Email from Sam about scholarship

It has been said that
"when your parents die you lose your past, but when your child dies, you lose your future".

Sometimes it feels like that is true, and I wrote a long essay exploring that concept, but then I decided that I just really wanted to share an email that I got last year that is a reminder of how "paying it forward" is what makes everything work.

The future is still ahead of us, I am glad that Derek can play a role in it.
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On Wed, Jun 20, 2018, 7:31 AM Sam  wrote:
Hello Beth and Warren,

Sam ----- here, Riley -----'s father. I would like to offer a note of thanks and appreciation from our family to you following Riley’s receipt of the Derek Witherell award. 

I would like to share what the award means to Catrina, Riley's mother, and I. On the evening of the award ceremony last week, Riley received several awards, seven in total, for various accomplishments. Each award with its own merits and a recognition to be proud of individually.

When Riley received the award I looked at Catrina and knew exactly what she was thinking, as I was thinking the same. On the way home, Catrina said her thoughts aloud - "We are exceptionally proud of you for all of your awards. The one we are the most happy about is the  Derek Witherell Scholarship."

I would add that Riley subsequently received the faculty recognition award at graduation on Saturday and we still feel the same in regards to which award is our favorite. Perhaps we should not choose favorites, but we did, let's keep it between us. :-)

We have always said we want our kids to do well, be happy and most importantly be good people. We feel the award you shared with Riley recognizes her for the good person she is.

I would also like to share a few comments from friends and family with you in response to the award. Catrina posted the following on her Facebook page.

“Riley received some very nice awards last night, but the one I am most proud of is the Derek Wetherell award for being such a thoughtful and kind person.❤️
 I have two wishes for my kids, to be happy and to be kind.”

Catrina works at xxxxxxx and is well connected in the community. It is very apparent from the responses that Derek touched and continues to impact the community in a very positive way. A few of the comments include:

Nancy:  Derek was one of Jonathan's best friends! That is a very special award! And well deserved Riley!

Melissa: Now you made me cry, for both Derek and Riley! ❤️

Mandy: Yay Riley-That’s great! And how wonderful there is a Derek Witherell award! I babysat him ️💙

Jahna:  I remember Derek, we have his saxophone at gbs, and loan it to students who otherwise could not play. It's such an honor to have known him. ❤️



For her part, Riley was fully aware of the background of the award and was humbled to be recognized in this way. Please know that the recognition of this award and the financial support will be directed into her future endeavors in a very positive way.

In similar fashion to how you shared a little about Derek in the letter, a letter I thoroughly enjoyed reading (well done), allow me to share a little bit about Riley.

 [ information about Riley's school decisions and other important info about her future dreams was in this spot]

Regardless of where Riley goes and what path her future takes we know she will do good things and have a positive impact on those she interacts with, it is simply who she is. You are now part of the community that will enable her to do so – thank you!

Photos of Riley are attached so you know what she looks like.

Best Regards,
Sam & Catrina

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Sigh…   that is how to "pay it forward".
This email had renewed our pride in the scholarship after I was beginning to think that it's time and purpose had passed.

( Last names removed, this letter used without permission, but it is a REALLY nice letter)      (ww)
I will post information about the scholarship when I am near a computer.
 It has been 15 years.  Thanks Dude.  We remember. 

Stones on my mind or (rocks in my head)

Sunday afternoon at the local Home Depot.  I really hate shopping but sometimes it pays off.  I needed to buy some rocks (as silly as that sounds in New Hampshire), and I do not own enough barren property or a garden to “grow my own” so I have to buy them.   

Home Depot sells various types of rocks in feed bag sized plastic wrappers that are small enough to move without equipment but big enough so that you feel that you are getting something for your three to five dollars a bag.   They offer many types of crushed gravel, crushed stone, river stones, and beach stones.  They have to have a little marketing so the rounded stones are “Mexican beach stones”.  The crushed marble is “ornamental”, and the granite is “antique” which is what I was buying today.  I thought that the concept of a stone being “antique” was interesting because this particular batch of stones that I was purchasing were made before humans or even most dinosaurs were walking around looking for a home depot.

I guess granite looks “antique” because it has a multitude of colors all mixed together rather than the pure color of some of the other types of stone available.

There are also a wide variety of mulches on sale right next to the rocks.  All types of tree bark, wood chips, and moss are sprayed with black, red, and brown dye so that they look “more consistent” even though they are made from different trees from different forests.  The colors are so bright that in my neighborhood it sometimes looks like the gardens are covered with froot loop cereal (which might be cheaper, I will have to look into it).  All of these colorful bags of byproduct have a 2 to 10 year guarantee that the color won’t wash out to postpone that day when you wander out of your house and find that your garden is covered with *gasp* tree bark!

One of the more interesting choices for colorful waste products to cover your ground with is “Rubber Mulch”.  This “mulch” looks like nuggets of red or black rubber made from old tires.

The rubber in tires is not naturally black of course, the tires on old cars were white or tan, but adding carbon black to the rubber made it harder to see the mold defects.

We no longer have many mold defects but people are so used to the black color that it would be difficult to market anything else.   So after tires have served their useful life they are recycled, which is an interesting process where the tire dealers pay to dump them at massive tire dumps where owners/husbands explain to their wives that “these things are worth a fortune!” until they catch on fire and burn for 2.5 years.

Sometimes a small percentage of tires DO get recycled, and now the companies that used to make door mats have branched out into the landscaping industry.   They melt the tires into chunks and try to cover the end result with a “natural cedar color” to hide the coloring that was added to hide the “natural rubber color” of the tire when it was made.  These have color guarantees too.  At least the shredded bark will decompose after the coloring washes off, but the rubber will probably just turn into black bite sized tire nuggets, which I assume you will cover with a thick layer of lifetime guaranteed CD/DVD nuggets with rainbow colors that you purchase at your local “Amazon landscaping supply” in another decade or so.

Anyhow, back to Home Depot on a Sunday afternoon.   I had finished overloading my flat railroad dolly with so many rocks that I noticed the solid-rubber tread on the solid-steel wheels had popped off and were just wrapped around the axle like a rubber band, I guess I should have made two trips.   So before I pushed my barge of “Antique stone” and “Mexican Beach Stone” towards the cashier, I was taking a minute to help an older couple load some rocks onto their cart.  The lady commented on “how tightly the store packs these bags together” and I replied that gravity tends to do that and added “imagine how much the trucks carrying these rocks from a Mexican beach to Keene NH must weigh” and she replied with the proper “Oh my, I hadn’t thought of that”.

We were finishing up when a family came up and was comparison shopping the choices of stone.  They were leaning toward the bright white marble chunks when the son-in law noticed that the rubber rocks “Last for TWELVE YEARS”, Mom replied that she won’t even be alive in twelve years (even though she was much younger than me), and you kids can replace the rocks when you own the house.  The son-in-law was undeterred, he said “these are good for twelve years, how long is the marble good for?”  Mom looked all over the bag and said “It says ‘Longest Lasting’ but it doesn’t say HOW LONG.”   They loaded their cart with red rubber rocks.   I grinned all the way while pushing my overfilled cart of billion year old rocks to my car..

ww,2015-08-30

One Last Candle

Doug Vassall

On the evening of June 2^nd 2015 the crowd carried a birthday cake covered with flaming candles out to the dark yard where Beth was sitting while singing Happy Birthday in a wide variety of keys and tempos.

She took a deep breath and blew almost all of them out, but she didn’t want to stop before the job was done so she gave one last POOF from the depth of her lungs and got the last one.  She gasped because that last POOF caused her to inhale the cloud of smoke above the cake, but she had completed her task.

The next morning Doug and Beth returned to the hospital to visit their Dad, Douglas L Vassall Sr.

A ping from Derek

Warren Witherell
June 8 at 7:16am 

OK, here is an odd one.  I was looking at the nice comments on Facebook about my "And then there were two..." post last night and a notification popped up that Google+ had created a "photo booth style" composition from four similar pictures.  They were created from photos that were backed up automatically from my server.

They are from thirteen years ago.

Neither Beth or I have EVER seen these pictures before.

(Cool)
Thanks Dude, got your message this time.
Subtle, very subtle.

This was copied from the Facebook blog post that can be seen HERE.

And then there were two... (Sophie)

A long ramble.  Only for those readers that have a lot of time and came to our house in Antrim or Keene.

A too-long ramble about odd justifications.

Derek had a couple of pets.  Foxy and Sophie.  Foxy was protective of her boy, and when he was out at night on a date, she would sleep by the door until he came home.

When he stopped coming home she never slept upstairs again and spent every night sleeping by the front door.

Foxy never recovered after Derek was gone, and she started getting more nervous.  This breed of dog is known for keeping inventory of everything in the house.  If Beth moved furniture while Foxy and I were out of the house, Foxy would bark at the “new” furniture when she got home.  We knew things were not going well for her when we were having a yard sale to get rid of everything we owned so we could travel.  At the end of the day when foxy discovered that most of the furniture was gone she ran out the back door before Leslie could get the lead to the dog-run on her.   Leslie went around to the back yard to catch Foxy and when she picked her up she went totally limp.  Leslie carried her around to the front of the house and asked me “is this normal?”  It wasn’t.  We took her in the house and after a minute or two she snapped awake.  The vet told us that she probably had developed a heart irregularity and had passed out.  Things were just too stressful for the little dog.

When we left for our reboot that we called “The Adventure” we left our Foxy in the care of Doug & Leslie because she would not have overcooked in the car when it was parked, and would probably not be allowed in most places that we might end up.   We suspected that we would never see Foxy again.   (We actually did not have high hopes of seeing ANY of our friends ever again either, but that is another story)

When we were parked in front of Lake Jenny looking at the Grand Tetons, we got the message from Leslie that Foxy had died.   It was only a few months after we had left.  It was a sudden death, probably the same type of incident that made her pass out.

Sophie, Derek’s cat was also staying at Doug & Leslie’s.  She adapted to her living situation and actually became Doug’s buddy.  They both slept about the same number of hours every day.    

Derek had gotten her as a kitten because Beth was working at a veterinarian’s office and some dolt had left a box with a mother cat and a litter of newborns on the office step on the coldest night of the year.

Sophie was adopted by Derek.  She was up in his room any time that he was.

“Ma!  Do something about the cat!” was a common thing he said when he was trying to go to sleep and Sophie wanted to do head butts.

When Beth & I returned to the Monadnock region from our Adventure we were able to have Sophie live with us again in 2008, first in an apartment, and then in our own house with a fenced-in back yard which Sophie loved.  She would spend all day in the yard, doing what cats do best: nothing.   She would move from place to place and continue doing what she had been doing in the spot she had just left. 

A few years ago Sophie had officially become a kidney-kitty.   A fairly common ailment which is either caused by diet or by living a protected life that keeps them from being squashed by a car before they are ten years old, which is why we never had kidney-kitties when we were growing up.

Being a kidney-kitty makes them skinny, bulimic, thirsty, and have other side effects.

Our previous cat Fred (who also was a kidney-kitty) was like a tanker truck,  He would load up on a quart of water and walk straight to the cat-box and deposit a quart of water and then head back to the water bowl.   Sophie did her business in the back yard so it wasn’t as much of an issue, but she was getting weaker.   We were having her treated by a vet with all kinds of medicines that she hated.  She finally was getting so weak that we decided to put her down.  We said our goodbyes and then Beth took her to be put to sleep.  Our vet was out of town so Beth had to go to another vet that was covering for her, this replacement vet had never seen Sophie before and suggested that he wanted to try “one more thing”:  IV fluids.   

I came home that evening and instead of seeing a cat shaped body bag, there was Sophie looking all happy and healthy again. 

That was two years ago.  She has remained optimistic, was always happy to greet the different friends that came to visit that made a big fuss over her (Cara, Leslie, Derek E, Gabby, etc), and in general enjoyed a cat’s life.  She survived through the winter and got to enjoy an entire season outside again.  When winter came again she hunkered down and attempted to hibernate until the grass returned to her back yard again.

Surprisingly she made it.  She once again was in her glory in her back yard.

Lately the IV juicing sessions weren’t keeping up and she was getting slower.   She was perky when we woke up and when we tried to go to sleep, but her entire day was spent sleeping in the grass.  And then she stopped eating again.

Last Friday we finally buried Sophie in her back yard.

She was our last living connection with Derek.   His dog and his kitty are both gone now.  Beth and I were VERY emotional.  This was more than just losing our cat, this was Derek’s cat.  She lasted eleven years longer than Derek did.  Our last living connection with the Dude.

Now the good news.

A year after Derek died a nice woman from a nearby town started having phone chats with me.  She was a person who claimed that she regularly talked to dead people.  She seemed relatively sane, but I am not very qualified to judge people about levels of sane-ness.  

An example of a typical encounter with the other side:   She would be driving and see someone sitting on a curb crying, she would stop and help and would find out that this person had a car accident earlier in the day and they towed his car away and “now he had no idea how he was going to get home”.   She would ask him some more questions and would figure out that the car accident was probably a fatality, this soul was freshly dead, and did not have a clue about what to do or was even aware of this new chapter in his “life”.   She would have to explain what happened and try to tutor him and lead him to where he had to go.  

It sounded a little far-fetched to me, but I always try to pay attention and learn from other people’s talents and skills even if I haven’t a chance of ever being able to accomplish or even understand how this would be possible.   It certainly makes a lot more sense to me than any sport with a ball does, so I had several conversations with her so that I could learn a little more. 

She said that folks from the other side operate at a much different speed.  Our lifetimes are a very short amount of time compared to their idea of “normal”.  For instance she told me about one time she was able to establish communications with her deceased mother.  At the time that her mother was speaking to her, mom was busy making cookies with a young family member that was deceased,   Many months later this medium attempted to contact her mother again because she wanted to ask her a question.  Her mother was a little irritated that her daughter from the other side was bothering her AGAIN while she was still trying to finish the cookies, couldn’t she just wait until she finished?

I was told that when “the departed” attempt to communicate with us, we can’t catch the hint.  We miss it.  These messages are obvious to some people that understand what to look for but I have trouble catching any subtle hint from anybody anyhow.   If you want me to hear something, don’t be subtle, it won’t work.

She had looked me up because Derek wanted to tell me a few little things,

He wanted to say that he had tried to tell us things in our dreams but we were obviously not “getting it”.  He wanted to let us know that he had made a few snap decisions that night, but he “probably” made the right choices.  Then he paused and added “No, he definitely made the right choices”.

I asked if she could still connect with him and she tried.   And succeeded. 

She asked him what he was up to, he said that he was working on his music (I figured they probably don’t have video games installed up there yet).

He had built a house.  She asked him what he built it with, and he said he built it with his thoughts (which she said she didn’t understand).   He uses the house to keep animals that have died and are waiting for the owners to arrive.  The medium said “Awwww, that’s so sweet, I always wondered what happened to the animals”, this particular medium had never seen an animal when she was poking around on the other side of the fence. 

At that time the house was occupied by several dogs and cats, a bird of some type and a horse.  He gave the impression that he had stumbled onto something that was in demand because he was getting (or was going to get) many animals.  I would think so, animals have a much shorter lifespan than humans, so unless you collect tortoises or parrots, you have probably burned through a bunch of pets before you finally get planted yourself.

This woman was not a huckster, she would not take any compensation because that would “taint” the readings.   She may have been crazy, but she was able to describe some of Derek’s characteristics and her description of his personality seemed consistent with the Dude that you all knew.

So this has been rattling around in my head for the last decade, and I always giggle when I think of Derek dealing with a horse, that is much too big of animal for him to deal with.   He always had a fondness for the type of animals that humans had messed up by tinkering with their biology.  He thought Himalayan cats were the greatest thing because they were totally dependent on humans to flip them over regularly or their bones and muscle would entropy.   “Hee-hee entropy…  they won’t move on their own…   They just dissolve if you don’t force them to move.”   

He liked pugs because if they get surprised their eyes can pop out of their sockets. 

He wanted a corgi dog because they are super fluffy and have legs the size of a hamster, but then a friend got one and discovered that they sometimes have the loving personality of a rock.  Corgis were out.  He wanted a freak of nature but he wanted a friendly freak of nature.

Derek thought it was cool that humans had modified bulldogs so they no longer could have puppies without a scalpel nearby,  he liked that Irish setters could get lost at the end of their leash because of AKC sponsored in-breeding and he loved how basset hounds would do somersaults when they stepped on their own ears.   Hairless cats, and talking birds that could imitate a dripping faucet or the sound of a toilet flushing.   Porcupines and platypuses were entirely natural but they were odd enough that they were acceptable too.

Taking care of animals in the ether would be right up his ally.  I am assuming that animals don’t crap or beg for food after they are dead.  Derek would not be that thrilled with the maintenance part of a house full of animals.

I have not heard from the woman in many years now, but I often think of Derek and his “house”.   Hopefully Sophie has joined her dog Foxy and they both are now reunited with “their boy”.

Beth and I will have a hard time with our current house only having the two of us, but I am hoping that Derek’s house is full of happiness.

This post was copied from Facebook, the original can be seen HERE.

A Great Waste of Time…

LIFE magazine has stopped publishing.  Some people have been surprised that they have stopped printing now because they weren’t aware that LIFE was still doing anything.  Well they have been putting out “special” themed issues a few times a year.  They were running out of steam.  They would be turning out the lights soon, everybody knew it, but nobody wanted to do it.
LIFE magazine was history.  Our history.
When an organization like LIFE magazine goes under for the last time, the offices are closed, the rent doesn’t get paid, so someone else moves in.  The new tenant is not interested in the files that the previous tenant had collected for more than a century.  Everything gets dumped and the walls get repainted.
Somebody at LIFE Magazine was smart enough to convince the decision makers that if there wasn’t going to be any caretakers of one of the largest collections of photos in the world then the pictures should be released into the wild.  The Internet!
They contacted Google and made a plan.
Now everyone that can access the Internet has an unlimited library card to poke around in the LIFE archives.  It’s wonderful.
Pick a subject and see the pictures.
I have only searched for ONE thing so far, because I try to limit my Internet time, but I can’t wait to sneak back there on a rainy day.
My choice?  Pictures of one of my favorite cars.  A car that only had three or four pictures taken of it… or so I thought.
I typed in “Dymaxion” which is Bucky’s really cool car.  Wow!  Thousands of pictures.  There are sketches, drawings, photos of the cars, the people building the cars, and even Mr.. Fuller himself. 
This stuff is gold.  Set your alarm and dig in.
This is where the pictures are going to live someday:  http://www.life.com/Life/
This is the site where Time-Life Photos are archived by Getty: http://www.timelifepictures.com/ms_timepix/source/home/home.aspx?pg=1
THIS is the portal that Google is running in a back room.  They don’t seem to be promoting it, but since they will be the muscle behind the life.com site, you can start checking it out NOW: http://images.google.com/hosted/life
If you don’t know anything about the Dymaxion, you can see it here: Dymaxion Assortment 
and here: Dymaxion Notebook

del.icio.us Tags: Google,Photos,LIFEmagazine,2008

Confabulators

con·fab·u·late 

intr.v. con·fab·u·lat·ed, con·fab·u·lat·ing, con·fab·u·lates

1. To talk casually; chat.

2. Psychology To fill in gaps in one's memory with fabrications that one believes to be facts.

---

[Latin confabulara, confabulat- : com-, com- + fabulari, to talk
(from fabula, conversation; see fable).]

---

con·fab'u·la'tion n.

con·fab'u·la'tor n.

con·fab'u·la·to'ry adj.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 

Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. 

Updated in 2003. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

**********************************************

confabulate
verb
1.	unconsciously replace fact with fantasy in one's memory
2.	talk socially without exchanging too much information; "the men were sitting in the cafe and shooting the breeze"
3.	have a conference in order to talk something over; "We conferred about a plan of action" [syn: confer]

WordNet® 3.0, © 2006 by Princeton University.