Just Around the Corner

My son Maxwell sang in a premier choir. When he began singing with the Maryland State Boychoir, he was a tenor, but as his voice matured, he moved into the bass section.

We are fortunate to have many of their performances on video.  A few were filmed by us, but never with a great camera.  Lots of MSB parents film the Boychoir, but again, usually with not a great camera.  The video and audio quality are never the strong points.  Jittery camera work is pretty standard.  I regret not trying harder to record more, but I am grateful for all that we have.

I can hear him. I can see him. And my heart, in the brilliant clarity of grief, fills in the spaces where his face is blurry.

When I am really missing him, I go for a virtual stroll, looking for new sightings of him.  I find other people on facebook and youtube who have uploaded pictures or videos he's in, and then look to see if I can find another one with Max in it.

I have become an expert on where to look for him.  I can tell what year the video was filmed from what choristers are in the front row.  When Max was a tenor, he was in the middle.  When he became a bass, he started singing from the back corners of the choir. Usually the far left, (stage left), but sometimes the far right.  The videos we have of Boychoir performances are a trade-off.  If they take in the entire choir, it's at such a distance that it is impossible to make out real details of individual singers.  If the camera is close, or zoomed in, Max is off-screen somewhere to the right or left.

Last week, I found a video and I knew that Max was singing with the choir. I recognized the singers, that they were his contemporaries.  Many of them were boys who sang at his memorial.

I sat through one whole song, begging the camera to turn just a little to the left to see where I hoped Max would be singing.  I resisted the urge to skip ahead.  I didn't want to miss a quick image if the camera only moved that way briefly.  And it feels ... disrespectful to truncate a performance of him.
 
After one whole song, a second one began.  The camera moved slowly to the left.

I gasped seeing Max. There he was.  Like he had walked around the corner of my home, or stepped into my office at work.

There he was.

For just a second, there he was.  Beautiful, alive, and singing.

The second passes, and I am lost in the watery embrace of mourning and memory.  The camera panned back to the right, and Max was gone.

Gone again.

Meeting Mezgeb Feb 24 2013

I can't believe it's been two years since we met Mezgeb!

I remember her being shy and pretty.  She loves her Mom.

And her sisters were used to her, liked her, loved her, too.

Games.

And food, of course!

I had forgotten that Max was with us when we went down.  Did we crowd into Grandpa's car with someone in the back?  Did we take two cars?

I miss having little kids to play with, to tickle.

Something serious.

And something silly.  I do remember Mezgeb sticking pretty close to Jen.

And John looking suave.

I am grateful for family!

Every Epic Love Story Chapter Ten; WorldCon, Atlanta 1986

Well, rats.  I meant to keep on writing this years ago when I began.  Originally, the reason I was writing this series was to inform a dialog with my absent daughter.  Away at BYU, she was dating, and I wanted her to have a record of how her Mom and I met and fell in love.

Things moved past a point where our history would be relevant to her story anymore.  She's been married almost three years now!  And events with our son Maxwell took all of our available focus these past months.

But this story, still unfinished in the telling, is part of a dialog with all of my children, not just Emma.

The things you do at the beginning matter.  I guess the trouble always is, you don't *know* it's the beginning of something.  You only realize in retrospect, "Hey, that thing mattered."  You should live every day like it matters.

When I think about the events at the end of the summer of 1986, I am baffled at the complexity of everything.  How did my parents accommodate such a weird collection of demands?  How is it possible that no one got lost or stranded?

 In July, Jennilyn spent a week in Maryland with me and my family.  In September, I was due to begin my Sophomore year at BYU.  I was eager to get back to Provo, eager to begin the process of turning in my mission paperwork, happy at the prospect of seeing Jennilyn again.  But first ...

First I wanted to see her again in Atlanta, Georgia, at the 44th World Science Fiction Convention. Now, in the last thirty years, Conventions ("Con"s) have exploded.  They have a Con for everything now.  But it was 1988, I was only 18, and it was new to me.  To me, it seemed like simple math.  I would go to Atlanta and hang out there with Jennilyn and some friends from BYU.  I would sleep on someone's floor for a few days, find food to eat, and then fly from Atlanta to Salt Lake City when it was over, and return to BYU.

I think this was the first time I'd ever rode in a glass elevator...

What makes me shake my head now is imagining one of *my* kids asking me if *they* could do something like that.

Where will you sleep?  Where will your stuff be (remember, not just a weekend's worth of stuff, a *semester's* worth of stuff)?  What will you eat?  How on earth are you going to get to Atlanta?!  How will you get from the Hotel to the Airport?  Seriously, what if you get lost?  What if your stuff gets lost?

I think my parents were *really* supportive, and they *really* liked Jennilyn.

I got in touch with someone else going to the Con who lived in the area, and we drove down to Atlanta together.  We met up with a bunch of other BYU Science Fiction fans, and spent the night at Jenni's Uncle's house in Atlanta, because the hotel rooms wouldn't be available until the following afternoon, after the Con began.  I ... have no memory of where my luggage was for those three days.  I barely remember eating, so I'm not sure where I got food.  I remember a couple of events.

I ran into William Gibson on an elevator.  He was very tall and we didn't talk.

The central event at a WorldCon is the awarding of that year's Hugos.  It was the year that Ender's Game was released, and we were all stupendously excited to have a Mormon SF author featured as a finalist for Novel of the Year.  After the awards presentation wear Scott Card won the Hugo for his Novel, I do remember sitting at a long table with a bunch of the other Provo Valley/Utah SF crew, celebrating the win with Scott Card.  Of course, Scott Card was waayyy at the other end of the table from where I was sitting, but it's one of my favorite brushes with fame, that I was at the after-party for that award with that author and my future bride.

The Con was amazing.  Jennilyn was amazing.  It was kind of a blur, the overload of far too much to do in such a short period of time, the cheating of sleep to go to one more presentation, watch one movie, attend one more event.  I do remember being irrationally jealous that I couldn't spend every single minute with Jenni.  I sometimes *still* have that feeling now.  Like I said, it's not rational.


We flew back to Salt Lake.  Somehow, I managed to hold onto all of my luggage.  Of all things, the Babcocks invited me on a camping trip to Zion's Narrows right after we got back.  So I went from one sensory overload to another!  But more time with Jenni = good.

Pro tip for camping with your girlfriend's Dad; don't be cute and sleep with your sleeping bags head-to-head with your girlfriend (so our heads were touching, but our feet stretched out in the opposite direction).  It seemed like a nice way to preserve a chaste distance, while allowing us to whisper sweet nothings and watch for shooting stars (we were camping without tents, the weather was amazing and clear).  But it ended up just being irritating.  We kept waking each other up during the night, which was disorienting and weird.

The hike up and back Zion's was amazing again. I was so in love with Jennilyn, and I adored her family. I remember over and over again, just basking in the glow of how much fun it was to be with her, to be with them, to be doing something so amazing.

The camping trip ended, we drove back to Provo, and got ready for school to start.  Jennilyn and I were getting ready to turn in our mission papers, and I was getting ready for an entire semester of dating Jennilyn.  We had a lot of interesting terrain to navigate.


Previously, on Every Epic Love Story chapter 9, A Summer Vacation in Maryland


Coming Soon, The *Absolutely True* Story of How and Why We Stopped Kissing for YEARS before we Got Married!