What are we doing here?

I thought a long time about posting this photograph.
Where do we come from? Where are we going? What is this all about?
I don't have the answers. I don't know why we go from fullness of life to non response - I know how this can happen but not how it could happen.
In a sense, this post is about being afraid that memory will fade. That Nicholas will fade.
This photograph puts me there. I can look at it and not fall apart now, but I can't look at it and not feel that moment. As though it was yesterday.

Squam Rock

The Fourth of July came and went. Nick's last (and only) load of fireworks from Seabrook is still sitting above the cabinets in the kitchen. We let half of them off in the Estabrook parking lot in 2006. Andrew was pestering his parents to let him buy some, and I thought of Nick.

For many years, the Fourth of July was defined by Erma's. There's a photo of us in her garden, Nick, Alex, Elizabeth and me, taken by Esther. Nick is about eight. The holiday followed a familiar pattern, one I had known since my own freshman year in college. A family gathering at Erma's, me as the adoptive cousin, Elizabeth and the boys adopted too. Seeing the family - Erma, Phil, Marcie, Mike and Candace, many more. Usually some neighbor's dog in the middle, and the cats - Pinklepurr, maybe Dandy, who knows. The beach, of course, and on the way to the beach, the climb to the top of the hill, through the trees, and then the bare top and Squam Rock.

Squam was always a challenge. There is really only one easy way up, as I discovered sometime in 1974. And getting up is the easier part. I don't remember how old Alex was when he first climbed it, only that Nicholas had to climb it too. Right away. I think he climbed it pushing off my hands, the first time, to get up over the first part. Then it gets easier as you get to the top. From the top there's the view - not quite this one, but close - the little channels of melt water, the mysterious nubs of iron where someone, probably a hundred years ago, built some sort of ladder or railing, now gone, probably for gentleman adventurers to climb up. And the vertical sides, it seems on three sides. The descent is harder - the choice between an undignified crab walk / slide on the seat of your pants, or the what-the-heck run.

Then there was the year that Nick climbed it on his own - no helping hands, no seat of the pants, just a wild scramble up and a wilder one down. I think he ran all the way back to Erma's to tell us. They weren't supposed to be climbing it without one of us there, of course. We (or at least he) climbed it every visit - probably for the last time in the summer of 2004, after Dad died. Erma was like a great aunt to Nick and Alex, died in April 2005. What a wonderful person.

Summertime

Summer came again. Nick loved it. The end of the school year, the not having to get up, the being able to stay up as late as you want, reading, watching movies, playing video games, sleeping in the next day. Camp, summer school, summer jobs - gardening at LHS, working the loading dock with Frank at Sears, fast food, two Russian ladies teaching summer Russian at Harvard, chain smoking during the breaks - a new language in 8 weeks! Summer orchestra at Harvard. Rancatore's. Baseball with Mr. McKenna. Biking. Falling off bikes. Hiking. Sailing at Courageous. Fishing (sort of). Sara. England.

Nicholas and the Standard Inscription

Nicholas was 15 when he discovered the Assyrian tablets. We were visiting the British Museum, and he and Alex were looking for the Rosetta Stone. On the way they passed several stone bas reliefs, including this one.

Carved across the reliefs is a cuneiform inscription - like graffiti, except this was done meticulously as part of the carving of the tablets. Cuneiform must have been hard to carve - the things that made it easy to incise into clay tablets probably did not work as well in stone.

Below the panels was a translation of the writing, which is what is known as the Standard Inscription:

The palace of Ashurnasirpal, chief priest of Ashur, the chosen one of Enlil and Ninurta, the favorite of Anu and Dagan, the divine weapon of the Great Gods, the potent king, the king of the world, the king of Assyria; the son of Tukulti-Ninurta, the great king, the potent king, the king of the world, the king of Assyria; the son of Adad-nirari, the king of the world, the king of Assyria;

the powerful warrior who always lived by Ashur, his lord; who has no rival among the princes of the four quarters of the earth;

the shepherd of his people, fearless in battle, the overpowering tidewater who has no opponent;

the king, subjugator of the unsubmissive, who rules the total sum of all humanity;

the potent warrior, who tramples his enemies, who crushes all the adversaries;

the disperser of the host of the haughty;

the king who always lived by trust in the Great Gods, his lords; and captured all the lands himself, ruled all their mountainous districts, received their tribute; who takes hostages, who establishes victory over all their lands.

When Ashur, who selected me, who made my kingship great, entrusted his merciless weapon into my lordly arms, I verily struck down the widespread troops of Lullumu with weapons, during the battle encounter. As for the troops of the lands of Nairi, Habhu, Shubaru, and Nirbu, I roared over them like Adad the destroyer, with the aid of Shamash and Adad, my helper gods. the king who caused from the other bank of the Tigris to the Lebanon and the Great Sea, the whole of Laqu, and Suhu as far as Rapiqu, to submit; himself conquered from the source of the Subnat River to Urartu; annexed as my own territory from the pass of Kirruru to Gilzanu, from the other bank of the Lower Zab to Til Bari which is upstream from Zaban, from Til sha Abtani to Til sha Zabdani. I counted as my own people from the pass of Babite to Hashmar. I set my residents in the lands over which I ruled obeisance and [forced labor].

Ashurnasirpal, the obedient prince, the worshiper of the Great Gods, the fierce dragon, the conqueror of all cities and mountains to their full extent, the king of rulers, who tames the dangerous enemies, crowned with glory, unafraid of battle, the relentless lion, who shakes resistance, praise the king, the shepherd, protection of the world, the king whose command blots out mountains and seas, who forced into compliance the relentless, fierce kings from the east to the west at his very approach.

Nick read most of this aloud, especially the part about Adad the Destroyer. There was something about the idea of this inscription covering all of the reliefs in Nimrud that really appealed to him. Strangely, the Assyrian reliefs seemed to follow us around - we found them at the Worcester Art Museum, which we visited with Nicholas when Alex was a freshman at WPI, and at the Museum of Fine Arts. When he arrived at Bowdoin, Nick discovered that the art museum there also has two fragments of panels. Many museums don't focus on the text of the inscription, so it was a delight to Nick that he knew the secret message chiseled across the figures.

Happy Birthday, Nicholas.

Happy Birthday, Nicholas.
Nick would have been 21 on Friday, May 7, 2010.
It will be 898 days since his death.
Nicholas was a perfect baby. He was early - always - but in this case it made him seem tiny compared to Alex. He curled up in our arms like a little mouse - tiny fingers, tiny toes, and it seemed little nubs on his shoulders where the wings must have been attached. An angel. Not quite here, not quite ours.

Time to share

I started this blog with the idea of sharing it at some point, but have never done so, and as you can see the posts are infrequent. It's too easy to think about the here and now, or if I talk about our life, pre 112207, to get bogged down in comparisons - the then and now. Nick's birthday is coming up, and that gave me the idea of trying to do a sort of cycle through the year - the now always brings back the then anyway.

Three years ago we put the photo below in Nick's high school yearbook. It was a sort of compromise. We wanted to buy an ad, Nick didn't want anything that would embarrass him, so this is what we did. No name.

The text is Rudyard Kipling's "If." Nick liked Kipling, at least as much as he had read of him. The Disney adaptation of The Jungle Book was his favorite movie for a very long time, and we read Kim as a chapter book when he was little. He knew some of Kipling's verse, including this poem, but "If" was our pick for him, rather than his own. Nick was on the way.

Science Olympiad

Another year. Three years ago, it was Nick, Frank and a handful of others bucking the LHS system, deciding to compete in the State Science Olympiad, and placing fourth. The science department told them they had no chance, they would embarrass the school. We told Nick he had more important things to do his senior year. Nick went ahead, somehow got it all done - college applications, interviews, homework, APs, and Science Olympiad. They went to none of the regional practice meets, but recruited kids, practiced the academics, worked on the engineering events until all hours as the date neared. Fourth.

I had no idea what that meant.

The team was resurrected in 2008 by Olga Guttag, almost single-handedly. In early December they came to us and asked if they could name the team in Nick's memory, and we said of course. Olga was able to get some money from Shire to help cover expenses - still no school support. That first year they placed fourth. Last year I helped coach (really didn't do much - I was in South Africa most of January) - we placed second, and nearly unseated Newton North.

This year we worked hard at it. I think I spent every Saturday after New Year on engineering events. Olga was hospitalized the day of the meet, Elizabeth and I had been at BI until midnight the night before, getting Elizabeth's finger stitched up (the cookies were great!), and I got the call while we were at the hospital asking if I would run the meet for the team. Nick was with us, I think. Big disappointment at the awards - we placed six, in spite of the usual good showing on some events. Good news the next day - scoring error, we really placed third!