January 9, 2012
Connections, today

A late start this morning brought me the moonset through the bare maple across the street. The lingering, thin clouds made it look like something from a horror movie, and I thought it’d make a good picture. No way the iPhone could handle it, so I went back in and got the big boy camera with the new lens and the tripod. I had a little time to futz with it while the car warmed up and defrosted. Ultimately, the results were unsatisfying. Even at f/1.4, the computer decided it needed a sixth of second to get enough light, which was long enough for the moon to get lost in the wash of the clouds. Fooling with the ISO and the aperture and whatever else I could move with my rapidly numbing fingers got me no closer.

Ten minutes later, leaving the neighborhood Starbucks, I ran into my old friend and colleague MC. Twelve years ago he was the head of our London office and desperate to get me to move there. I was building a system to trade warrants on the Milan Stock Exchange and he wanted to expand its use widely and rapidly. The LSE, Johannesburg, Amsterdam: we were going to conquer them all with my quoter. The FTSE was heading to 10,000 and we were gonna ride it to the promised land. How Sharon and I fretted over that decision. To leave our families and her career behind, to expatriate to a country I was rapidly falling in love with, to continue my rapid rise in the technology ranks of the world’s largest investment bank. But we’d just adopted an adorable puppy from a farm near Mattoon, and at the time the UK’s immigration policies for pets were brutal. He’d have had to spend six months in caged quarantine far outside the City. We couldn’t do it to the little guy, so we passed. Four months later, the markets crashed and some of the expats were lucky to get their airfare home covered when they got canned.

Forty minutes later, at the office, checking all the usual places before googling how to set up a camera for a good moon shot. Gmail, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, work email, in that order. Some of those will be consulted again through the day, some won’t.  While at LinkedIn, I see they are suggesting I connect with D. I smiled; it is the older, ethnic version of her name she uses now, not the Americanized one I used to call her. According to the site, she has one connection and now they think I should be her second. How the hell can they know? We haven’t talked since before I got married. She must have signed up, like, today, and they know about our past already? Does this thing have a portal to 1991? I’d look at her profile, but they snitch like that and I don’t want her to know I did. Damn them for that.

Maybe an hour later, on Facebook, a link is posted to a nearly defunct group of ex-coworkers. It’s a small industry and we’re mostly all still in it. That was Job Zero. When the world’s largest investment bank finally took their blowtorches to it and cut it up for good, we called it the diaspora. We’re everywhere now, scattered and rearranged a couple of times, but still doing what we do. Some shop had a big layoff last week and we’ll rearrange again. No one ever really leaves. About fifty of us learned an awful thing when we saw that link. A man we knew—a guy I regularly got drunk and argued about the merits of C++ vs. Java with—was suddenly gone. He’s the second guy from that old group to go in this fashion over the last few years. Forty-something, apparently healthy, he said goodbye to his family in the morning and didn’t make it home. * I guess it’s stressful work. I thought about it briefly and shared the link. The service was today, and there was no time to worry about sensibilities or delicately delivering the news.

I went right downstairs to tell P, my boss’ boss, also a refugee from Job Zero, also of the diaspora. He needed to know and he’s not a Facebook kind of guy. I wanted him to hear it from me. I found him in his office and shocked him with the terrible news. He immediately cleared his calendar for the afternoon. I already had.

At some point after that, I had a technical conversation with my guys about providing a Java API for one of our C++ applications. I don’t really remember the details. We’ll get that done. They’re both good languages.

I told a few other people throughout the day. Along the way I learned another old friend’s marriage of 15+ years is over. Amicable, he says.

At four, we’re crammed into an ancient Lutheran church in Wicker Park to watch an American boy and his Canadian mom eulogize their Dutch father/husband. I was irritated, more than I had a right to be, by the underpowered microphone at the altar. I could barely hear the early speakers. Even the settling noises of the wood in the pews was enough to drown them out. But when his son spoke—maybe eight years old? about like mine?—suddenly the incidental motions of asses in seats came to a halt and the wood groaned no more. The silence became the heaviest thing in the room. P, next to me, a man who has shown me tremendous kindness over the course of my career, put a steadying hand on my shoulder at a time when I needed it. Again. A pianist played Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata while we lit candles and greeted the widow. He played it really, really slowly, but it still wasn’t long enough and it ran out before everyone had paid their respects. (He didn’t try the Allegretto.)

Immediately, across the street to an enormous mansion of unknown ownership for memorial drinks. MC, fellow refugee, is there. We remark that twelve hours earlier we greeted each other in a cold parking lot with hot venti Pikes, and now we stood by a warm fire with Maker’s Mark on the rocks. Many faces from the past were there. Here was T, pregnant again, beautiful. I haven’t seen her in five years, so there was catching up to do on kids, work, spouses. She remembered something I wrote a couple of years ago about the acquisition, how it moved her, and how I should think hard about writing for real. She knows I’m not happy doing what I’m doing. P, who clearly heard every word of that conversation, politely pretended not to and changed the subject. She couldn’t know he and I are going out in a couple of weeks to discuss my career over drinks.

Twenty minutes later, I’ve downed my bourbon and I need to get home. I say my good-byes, get my hugs and handshakes and kisses. Walking down Evergreen towards my car, I power up my phone and see that D wants to connect with me on LinkedIn.

I look up to see the moon rising through the telephone wires.

* A couple of days after posting this, I discovered he had committed suicide. Since the original post was a sort of stream of consciousness thing, a brain dump, I’m leaving the original text alone since that’s how I felt at the time, even though it’s not factually true. I thought it was important to add this footnote to correct/clarify.

9:43pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZEG6ZyEY17ym
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(Notes: 36)
  
Filed under: emo personal long 
  1. lefauxfrog said: Lovely. I skimmed the first paragraph before reading the whole piece and it must have inspired my moon post.
  2. christaaland said: Beautiful. Thank you.
  3. hookersorcake said: yeah you should write - you have a clear yet relaxed voice.
  4. scholvin posted this
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