The Agrinautica

July 4th, 2020 - I woke up in the dark and cold, since it was the middle of what felt like the coldest darkest winter here in my little house in rural southern Australia. I reached for my phone to see what emails and such came in overnight -- since most of my friends and family live in the United States there's often new correspondence overnight. Blearily looking at my phone I saw an email from my mom (furzicle) titled "ROGER'S DEATH."
   My heart stopped. Roger was her father, my grandfather. I grabbed for my glasses, blinked a few times and looked at my phone again. As my vision straightened out I was able to discern that the email actually was titled "Roger's Health" It was merely an update on some meds he'd been taking. It also mentioned in passing that he was planning to make a homemade ventilator, of the type they put dire covid patients on. This idea is nowhere near as hare-brained as you might first be assuming -- a lifelong engineer (now 93), the engineering firm he had run manufactured extremely delicate parts of NASA satellites, including mirrors for the Hubble Space Telescope, and he still had a workshop full of state of the art tools. If he decided to make a ventilator, it wouldn't be a laughable duct-taped together thing, it would be suitable for use on the ISS. The one quibble was that he apparently planned to go to his local hardware store, Harbor Freight, for an oxygen tank, whereas his doctor had suggested that maybe "medical grade oxygen" was required.
   Chuckling slightly at my mistaken misapprehension and his absolutely typical "I'll just engineer it" attitude, I got up, made coffee, and commenced standing under the heater until I should feel warm enough for something more ambitious.
   My phone dinged. A message from my mom. "Hey Kris please call me when you're awake." This was unusually serious and formal. I immediately called her.
   "After coming home from the hardware store today, Roger collapsed and died." she informed me after some brief preliminaries. The cause of death was congestive heart failure.
   As it happens, a friend of mine also lost his grandfather that day (which was July 3rd for everyone else; I live one day in the future, recall). As I was perusing facebook I noted him saying his grandfather had "passed," and it inspired me to look back at all the messages that so far had been exchanged or posted regarding Roger's death already that day, and clearly my family doesn't go in for euphemisms. Almost without exception they referred to Roger as having died. And another thing about my family, I could picture in someone else's similar story their mother perhaps sobbed the news brokenly between tears, but my recollection is that mom told me fairly matter of factly. And furthermore, at both Roger's and his wife my grandmother's funeral 13 years earlier, my recollection is that the only people crying were spouses and partners. Not that we weren't sad, I think we all think they both were the absolute best grandparents and parents that could exist, but this is our family, we're very stoical. And the reason I'm pivoting from Roger's death to these observations about our family is because I think Roger was the epitome of our family's values. He was incredibly intelligent and turned his intelligence towards understanding physics and science and making cool machines, and other technical pursuits such as flying. Mom and her brothers are science teachers, engineers and creators of things. Roger embodied a wholesome integrity without ever seeming holier-than-thou, indeed not religious at all, he did right because it was the right thing to do. Lucky in life in a number of ways, he had nothing but kindness and empathy for the less fortunate.
   It's overwhelming to try to summarize such an inspiring life in a few pages, which is why I still haven't attempted it, nor did I for my grandmother ("Mum-mum"), which I've always regretted.

   Born in 1927 in Los Angeles, he described a mythic sort of LA of a bygone less hectic era in the many stories he'd tell us around the dinner table, or in his unpublished autobiography. Actually he wrote two, "Roger Over," about his life in aviation, published via self printing a few copies and giving them to family members, and "Roger, Under," about his sailing adventures, never completed or widely read until after his death. In fact, let me let him tell you of one of his very earliest memories in his own words:
   "One of my earliest memories has a nautical flavor. It was 1929. I was two years old. Our family was aboard the SS Caliwaii returning to the mainland after a year in Honolulu where my father had taught at Univ. of Hawaii. I was left in a bunk for my afternoon nap. Somehow I fell out. I can recall being on my back staring up at the overhead and watching it spin and sway. In some versions of this memory I was seasick. I'm not sure now.
   In the late spring of 1938 — I would have been 11 — our family decided we should build a boat... " And, well, you can read the rest of that first chapter here. His father taught physics, and was also inclined to engineer solutions (He made a set of back wheels for his dachshund after it lost lost the use of its back legs after leaping out of a car to chase a rabbit), and the "family decided we should build a boat..." ...the Ransom Family ethos passes from generation to generation while hardly changing at all.
   Anyway, in that same chapter he describes sleeping on the Redondo Beach through hot summer nights with his brother, and together using their home made boat to earn some money by rowing out to yachts and ferrying people ashore which could earn them as much as $1.50 over a weekend. Sometimes someone else woud "borrow" the boat and they'd walk up and down the neighboring streets until they found and reclaimed it, it was a simpler time.
   WWII was on at the time he graduated high school and along with many of his friends he was in a hurry to graduate and join the war. The navy almost accidentally took him at 16 but then caught the error and told him he'd have to wait till he was 17, at which point he joined an accelerated officer training program at UCLA and later Berkeley. His bst friend from high school was killed in Okinawa, which must have been very sobering, but he nonetheless remained set on getting into the fight. The war ended while he was still at school, and due to consquent changes in the program I don't fully understand he ended up dropping out of the program to join the navy as enlisted instead. I am told the reason he has always insisted that everyone call him Roger is because when he was in the Navy he couldn't shake the habit of referring to his father as daddy, which he found embarassing and didn't wish to burden his kids with a similar habit. On the subject of names, the way I believed he got his own name when I was young, because its how he told it, but I later came to realize was (probably) entirely a Roger joke, was that when his mother asked his father to come up with a name for their son, his father, who had been a radioman in the navy in WWI, responded with "Roger" (ie understood) and she said "oh that was quick!" And one more name related anecdote, it was while traveling on troop trains to and from Great Lakes Naval Training Station near Chicago that, joking about their hygiene after these long journeys he jokingly adopted the name "John Q Mold," which is the name of his livejournal jqmold!
   After that he finished college and used the GI Bill to take flying lessons, before joining the Air Force and flying primarily B-25s. After that he ran the lab, which, to quote his official obituary (written by furzicle) "Roger’s career was designing and manufacturing scientific optical instruments such as lenses and mirrors, largely for the space program. Optical elements from John H. Ransom Laboratories, founded by his father during the Depression, were utilized on the Hubble Space telescope and on the Mariner Mars probes."
   He met my grandmother, Shirley, at UC Berkeley and they were married just shy of 55 years when she died in 2007. When she died the two of them had recently been in Malawi helping build water pumps, and unfortunately the doctors wasted too much time thinking she was suffering from a tropical disease and failing to detect a relatively rare form of cancer until it was too late. She had gone windsurfing on her previous birthday (81st). I remember a rare moment of family emotions the first thanksgiving after she died, when Roger actually broke down in tears for a moment in the middle of the sentence "this is the first thanksgiving without Shirley." Which, given how unemotional we all habitually are, was a really poignant moment. My throat tightens just thinking about it. On Roger's 92nd birthday he went flying, doing loops and barrel rolls over Southern California (due to medical holds on his pilot's license he had to hire a flight instructor to accompany him, but that guy ended up just being along for the ride).

   When I think of Roger, the most iconic image for me is of him sitting at the dinner table after a meal, chewing on a toothpick while he regales us with one of his classic stories, or perhaps demonstrating a concept of physics or light refraction on a napkin, using one of the pens he always had at hand in his pocket protectored chest pocket for just this purpose. I fondly remember from an early age admiring the many naval mementos around his house, and when I went out sailing myself it was in his navy peacoat and with his sextant (and when dressing "period," in his 13 button bell bottom trousers! (Surprisingly comfortable, though frustratingly lacking pockets, and woe betide you if you're in a hurry to use the head, you have 13 buttons to undo!) And I realize now that my fondness for writing stories, can probably be traced back through my mom, to Roger .. and perhaps further back to his grandfather who kept a diary as he crossed America in the mid 19th century (and was a sheriff's deputy in Tombstone at the time of the shootout at the OK Corral but I digress)

   I don't subscribe to any belief that he's playing a harp on top of a cloud or something, continuing to be conscious of the passage of time in sync with us, but rather I feel like having once existed he will have always existed, and that's enough to make me happy that such a remarkable and worthy role model of a man existed and will always exist in the time stream.