The naked stars remember

[pameladean]

Which is a very good thing, because my brain is all fragmented. I've also been struck pretty much dumb by the events of the past month and have hardly managed to tell anybody anything. The account of events behind the cut is discursive, muddled, and awfully long. I want to say here, therefore, that everybody did Mike proud. Things looked quite smooth from my pew, but I know that a lot of pieces were put together very late indeed, so all praise to everybody involved. At one point the minister said, "Patrick Nielsen Hayden, please come up here and tell us what to do next," and I couldn't help laughing, as some others did too, because how editorial is that, after all? The readings of Mike's work were all most excellent, from papersky's starting with the Janus sonnet through jonsinger's reading Acme Food Enhancements from Making Light, and coffeeem with "Shared World," and casacorona reading a bit of Aspects. I know I'm forgetting people and I wish that I'd written everything down. The forgetfulness is my fault, not yours. Things were read so well that I actually bounced in my seat and felt gleeful, no small accomplishment under the circumstances.

The eulogies were breath-taking. There was a great deal of laughter, as was only right. Everyone who spoke (Jim Rigney, Victor Raymond, Lynn Litterer, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and Neil Gaiman), told anecdotes about Mike, showing many sides of his character. The anecdotes described him, they made a shape that he was inside of. They didn't make me cry. But Teresa said, "He was so good, and so kind," and went on, very eloquently, but I couldn't write it down for you now. Those things are harder to say than the narratives. Neil said, among many other things, "He wasn't smart to make you feel stupid; he was smart to make you smarter." Those sentences, the ones with the verb "to be" in them, were the ones that made me cry.

Mike's aunt spoke last. It was a little spooky. She gave a dry careful summary of events and times and a few anecdotes, very sparse, but very clear, and it contained so very many of the themes of Mike's life when the rest of us knew him, it was heartbreaking and profoundly comforting all at once.

Emma and Adam played Mike's song "Madonna of the Midway." I have the lyrics on a battered sheet of paper that he handed me one day, but I had never heard it played before. I was so glad to hear it.

The sun shone the entire time.



P.

On Friday I got up and accelerated my morning routine, waiting for a call from coffeeem or Will to call, since we had a lunch date complicated on one end by the need for Emma and Adam to practice a song, and on the other by the need for Will and me to be at the First Universalist Church by one to hand out programs for Mike's memorial. Emma did call. We hadn't spoken in person since 2002, though there had been email and letters. I kept speaking just as she started to speak. However, we got things sorted and I went and got dressed.

We had decided, because of the paucity of time, to meet at Marla's, which does an Indian lunch buffet that I have tested extensively. It was a perfect autumn day, and I really did think of the piece of Mike's poem "Shared World" in which the author determines, or conjures up, the weather. Emma read it at the memorial and the minister quoted it, gesturing at the tall windows with sun streaming in. I was late getting downstairs, but David was just putting down the first sheet of foamcore and sorting the photographs into piles, so I had to go in and admire them. Mike in many moods and at many ages, with many of us. It was a gorgeous display when it went up, but pausing to admire its assembly meant I had to hurry. Crows were yelling and starlings doing their slide-whistle impression. I had meant to go by Mike's old street, which was right on the way. He lived eight blocks further north than I was going, but I used to cross Garfield and look down it with the pleasant sensation that he was right there. I ended up not doing that. I'd just gone right by his apartment the week before, going to the Wedge to pick up goat cheese for Convivial.

That was a beautiful autumn day too. I was just taking my usual route: the number 18 bus to 24th and Franklin, then a walk through a pleasant neighborhood to Garfield, Mike's street, one block north on Garfield, right past his apartment, and then over to Lyndale, which is too trafficky for pleasant walking. I had turned on to Garfield before I remembered. The southern end of the street has some big stucco houses and a big stucco and brick apartment building on Mike's side, the western side, and then a big old brick apartment building covered with ivy, reddening now. Then a second big old brick building, also covered with ivy. There was a sign hanging from its front, a banner in red and green held out on a rod like the "BANG" sign that comes out of cartoon guns sometimes, or used to. It said "FOR RENT."

I went on down there, but I didn't pass the building. I turned between it and its identical neighbor and walked along its southern side, craning my neck to look at the third-story windows. The building is shaped on that side like an E with the middle missing and very thick ends, and that was where Mike's windows were: two at one end of the kitchen, facing south. He'd had a bird feeder that somebody gave him in one of those windows for a few years long ago, and had told me all about the house sparrows. The other one had a window air conditioner for a few years. There was a Fourth Street Fantasy Convention where he came to the hotel and immediately fell asleep in his room for six hours, missing a panel that he was intended to moderate. Elise, not yet his partner in the full sense, though certainly one in mischief and intellectual collaboration, took over moderating the panel and impersonated him briefly by shoving her glasses down her nose and looking sternly over them at the audience, all of whom cracked up. Anyway, he told me later when he got up that being in a room where the air conditioning was silent had put him to sleep faster than any drug. I hope he had a different air conditioner these past few years. The last time David and I saw him he was talking about "my pet squirrel," with an ironic intonation difficult to describe; the squirrel was doing that thing squirrels do, trying to break into the apartment through the thin accordian wings of the air conditioner.

Three other windows, the bathroom being the last, and that was all. I went through the alley, with a sudden vivid recollection of helping Elise clean things up a little while he was in Charleston. Elise was feeling creaky, so I ran the trash and recycling downstairs. I'd never been down those stairs before then, though later on when Mike and I would have lunch sometimes and then go back to the apartment so that he could show me something or the other, either a manuscript he'd forgotten to bring or a computer game or something new on the model railroad, he'd let us in the back way. I don't think I was there above a dozen times, though, in all the years he lived there.

That day, I went on to the Wedge to get my cheese, and I kept looking for him in the aisles, because it was late enough that he might be out. This day, I skipped Garfield.

I was late, but Will and Emma were mercifully later. They brought Adam and Betsy along, since they had to get to the memorial and hadn't had any lunch either, and we had a very pleasant time. I was smug that they liked the food. It was a good day for vegetarians, with only two chicken dishes.

When we got to the church, netmouse greeted us, and skzb was up on the stairs talking to somebody. There were hugs all round and some conversation, but we tore ourselves away, Adam and Emma in one direction and Will and Steve and I, who had been asked to hand out programs along with two other friends, to find out what we had to do. jenett found us and showed us the drill. There were blank stick-on name badges, markers, sheets of sticky labels with four different quotations from Mike on them, and colored stars coded to how one had known Mike: fannishly, professionally, through gaming, online, and I've forgotten the other one. Somebody protested that there was no star for model railroading, and it was suggested that maybe that was gaming, but then pnh said that surely model railroading came under "online," which settled that. gerisullivan's programs were beautiful, with "Against Entropy" on the front and "and Blue Water" on the back.

I handed out a lot of programs and directed people to the badge table. I knew almost all of them.

I want to write about the reception and the wake, too, but that will have to be later.

P.

Comments

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

I am so sorry for your loss; I knew the glitter, but you knew the man.

[pameladean]

Thank you. It's all of our loss, though. Even the glitter was remarkably substantial.

P.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

Yes; I wasn't close to Mike personally, but his loss is a blow to the whole community of which we're part.