some time before they get around to working out my problem. Because of that and the fact that I feel this is too important to remain uninvestigated, I’ve begun devising a series of experiments of my own. They are more closely related to applied physics rather than the theoretical physics bits those CERN guys will have to work out.

I need a larger sample size to derive statistically meaningful results, but here are my preliminary findings: Certain characteristics of songs tend to cause my vehicle to accelerate, decelerate or remain at a constant velocity. I say vehicle rather than truck because initial tests seem to show that it applies to the other vehicles I’ve tested it in as well. I will conduct a double blind experiment at some point in the future to validate those findings.

The results so far seem to indicate a complex interaction between beats per minute (BPM) as well as prominence of a distinct bass line in a given music sample and the volume at which the piece is played with the speed of the vehicle. It would seem that an increase in any of those factors raises the vehicle’s speed. An increase in more than one simultaneously seems to elicit an exponential increase. This has been observed and experimentally verified using a number of test samples including Propane Nightmares* by Pendulum, Supermassive Black Hole* by Muse, Paralyzer by Finger Eleven and Beverly Hills by Weezer.

As nature tends to favor a bell curve over a catenary one, the vast majority of music tends to fall somewhere in the middle. As the data set builds, certain songs are emerging as the true center of the bell. I have termed those ‘cruising’ songs. They include such songs as 1,2,3,4 for The Plain White T’s, I’m Yours by Jason Mraz and You and Me by Lifehouse. Those that seem to be settling to either side of center are too numerous to list.

The ability to slow my vehicle seems to be a recessive characteristic. Only those exhibiting the lower limit extremes seem to have any decelerating effect and even then not reliably. The songs in that class are similar in characteristics of Suzanne Ciani and Enya’s more common fare. It should be noted that the results are within the margin of error thusfar, leaving open the possibility that any decelleration observed could be simple coincidence.

An interesting, but possibly unrelated phenomenon has been observed in one instance. My vehicle experienced similar unplanned acceleration on the way to the hospital with my wife while she was in labor with Courtney. The vehicle reached extreme speeds as contractions neared a one minute interval. It should be noted that no music was being played at the time. The working hypotheses is that the rapidly increasing rate of contractions over the course of the half hour drive acted through the same mechanism that allows higher BPM in music to result in vehicle acceleration. We are unable to test under those conditions again (ever), but use that as an anecdotal data point in hopes that it might later reveal something we haven’t yet observed. I hold out hope that if the cause of either of these unusual phenomenon are revealed they may prove to share a common origin.

In the absence of theoretical support, experimental work will continue on future road trips. I will report results as they become available. It should also be noted that officer Davis has requested payment of $124 for his contributions to this effort in lieu of receiving credit when the final paper (tentatively titled “Radio Control: The link between musical characteristics and the velocity of various vehicles”) is released to the journals for further peer review.

/g

* The video for propane nightmares initially seems to be mocking religion but, after watching the entire thing, seems to more be making a statement on the lunatic fringe cults that have made the news over the years. You will have to decide for yourself. Muse’s video is just… well… bizarre like so many videos out there these days.

For as long as I can remember I have always been a verbal chameleon. That is, without any conscious effort I conform to those around me. Well, I guess it extends beyond verbal. It extends to facial expression, general posture and physical mannerisms as well. And if I’m exposed to a group of people with similar attributes for any extended period it actually takes a day or two for me to shed the last remnants of that absorbed behavior. Christy tells me that when I come home from a week long trip to Dallas I am decidedly Texan for a day or so.

If you talk to me when I’m “just me” I don’t have any discernible accent, or so I’m told. I may speak a little too fast for all but New Yorkers but I otherwise come off as very Midwest. I’m not though, I’m from the South. The deep South. My only tell is the occasional “y’all” or “fixin’ to” but at least I don’t drawl them.

As soon as I am around someone else, however, I begin to pick up their patterns of speech, vocabulary and mannerisms. It isn’t an overt, over the top imitation, mind you, just a subtle mimicry. Funny thing is, it isn’t something I do consciously and I don’t do it at all with close friends or family. In fact, it is so subconscious that, in the rare instances it has been pointed out to me that I am doing it, I have a hard time recognizing it unless some specific thing I’m doing is singled out.

I’ve heard of other people doing the same thing, though infrequently. At least, not to the degree that I do. And I’ve had people imply or outright say that it is a form of deception but they are way off base. It isn’t even close to that. Even in cases where deception would gain me nothing I still do it. Besides, I think deception is inherently an intentional act. The behavior I’m describing doesn’t cross the conscious plain anywhere.

Several years ago a good friend who majored in theater told me there was a name for it: memisis. It is a greek word that loosely translates to “imitation” but is more accurately defined as “the art of imitation through physical and vocal means.” And the term has some place in theater obviously, but it only partially describes my behavior. Most typically, mimesis is thought of as an intentional imitation unlike my unintentional mimicry. Actors employ the concept and some self-help job books will tell you it is a useful interview tool. If the interviewer leans forward, so do you. If he speaks slowly and softly, so do you. If he smiles, you smile. And so on.

That never quite satisfied me as an answer, though, because it only answered the how, not the why and, to be honest, the why was always the part that puzzled me. Because of that long held curiosity on the subject, I was pleasantly surprised last week when I stumbled on a study entitled “The Chameleon Effect: The Perception-Behavior Link and Social Interaction” that is entirely related to the phenomenon. The principals set out to experimentally evaluate it. As most scientific papers are, it is a bone dry read so I’ll save you the effort and summarize.

The Chameleon Effect is a “nonconscious mimicry of the postures, mannerisms, facial expressions, and other behaviors of one’s interaction partners”, “Mimicking speech patterns, slang, accent, posture, pace, tone and even facial expressions.” Surprisingly, at least to me, the study showed that almost everyone does it. It is just pre-wired human behavior evidently. Most people just do it to a very small degree. It is equated to a form of “social glue” and that makes sense.

But that they found that most people unconsciously mimic those around them in very minor ways is interesting, it doesn’t explain why I do it to the extent I do. Well, the study also found that “dispositionally empathic individuals exhibit the chameleon effect to a greater extent than do other people” and that “the mere perception of another’s behavior automatically increases the likelihood of engaging in that behavior oneself.” Ah-ha. Now we’re getting somewhere.

I believe I am empathetic by nature or, as they put it, dispositionally empathetic so that would likely be a part of it but the second factor they listed was far more interesting to me. That the act of noticing others’ behavior makes you more likely to imitate it is huge in my case. I am a people watcher to a fault. For as long as I can recall I’ve practically studied those around me. Not what they look like but who they are.

I’ve always said that I would make a terrible witness in an investigation because I don’t notice even the most fundamental things about the appearance of others. I can spend a day with a customer and could usually only give you a vague impression of their physical appearance at the end of the day. I might know their hair color, but I am far more likely to have just an impression of light or dark. You can be 100% certain I won’t know their eye color unless they were especially striking. The shape of their face or the line of their nose or mouth? Forget about it. In fact, I can only tell you the eye color of a couple of my coworkers even and I see them every day; and that’s just because they are Finnish and striking blue eyes is a common characteristic among Fins.

Now, if you want to know if someone has a nervous tick or uses some idiosyncratic phrase, I’m your guy. Those are the things I notice about people. Physical characteristics are secondary. My memories are populated with things people said or ways they said them rather than with their hair color or outfit. I will certainly be able to tell you that person x had a warm, open smile but don’t ask me to describe it to a sketch artist.

That lack of attention to physical attributes has landed me in trouble more than a few times, particularly with those of the opposite sex. Failing to notice a girlfriend’s new outfit: bad. Failing to notice her hair color changing: really, really bad. It’s not that I didn’t know her hair color, and I noticed peripherally that something had changed, it just didn’t register enough importance mentally to stop and try to figure out what. As pretty as her hair was, I wasn’t with her for her hair. Oh, and we are talking shades of color, not major color changes in my defense.

As a result, I’ve learned to compensate for that behavior with those closest to me. I consciously take note of my wife’s and kids’ appearances and make sure to comment when something notable changes. Of course, that has backfired a couple of times too. I once complimented my wife on how nice a new outfit looked only to be informed it was not even close to new and that she had worn it several times before. Oops. Guess those were on my off days. Can’t win for losing, I tell ya. If anything, that conscious effort feels closer to deceptive because it feels “put on”, though I know it isn’t. I’m not a total clod, by the way. If Christy looks especially nice I notice it, I just don’t track the little stuff.

So I am relieved to finally have some “closure” on the issue and it is nice to know that I’ve been scientifically proven not to be a freak. Well, at least not on the basis of my mimicry of others. There are likely other criteria I wouldn’t fare so well with, but I digress. So now I have proof that it isn’t an intentionally deceptive act should the need arise and, more importantly, I can stop wondering about it and just go with it. Now, if could just shake this darn southern accent I picked up in Charlotte this week…

/g

Every once in a while our own mortality is brought uncomfortably close to the surface. Sometimes it is from a loved one passing away, but more often it is from someone we know with whom we have a lot in common dying unexpectedly. You can’t help but think that it could have been you. And sometimes – just sometimes – it is from a completely unexpected source. I had just such an experience last night.

I’ve been going to a digital photography competition site called dpchallenge for several years (my profile is here). It is unlike any site I’ve ever been involved with in that it has the strongest sense of community of any virtual group I’ve seen. I’ve seen the group come together and collect donations to finance a cross country trip for a member whole adult daughter was in the hospital on the opposite coast. I’ve seen them start an impromptu contest with an entry fee (there normally is none) with all the proceeds going to replace a camera that had been stolen from one of the members. I’ve seen members pool frequent flier miles to get a mother who was in bad financial shape to her daughter’s wedding. There have been many other similar instances. In every case more funds were raised than was needed. It is just that tight of a group.

Life has been busy for the last several months so I’ve not been on there much before last night, so it was with much sadness that I learned one of the members had died unexpectedly. His name was Sean Matos and he went by JawnyRico on the site. He was an amazing photographer but, more importantly, a great guy. I was caught by an unexpected wave of emotion on reading that he’d died. It was made worse by the fact that he was only 27.

I’m not sure why it affected me as strongly it did because I didn’t know him personally. I really only knew about him from discussion threads in which he has participated and photos he has entered in various contests but I had seen enough to know that he was a good guy and was well liked. So I went on to read the thread discussing his passing. The outpouring of grief from people who had never met him in person was touching and was frankly getting to me when a post stopped me cold. His wife, who wasn’t involved in the site, logged into his account and posted to the thread. Even in her obvious grief she’d taken the time to come there to thank everyone for their support and condolences. It was touching beyond words. Here is her post:

This is Melissa, Sean’s wife. Wow. I am so amazed to see what all of you thought of his beautiful photographs. I always knew how talented and special Sean was, and how his gifts could touch people’s lives. It truly takes my breath away to see how much he meant to so many of you. The latest challenge “The Cowboy” being in honor of my husband, means so much to me. He loved photography. It was such a passion of his. We spent hours together working on these photos and traveling to different places to take them. I will miss that. Thank you so much for all your love and support through this time. It is a huge loss in my life. The love of my life, and my forever best friend is no longer here. I pray that I get through this with the support of my family here and the wonderful support from all of you. Thank you so much for helping Sean and honoring him now.

I love you all!!

I went from choked up to tearful then I read on. As the thread unfolded the site admins made his profile a permanent page as a memorial and his wife returned to say that she was taking up photography as her way of staying connected with her late husband. She created her own profile and for a user name chose “Luvagirl”, a nickname her husband had given her back when they were just dating which was evidently when they were 15 or 16. I’m can’t find the words to express how moved I was. I then went to his profile page to look at some of his work. I’d always liked his stuff but hadn’t really looked at it as a single body of work before. Before I ever got to the photos I made the mistake of reading his profile. In part it read:

Love two things, my wife Melissa, and photography. Found this site and it rocks with all the talent, info, learning, and incredible photographers of all types. Hope to learn lots with editing and improving my people shots. Always remember to never take life to seriously, nobody gets out alive anyway. Thanks for stopping by, and we hope you shop with us again soon.

Signature – Last night I lay in bed looking up at the stars in the sky and I thought to myself, where the heck is the ceiling.

How prophetic and how terribly sad. I was far from together after reading all of that but then I noticed the user status on the profile. Every profile shows the same line but I never thought much about it until this time. It read:

Status: User is currently offline

I don’t ever recall something so innocuous eliciting the emotional reaction that single line did. It connected with me somewhere deep within and left me completely wrung out. I feel more like I’ve lost a family member than someone I knew of online. And I keep thinking that, but by the grace of God that could be me. As I sit here in need of a tissue I find that I cannot fathom what his wife must have had to endure. My heart goes out to her. I’ve included a few of his pictures below as my own little tribute to him but it hardly seems enough. Perhaps the bigger tribute is in taking his advice: never take life to seriously, nobody gets out alive anyway.

/g

Click on the images to see the originals complete with his commentary.

The title of this shot is “Forever Best Friends”. The same term his wife used to describe their relationship. How poignant.

I’m supposed to be at home now, sleeping in my own bed. Instead I’m staying in my home away from home, also known as the Marriott. At least I have status here so I get chocolates on my pillow. Be thankful for what you have I guess.

I am in Charlotte, NC doing some work for Xerox at the moment. I was supposed to wrap up here Wednesday afternoon and head home but, alas, it wasn’t meant to be. Technical gremlins (powered by Microsoft, of course) reared their ugly heads and I’ve had to extend until tomorrow. Or should I say later today. You know, being in a hotel isn’t so bad if you are expecting it but having the rug yanked out at the last second just sucks.

note: If you are waiting for the actual point of this post, wait no more. You’ve just seen it. I’m just in a cry-baby mood and wanted to complain a bit. I’ve accomplished what I came for. You may be excused with the court’s thanks.

I just grabbed a bite at the Jack in the Box up the street. Not because I have any love for Jack in the Box, mind you, it is just the only place open in the middle of the night. If you’ve not had the pleasure of eating their food in the middle of the night let me save you the trouble. Don’t. Not that their food is that great in the daytime either, but it is especially toxic at night. I should have know something was up when I saw they had a Pepto-Bismol shake on the menu. OK they don’t, but they should.

The one bright spot is that a good friend saw in my Twitter feed that I was going to be stuck here another night (yes, I complained there first) and, having pity for a poor wayward traveler, popped online to say hello and chat for a while. The companionship was greatly appreciated. It brightened my night immeasurably. Thanks!

I checked into my room this evening after leaving Xerox and, next thing I know, I’m waking up at something after 10. Someone must have crept in and struck me in the head or hit me with chloroform or something. I feel certain of it. I recall walking into the room and dropping my bags then I remember sitting on the edge of the bed. Then, pow! I woke up. Either way, my sleep schedule is completely hosed now. Oh well, that is tomorrow’s problem, er, later today’s problem. Guess I’ll wander off and see if I can grab another couple of hours before morning. Ciao!

/g

On the way to work this morning I hit a slowdown in traffic and noticed everyone merging into the right lane just ahead. As I crested the small rise I saw why. A small pickup truck was on its side across the road, blocking the suicide lane and the inner lane on my side of the road, the top of the truck facing traffic. The accident had happened recently enough that no emergency response of any sort had arrived yet but, more notably for me, no one else had stopped either. From the time I saw the truck to the time I got there something close to 100 cars passed it. Everyone was just merging over to get around the truck and go on with their day. Well, that isn’t entirely accurate, I guess. There were a few people who had pulled over into an adjacent parking lot and were sitting in their cars gawking. I got the distinct impression they were wishing for some popcorn. Now, I’m no physician and I knew that there was probably nothing I could do to help the person in that truck, save for providing a little company until help arrived but I stopped just the same.

While this particular incident set a new low (though not by much) it was hardly an isolated case. If only it were. A couple of years ago while driving down I-185 in Columbus, GA I noticed a car up ahead on the right shoulder with someone standing behind it. As I got closer I saw that it was a grandma-mobile, complete with grandma standing behind it. With the trunk open. And all her groceries out on the ground. And grandma trying feverishly to get the tire out of the well in the trunk. Unfortunately it outweighed her so she didn’t seem to be making much headway. Oh, did I mention it was June?

You don’t have to be Matlock to deduce a few things about this scene. Grandma had gotten a flat tire and pulled over and she had been there long enough to unload a considerable load of groceries, remove the jack and attempt to get the tire out, several times from the looks of her. So she’d been standing there in near 100° heat with humidity hovering around 95% (welcome to summer in the South) while many hundreds, or perhaps thousands of cars passed her by. And when I say grandma, I mean really, obviously, very much a grandma. She was perhaps seventy and all of 4’8″. Very threatening, lemme tell ya.

Traffic was anything but light and I was four lanes away (in the fast lane, big surprise) so I was unable to safely get over and stop to help her. Having noticed the conspicuous shortage of help, I went to the next exit about a mile up, doubled back and drove the five miles back to the previous exit and circled back to find her still standing there, still trying unsuccessfully to get the tire out of the car. All of that took me more than ten minutes and she was still there alone. I suspect it took me longer to get back to help her than it did to change the tire and have her on her way, melted ice cream and all. And when I initially approached her she offered to pay me to change the tire for her. Pay me. Really. There was no possible way I would’ve accepted her money. Even if I had been so inclined to I’m pretty sure my grandma Mead, rest her soul, would be waiting for me in heaven to grab me by my ear and give me a long talkin’ to, complete with disappointed look. Trust me when I tell you, you don’t want to experience that.

Then there was the lady and her six year old that Christy and I stopped to pick up. They had already gotten over a half mile down a busy highway from their broken down car without anyone stopping. And the time that Christy’s car died in the road at a busy intersection with a then 3 year old Courtney in the car. I was out of town and AAA takes forever to respond in this area so there she sat, half in the road, for over an hour before someone stopped to at least help her push the car completely clear of the traffic lane. That good soul was an elderly gentleman on his way home from his dialysis treatment.

And on and on it goes. I guess I really shouldn’t be shocked. I’m suppose this is not a new problem. You only have to look as far as the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke to know that there have always been those happy to pass by on the other side of the road from someone in need.  Even so, I still can’t get past incidents like these. I mean, don’t we all have grandmothers? Can’t we all imagine it might be us in that overturned truck one day? Can’t we all recognize that it could just as easily be our wife and child? Very, very few things in life truly, completely elude my understanding, but I’m afraid this does.

And I’m not relating these stories to cast myself as some wonderful person. That would be a little like bragging about not beating up the weak kid or not robbing a bank. What I did in both cases cost me nothing but a small amount of time and neither in neither case did I do anything that I would consider beyond the barest minimum of what passes for humanity. And, unless it was jerk’s only day on the interstate (kinda like ‘couples only’ or ‘backwards only’ skate at the skating rink) and I just missed the announcement, I’m reasonably sure that many people who otherwise pass for “good people” drove past that day. They must have. I can only suppose that each rationalized why they couldn’t stop. I really don’t know.

The good news in this case is that the guy in the truck had already climbed out with nothing more serious than the stray scrape or bruise and grandma suffered nothing beyond they previously mentioned loss of ice cream but either case could have ended much worse. I could understand someone not stopping to help, say, me. I’m a big guy who might be up to no good. But, c’mon, an eldely lady? A mother and child? Someone in an over-turned vehicle? And all in very busy public places. If someone can explain this to me, please do. As it stands now, I can only shake my head in dismay. The Good Book tells us that the Good Samaritan was a helpful neighbor to the man who had been robbed and enjoins us to “Go and do likewise.” Am I the only one that finds it a little depressing that we should even have to be told?

/g