Getting around to it

Chaos and fractals were hot stuff in the 1980s and I spent quite a bit of time on the subject—at one point Cliff Pickover, a thoroughly nice person, sent me a large package of material by mail. So, one of the first courses I signed up for as a grad student was Chaotic Dynamical Systems. In the event, I had to drop the course, along with several other maths courses—my work was to be in other areas and the textbook ended up on my shelf for unread books.

The other day I decided to pick it up again and see what I’d missed out on. One thing was clear: I might have been able to do the exercises when I was a first-year student, but by now most of my calculus was just hazy memories. And indeed, in contrast with most of my other literature on the subject, this was a book about proper maths, rather than computer graphics, and spent most of its space on proving various theorems about seemingly simple functions, but which exhibited chaotic behaviour. Still, even if my understanding is patchy these days, I’ve been going through the book, picking up concepts and ideas.

In the book was still the receipt from when I bought it and as I was reading on the train home the other day I listened with half an ear to the two girls sitting next to me talking about their studies. The one just next to me turned out to be a first-year student at my alma mater and the continued conversation revealed she had been born just a couple of days after I bought the book I was finally reading. It’s so hard to keep up.

Not going gently into that good night

A few days after my visit my father passed away, finally overcome by heart failure and pneumonia.

My father and I never had a good relationship. Perhaps our innate temperaments were not all that different, but if nothing else, the differences between growing up in post-Civil war small-town Finland and 1970s suburban Sweden, betwen surviving new wars and living a laid-back academic life, ensured that we had few, if any, things in common. Possibly I would even strive to increase those differences to mark distance.

With time I came to better understand my father's motivations and the ideals he tried to live up to, but by then I could no longer communicate this to him, as he had descended into dementia. Perhaps it was even necessary for my understanding that I no longer had to keep my protective shields up, that my formidable father was reduced to a frail old man who I no longer had to be angry at but could pity and comfort as best I could.

Now, I am at peace and so is he.

Decrepiter and decrepiter

So, a year later a visit to the optometrist indicated that it was time for reading glasses. This time I decided to go for a wide-field frame, just to try things out.

I suffer from conflicting emotions: With the new glasses most of the world is fuzzy and weirdly distorted but it's both embarrassing and heartening how much better I see things things 0.4 m away—puzzling has become much easier with the glasses.

And then there were 28…

When I left elementary school, I lost contact with my class mates, mostly without any regrets.

I was invited to a class reunion several years ago, but I couldn't attend, as I would be talking at a conference abroad at the same time. Still, I called the organiser and sent my greetings and I also asked whether a certain girl would be attending. (She never was my girlfriend, I didn't even think of it as an option at the time.)
“Err, she…she is no more.” Oh. Without asking for the cause of death I still wasn't very surprised.

Yesterday, the morning paper carried the death notice of a then-friend of mine (who was her boyfriend), torn from wife and children at an early age.

The countdown has begun.

Passing on

My setting up a home of my own unexpectedly brought me back in contact with my childhood best friend J, whom I hadn't seen in a long time. (There seems to be a strong instinct in single men to look after each other.)

J's father passed away some time ago, so he had inherited the family manor—big, decrepit and filled with the accretions of generations of packrats. As a child I had spent almost as much time there as in my own home.

With sorrow J had accepted he had to get rid of the house and its contents and now finally he had found buyers well-heeled enough to afford to (hopefully tastefully) renovate the building and the grounds (now just small strips around the building itself rather than the large and unkempt orchard my child-I used to run through to reach the house—the orchard in turn just a corner of the lands that the family had commanded in their heyday at the turn of the previous century).

This weekend was the last that J would have with the house and he invited me to share it with him. I biked over, pedalling on roads so familiar, yet in many places lined with houses that had been crammed in between the ones I remembered. The gravel path up to the house seemed not to have been filled in since I helped shovel gravel into the deepest potholes ages ago. Externally the manor looked just as I remembered it, the same horseshoe doorknocker on the door. I didn't need to use it, J had been expecting me and opened the door as soon as I had locked the bike. (It was imperative to lock the bike when I was 10 too, but I have to have a much sturdier lock these days.)

We went through the house room by room. There was enough of the original furniture still unremoved that it was easy to fill in the missing pieces—very little had been changed in the last 25 years. I peeked into the closet in J's old boys room and was immediately transported back to my tweens: the stacks of Svenska MAD, Märklin catalogues, audio cassettes, and Matchbox armoured cars were still there, overlaid with a slightly later sprinkling of 3.5" flopppies.

Stepping out of the serving passage I felt the smell of sun-warmed wood and remembered how we played ”Den försvunna diamanten” in summers so long ago.

In the end I had to leave, carrying some mementoes J kindly gave me, for a few hours having been back to other days; perhaps happier such.

Increasing decrepitude

Today at lunch time I got my first pair of glasses ever. Not very strong ones, but they will supposedly make it easier for me to read. I had been promised them within 5–10 working days from prescription, but in fact they arrived in less than three.

What confuses me a bit is that the optics themselves seem not to cost anything, in spite of the necessity for grinding, surface treatment etc—the expensive bit is the frames, which basically are mass-produced pieces of plastic and/or metal. And of course, as such things go, frames that don't make you look like an idiot are expensive. I'm sure there is something strange and unwholesome behind this, but I'm not quite sure what yet.