This blog has gained vastly increased importance to me in the past few days — a friend of mine (you know who you are!) found me again through it. I haven’t seen him in about 15 years, but judging from his pictures, he is much the same:
- Just as mischievous-looking as ever, and
- Still clearly unworthy of such a magnificent woman as his then-girlfriend, now-wife!
- (I know she agrees with me so quit pouting!)
I met him about 6 months after my son was born. I was an only child, never taken care of a baby, and had had a long, hard delivery capped off with a cesarean at the end, so I was recovering from/learning a lot. “Overwhelmed” don’t half cover it. To top it off, five months after Peter was born, my father died extremely suddenly — “He just fell over dead” about sums it up.
So, about 6 months after Peter was born, I desperately needed a vacation. My friend in Denver said I could come on over, so I did. Denver’s a lovely place, and the loft bed that he’d installed over the washer-dryer set was made ready for me. And by the way, there was this kid he had doing a bit of free-lance work at his computer company….
Four months later, that kid was working for me. The rest is history, or, if not history, too long of a story for me to want to type it all in to the Movable Type screen right now.
I remember that kid playing with my toddler-son, trying to teach him to say “asynchronous system trap.” The kid told me long ago that I’d be a good programmer, if I ever wanted to learn.
Since then, I’ve learned Fortran, Pascal, C, Visual Basic, Scheme, Windoze (sort of… as much as anyone does), VMS, unix, DCL, and now I’m acclimatizing to OSX and Perl.
Perhaps “chance meetings” is the term that we give to the important parts of our lives that, since we were looking for the “important” stuff elsewhere, we paid little attention to at the time.
You know, my son is 17 now, and he still can’t say “asynchronous system trap.”
white pebble 