Stay With Me

Our last big road trip was to New Orleans this May. Alan invited Laura to come along as well. We took two cars, and drove all the way from Iowa City, stopping in Memphis on the way down, and in Little Rock on the way back up.

On the way down, Mom rode with us for much of the way, and I helped her edit some translations she was working on. Having a blog entry about New Orleans and Memphis without any jazz or blues seems like kind of a travesty, but there really wasn't that much on our trip. There was this, which you could argue fills the role, kind of.

We spent quite a bit of time trying to teach Mom the acceptable pronunciations of the name of the city, New Orleans. We discussed that most northerners used the acceptable "new ORlins" pronunciation, but that "NAWlins" was the local pronunciation, especially casually. We discussed the much debated "new orLEENZ" as likely not acceptable. And that "new OH-lee-ins" was definitely wrong. Other than that, and a few street performers, the closest we got to jazz and blues was when I was whistling this little tune I had stuck in my head. Alan thought it was an old blues classic, and tried really hard to place it, but in truth, it was just from the intro to something very different:

(radio-safe version)
The trip was a blur of activity. We ate Memphis barbecue, boudin, boudin balls, jambalaya, fried chicken, po'boys, and drank hurricanes, even Grandma (especially Grandma?).  I bought pralines for Isabelle. We saw alligators on the bayou, visited the pharmacy museum, went on a cemetery tour, and went to a crawfish boil. For Grandpa's birthday, we got chocolate cake.

One day, I ventured off on my own and went to not one, but two different hot sauce bars. These places had counters full of hot sauces to sample, including ones that required signing waivers. I made a horrible mistake at these hot sauce bars: I tried the waiver-signing hot sauces on an empty stomach. I left to join the rest of the family, and suddenly, a couple minutes after walking out of the store, the mix of habanero, red savina, Carolina Reaper, scorpion pepper, capsaicin aquaresin, capsaicin oleoresin, and  ghost pepper made its way from my well-lined stomach to my not-so-well-lined duodenum. I decided to sit town on the curb outside Jackson Square to let it pass, and it did. So, I got back up and joined Mom and the grandparents at a bar. As they finished and we went to leave, the next batch of hellfire hit my small intestine, and I felt myself being turned inside out from within again. This time, I was afraid I was actually going to pass out from the pain, so I sat down again, and then had to lie down on the sidewalk. Now, the police are pretty used to seeing people lying on the sidewalk in the French Quarter, so they were immediately at my side asking my family if I had been drinking. Mom had to explain that I was a doctor, that I was fine, and that it was hot sauce-related. I got up, and met the rest of the family at the restaurant where I slammed a glass of milk and ate some food. The family asked if I had learned my lesson, and I said I had. I would make sure there was food in my stomach before trying the hot sauces again. I'm not sure if that's the lesson they were talking about.

Alan started his search for tarot cards, but couldn't find what he wanted. He ended up ordering some online, and did many a reading this summer for himself and his friends.
 
One night, we went swimming. Alan had been a competitive swimmer as a kid, but Laura didn't know how to swim, so she waded with us. On the way back up to the hotel rooms, I saw myself in the mirror, and was kind of horrified. My hair had become a stringy wavy mess, my eyes were bloodshot from the chlorine, and I reminded myself of something I had seen before, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Then I remembered.

At 2:09. Yeah, not good.

I had to leave early, so Mom stayed in New Orleans with Grandma and Grandpa, and I left with Alan and Laura. On the drive back, we read stories, entries on this weird website about strange monsters and phenomena, and talked. In Little Rock, we went to the Clinton Presidential Library and Museum.

This trip was an island of getting along in a time of a lot of tension. Alan and Laura, my parents and me, there were lots of things going on. That's not to say that we got along perfectly all the time, but it was nice. We truly got to connect and mend. But, again, it was an island. Afterwards, real life returned, and things fell apart.

I'm slowly learning to be thankful for the good times we had instead of focusing on the fact that they will never happen again. In dreams where I catch glimpses of Alan, he's always having fun, and we're never serious. It's never about him being dead. As much as I long to have another serious conversation with him, maybe these dreams are the universe's way of showing me that he's okay. Or his way of giving me another little good time, even now that he is gone.

From A to Z and beyond?

Okay, this post is a bit different. There's no music. This post is about the other thing we listened to on long road trips: Alan himself. He really liked science fiction, as do I. He would find full text stories and read them to us. Each title below is a link to the text online. I don't know if anyone will actually do this except for me, but try reading these stories out loud and imagine his voice.

Asimov

The Last Question 

In this short story, people ask a computer of their making a question that cannot be answered, or can it? The answer is not 42. Alan read this to me and Isabelle on one of our trips to Wisconsin to see Mom and Dad. This was one of the first.

If you do read it, check out this website.

The Last Answer

This story, published 24 years after the previous story, is about an entirely different question, almost the opposite in fact. Alan read these to us back to back. Despite my extensive Asimov collection, somehow I had missed these gems of his work. Knowing now the questions that were going through Alan's head, I wonder how this darkly humorous take on existence resonated with him.

Nightfall

Read to me and his friend Laura on our way back from New Orleans on our last family road trip. In it, he ponders a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God!

Let's just say that's not how things unfold. This was the last story he read out loud to me. The last line haunts me as I hear it in his voice: "The long night had come again."

Zelazny

The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth

Roger Zelazny is my favorite sci-fi author. This is not his best story. For that, you might want to check out A Rose for Ecclesiastes. These two stories were the pre-Space Age sci-fi era's last hurrah, writings about Venus and Mars at the moment just before we knew what was on them (or what wasn't). This particular short story, The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, stretches the definition of short a bit, but bear with it. To get the full experience, try reading it in a variety of mediocre southern accents, with one of the characters sounding remarkably like Cleveland from Family Guy.

For Isabelle and me, this story, in those voices, is a strong memory of who Alan was -- realizing that the character with the thickest southern accent was from the Midwest halfway through the reading, complaining about the spotty 3G/4G internet access on the road, lines alternating between masterfully delivered and awkward due to trouble reading on a phone screen in a moving car.

Beyond?

Frankly, I don't know what comes next. Reading stories has been hard for me since he left us -- too hard to concentrate. I do see irony in Alan's reading speculative fiction about the distant (on not-so-distant) future when he couldn't even picture his own tomorrow. I think Alan would want us all to look forward, though, in that way that he couldn't.