21

I'm still not sure quite how I managed it,
but I somehow talked my parents into giving me
the family van for two weeks that spring,
two long weeks that stretched into three.

It was my best friend Tim and me--
we'd been missionaries together in Idaho--
returning to the scene of the crime
visiting all the families we used to know.

No doubt I got the van because of that girl,
Miss Bonners Ferry, the lumberjack
who played classical piano, was a lifeguard too
and the whole reason I wanted to go back.

A nice girl for a change, good wife material,
instead of the tramps I usually chased.
Tim had his eye on her younger sister,
but those were long odds we faced.

A thousand miles I rebuffed his offers
to help drive. Insurance reasons, I'd say,
but really I didn't trust him at the wheel.
My father had treated me the same way.

Things were good in Bonners Ferry. We hiked,
climbed rocks. The girl let me hold her hand
one night, and we played duets at the piano.
Tim and I stayed longer than we'd planned.

Then one day he left his journal sitting out,
open to a page about what a jerk I was being,
always making him look bad. I asked the girl,
but she couldn't guess what he was seeing.

A thousand miles home is a long, long way
to drive when you don't know what to say.


28

I-80
Wyoming
night time
snowstorm
eastern slope
Continental Divide
15-foot U-Haul truck
  50 to 60 miles per hour
      girlfriend white-knuckled
           behind the big wheel
                swerving skidding
              on the downhill ice
           all our possessions
        rocking in back
      not quite
   overbalanced

I pump my
passenger brake
of course to no effect
snowflakes like hyperspatial
streaks in the headlight beams
    I gently suggest slowing down
            or even pulling over to let
                          me drive instead
                              but not gently
                                      enough

                              I'm an excellent
                            driver she insists
                      you should have seen
               that time I spun out in Texas
    and I didn't even run off the road

  but I grew up driving in snow
I tell her and you didn't
you have to slow
down

  it's the wrong thing
            to say and we
                            fishtail
                                            again

                                                                  one
                                            moment
                          of terror in the
          long, slow slide from
west coast to east coast

one harrowing strobe-lit frame
   from the superslow-motion
           accident that is

                    us


24

Wait, that's the one where
I lost my virginity.
Sorry, not this time.


23

Immediately after the tiny little Salt Lake City wedding,
I jumped in the Nova with Tim and his blushing bride—
not the sister. We raced straight to Evanston, Wyoming,
taking adjacent motel rooms. All night I had to imagine
what might be going on next door—which turned out
the next morning to have been nothing much. (We had
size issues, Tim whispered.) Their friend, a guy named
Bart or some stupid shit like that, met us in the parking
lot, having driven from who knows where for who knew
how long. I rode shotgun across Wyoming and sunny
Nebraska in Bart's Japanese pickup truck, all day long,
all the way to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where we staged a
second ceremony for the benefit of the bride's family.
Before the sun was up again, Bart had lit out west with
me groggy in the passenger seat, on our way back to
Utah. I could barely keep my eyes open, but late that
morning when I caught him nodding off, the adrenaline
jolted me like paddles to the chest. I begged him to let
me spell him behind the wheel. He denied having fallen
asleep, and when argument failed I resorted to Plan B.
I talked my way through that day like I've never talked
since, and never before—babbling, burbling, blabbering,
spinning stories like Scheherazade staving off death.
I even sang my heart out, and every time I saw those
eyes drift closed I cranked the volume. It occurred to
me, thinking of Tim and his impenetrable bride still in
Iowa, that this longest day of my life was my payback.
It's just a good thing that road was so damn straight.

Clearing out my inbox (a task that requires a pitchfork, a shovel, and high-volume hose), I ran across an email from a old, old family friend who had known my father since they were young together in Los Angeles, and whom my siblings and I have always known as Uncle Lee. Laura and I dropped in on him last February, and while we shared a meal of takeout sushi he regaled us with stories from Dad's younger and wilder days.

In the followup email, Uncle Lee had one more memory to share:

I think I forgot to tell you that your dad could dance and memorize at the same time. If he liked his dance partner he would ask her for her telephone number which he would memorize immediately so he could call her and thank her the next day.

I am not sure how many telephone numbers he could memorize in one evening.

It was a simple drive twelve miles north this morning to get to Skokie for Algis Budrys's memorial service. Laura was unable to join me so I went alone, and I found when I arrived at the funeral home that there was no one there I knew. Actually, I did meet Ajay's dear wife Edna back in 1985, but I wouldn't have expected her to remember that brief occasion all these years later.

I don't do very well in crowds where I don't know anyone—heck, I can get intimidated in crowds where I do know people—so I sort of slinked around at the back of the room, feeling somewhat like an intruder. Two display tables helped me occupy myself. One was covered with an arrangement of various editions of Ajay's books. The other displayed a selection of interviews with and articles about him, both from print sources and online. On a widescreen television ran a slideshow of photos of Ajay and his family.

The service began not long after I arrived, and I found a seat toward the back. There were fifty or sixty people in attendance, I would estimate, and the number of chairs for everyone was almost exactly right. A pastor spoke for a few minutes about Ajay's greatness as a husband and a father and a writer, and offered a prayer. Then she turned the time over to Ajay's sons.

Jeff shared remembrances and appreciations of Ajay he had gathered from people online over the preceding few days. Among the poignant, funny, and just simply factual snippets he read, I was startled to hear a line I had written in a brief post on Monday. Tim expressed his good fortune at being able to spend many of his adult summers with his parents' house as a home base, and shared an observation an associate at a Renaissance fair had made—that no wonder he seemed so even-keeled, with parents who had always stayed together. Dave recounted the last years and final days of Ajay's life, when despite setback after setback, Ajay had remained cheerful and become even more of a sweet man. All three sons credited their parents with giving them the space to do their own thing—as long as they did something. There was also much talk of Ajay's prowess as a bicycle builder and mechanic—the boys grew up having by far the best bikes around, at a time when 10-speeds were still exotic—and stories like the time he singed his eyebrows off cleaning bike parts with gasoline.

After the boys spoke, Edna offered a few words in tribute to Ajay's humor and wit. She also recounted how, when they were young and living in New Jersey and playing a regular penny-ante poker game with Fred Pohl and others, they would all pay their poker debts to one another first anytime a check for a story arrived in the mail.

Next the pastor opened the service to remembrances from anyone who cared to share them. We heard moving and amusing stories both, from people like the massage therapist who worked with him the last three years of his life, the neighbor who eventually went into politics with Ajay as a close supporter and publicist, the young man to whom Ajay was a surrogate father figure, the director of the Writers of the Future contest who had worked with him for 24 years, the friend who first met Ajay in the '50s in the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, the younger cousin whose family were fellow immigrants, and more.

Finally, after some internal wrestling, I stood up. You might not know it if you've heard me speak, but it terrifies me to talk in front of a group unprepared, especially a group of strangers. But none of Ajay's students had spoken up yet, and I thought at least one should. What I said, more or less, was that despite only really knowing Ajay for a few weeks during the summer of 1985, he'd had a profound influence on my early development as a writer, as he no doubt had on thousands of others. I said that what I carried with me was not just the serious lessons about writing that he imparted, but also the demented childlike glee in him that would manifest at the oddest times.

I recalled the epic water fights of our Clarion workshop, and Ajay squaring off against Damon Knight with water guns at our final barbecue. What dangerous opponents they were to any who crossed them! And I recounted a scene that is seared into my brain, how when Ajay spied a blue stuffed rabbit that seemed to show up as a Clarion mascot year after year, he got a demonic look in his eye, hissed, "I ... hate ... that ... rabbit!", and proceeded to bite, kick, and bludgeon it into oblivion. "If you knew Ajay at all," I said, "you can imagine what a startling sight it was to see him jumping up and down on that stuffed bunny."

What I learned from this, I said, was to try to remember to keep a spirit of fun about me, even when engaged in work what I consider to be serious work. I managed to get through my two minutes without resorting to a tissue, though it was a close thing.

After a couple of more remembrances, the mourners filed past the open casket one last time—Ajay looked about as good as anyone I've seen in that situation, with a very short, neatly trimmed white beard—before retiring to the parking lot. Edna thanked me for what I had said, which put me at something of a loss for words.

I had to be back home, so I didn't join the procession to the cemetery for the interment, but I trust it was as lovely and bittersweet a ceremony as the service at the funeral home. I will leave it to others to remark on Ajay's importance to the field of science fiction, but I can only remark right now on his importance to my science fiction. I'll never forget him because he was the first person to, with authority, give me serious reason to think I might really be capable of becoming a professional writer. In his curmudgeonly way, he told me I wasn't close to there yet, and he certainly let me know it was going to be a difficult process, with only a small likelihood of flashy rewards, but he let me know I had the potential.

One last thing I will never forget is how, on the last day of Clarion, Ajay brought to me a copy of the souvenir book we students had made with a selection of our stories, and almost shyly asked if I would sign it. Of course, all of us were signing one another's copies, like yearbooks, but there was just something in Ajay's approach to asking that made me feel like a king. I was seventeen, and he was a Golden Age giant, but he made it seem like those designations didn't matter. And they didn't.

A meme via curmudgeon:

The Rule is that you take the best picture you like from the first page of Google Images results.

1. The city and state of the town you grew up, no quotation marks.
http://home.comcast.net/~utahauras/trevorspider1a.jpg

2. The town where you currently reside. [Sorry, had to pick two, tempted by three!]
http://www.ohfs.org/images/PictureGallery/2004/2004NewYork7.jpg
http://www.wirednewyork.com/parks/astoria_park/astoria_park_pool.jpg

3. Your name, first and last, but again, no quotes.
http://www.dogberry.net/dhsx/reunions/dhs84/20_Year/images/28.jpg

4. Your grandmother's name.
http://i.cnn.net/cnn/2004/TRAVEL/DESTINATIONS/03/04/forgotten.photographs.ap/vert.partridge.ap.jpg

5. Your favorite food. [Close second and mouth-watering third.]
http://www.xperiment.se/bilder/gyro.jpg

6. Your favorite drink.
http://www.flubu.com/comics/Bizarro-scotch.gif

7. Your favorite smell. [Mmm, the second-place smell, the third-place coquettishness.]
http://www.ibiblio.org/dykki/pics/coffee.gif