Jon H - memories of my father.

[kyrielle]

I've also linked this in the memories post of Dad's LJ, so you may have seen it there already. It is at http://www.jonh.net/~jonh/andyd/ - and I am copying it below the cut so that I have a copy here. (Jon gave me permission to link it or copy it - thank you, Jon.)

The pictures of people have links to larger copies, in both the original and this copy.



Andy Davidson

I don't have a very good memory. I can learn abstract concepts, but I'm not much for remembering events and facts. (It turns out that Chad is in Africa, not the Middle East. Who knew?) That didn't bother me much for a long time: if I couldn't remember a theorem, I would just re-derive it from abstract concepts. Right now, I'm desperately wishing I had a memory. I remember that I spent a big fraction of my childhood with Andy, and a much bigger fraction of my learning. I remember abstractly what pure joy it was, how much I anticipated each visit with him. I sure would like to replay and relive more of the actual events.

In the third grade, I was in a Talented and Gifted class at the middle school a couple days a week, taught by Mrs. Buismann. TAG involved a lot of tinkering: dozens of plastic drawers full of corks, springs, doodads, wires; I was particularly fascinated by the steel bristles from a street sweeper. One Saturday, the teacher invited parents to come in and describe what they do at work, and to bring props to tinker with.

Laura Davidson was my classmate. Her parents were fed up with the Newberg schools, and so Julie drove Laura out to Sherwood every day. On "Career Day", Andy brought in and set up his CoCo (first generation, chiclet keys, 4KB RAM). Another dad brought in a PC, and I spent the better part of an hour drawing a maze with asterisks in a text-mode spreadsheet. At some point, another kid evicted me from the PC, so I wandered over to Andy's CoCo. The kids before me: "Does it play any games?" Andy: "It can, but not today." Disappointed, the kids move on. Little Jon: "So what is it doing now?" (Andy obviously looked like he had something to show off.) Andy: "Type in your name." I typed "Jon", and the computer replied, "Hello, Jon! Have a nice day!"

It was a simple demo, and the perfect demo. No mystery, just power. "How does it work?" Andy hit break, and listed the three-line program. He showed me how to add a "when were you born?" prompt, and we had the program print out how old you were. Wowee! This is amazing! I can make it do anything! I was giddy with power. Andy knew he'd found his mark. We went on like this for an hour or so, talking about the kinds of things you could make a computer do, and how you'd do it.

Career Day was wrapping up, but Andy saw my enthusiasm, and arranged with the teacher to meet me at the school the next Saturday for additional lessons. Before that day, every so often an adult would ask me, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" It was a completely absurd question to ask a third-grader, and yet I knew some of my school mates already had it figured out: garbage truck driver, mailman, fire engine. Not me. I had no idea. I couldn't imagine spending a whole day doing a single task — how boring! On the day of Andy's visit to my school, I found my career and several of my hobbies.

Andy met me every two weeks at school for quite some time. When summer came, my parents invited him to come to our house.

Andy's diesel VW Rabbit ratta-tat-tatting up Norton street Saturday morning meant "breakfast" — two weeks of a bit boring at school, flailing in ignorance on projects at home, a fast of knowledge would be broken in a few minutes. Andy will come inside and make mercifully little smalltalk with my folks — come on, Mom, we've got things to learn! — and we'll get right down to it.

We'll talk TTL logic. We'll design a circuit board for my CoCo, prickling with expansion busses and expansion boards. (It was a 6809. Andy taught me its assembly language by reverse-engineering an inch-think disassembly of its ROM. Later, in grad school, I was a star programmer and hardware engineer for our 6811-based robot because I already knew its processor like an old friend.) We'd debug my circuit board with an oscilloscope: Oh, rats! See those overshooting transitions? Time for a resistor to ground over here and a capacitor over there. How does the capacitor fix the problem? Andy launches into fifteen or twenty minutes of just exactly the electrical theory needed for the job, drawing an analogy between electrical circuits and water pipes. (Andy wielded analogies deftly, communicating subtle concepts quickly, but never falling for the temptation to draw bogus conclusions from the analogy.)

That's what I love about learning from Andy: Almost without exception, he knew exactly what I needed to know next, and would dispense the knowledge without delay. He indexed a huge body of knowledge, like a walking Web index, plus he could readily adapt it to my background. Learning from Andy was a powerful drug — I take a couple-hour hit of the "smarts" on Saturday morning, and I'd hover along the rest of the weekend on a high of chemicals sloshing around my brain trying to clean up after all the synaptic rewiring. You can imagine that withdrawal wasn't easy: it was always bittersweet to hear the Rabbit ratta-tat-tat to a start and rattle away, knowing that it would be thirteen days and twenty hours until I heard it again.

So it's obvious that I credit Andy with my intense passion for all things electronic, electrical, physical, mechanical, programmatic, and mathematical. Those few hours every couple weeks were gold to me — no, water! It's surely nonsense to extrapolate, but if I'd been able to suck knowledge out of his brain sixteen hours a day I'd be a megalomaniacal supergenius writing to you from my underground lair's control room for my orbiting space lasers and robotic sharks.

Andy's M.O. for acquiring knowledge is tinkering. (That's why all this knowledge gets demand-paged in.) You could tell Andy was a tinkerer by all the projects he built, and twice as many again started or designed. Moreso by Andy's house. In particular, his shop. He always apologized for the messiness of his shop, as if it should somehow embarass. It was cold in there, but it was a dusty Magic Kingdom. Pneumatics, hydraulics, tools that could build anything. Big chainsaw. Drill bits small enough to make holes in printed circuit boards.

The ultimate unfinished project was Andy's well controller. The Davidson cottage had a locally infamous well. Draw too fast, and you pull up silt: the bathtub's brown. And too fast wasn't very fast at all: just about every water appliance in the house violated "too fast." At any given time, some computer (for the longest time, various generations of CoCo) was set aside — nay, annointed — for the high post of Eventual Well Controller. Its job would be to run a tiny Forth program to modulate the well draw rate to avoid drawing silt, using a tank to handle peak demands. So many computers served as Well-Controller Elect without ever being inaugurated, over so many decades, that it was the stuff of Rural Legend: I was sure it would never happen.

A few years ago I visited Andy and Julie out on Ribbon Ridge. Andy had been retired for a few years, and the place looked better than ever: new windows, remodeled bathroom, updated kitchen. But what Andy really wanted to show me was in the shop.

A ten-by-ten foot room had been carved out of the open shop plan, framed up, and insulated against freezing. Inside was an enormous cylindrical white plastic water tank; all sorts of other cylindrical white plastic-and-stainless-steel contraptions: pumps, filters, pressure gauges; and a maze of gleaming 1 1/4" PVC that rivaled the NT "pipes" screen saver. This was it! The dream realized! Six hundred gallons of fresh, clean, filtered water! Three filtering systems for all the various quirks of the Ribbon Ridge water table.

Andy regaled me with stories of its design, construction, and revision. My favorite part was when he told me about fixing a problem where the system would "hammer" (oscillate) violently. See, this pressure tank is like a capacitor, and the long run of pipe to the well like a resistor, and the well pump like a voltage source... we had finally come full circle. Andy was teaching me about hydraulics using electronics analogies.

We went inside and enjoyed a clear glass of water that tasted nothing like Ribbon Ridge silt. And he flushed the toilet, just to prove it wasn't an elaborate hoax.

Andy fed my addiction with loaner equipment. I used his loaner CoCo for a bit (16K, chiclet keyboard — at the time, it was a Well-Controller-Elect), and then my folks bought me my own box. But no way could we afford a brand new $600 Hayes Smartmodem 1200. Andy arranged a loan of one, plus a Televideo 950 glass teletype — its termcap entry never was quite right; you always had to ^L to get vi back to sanity.

Andy loaned me his scroll saw. He loaned me a drill press and a set of tiny drills small enough to drill PCB holes. All this stuff would emerge dusty from the shop, just the right tool for the job. I have no doubt that NASA kept Andy on quick-dial in case they needed to borrow some implausibly-shaped heat-shield-tile-burnisher for the Space Shuttle.

He also arranged for me a guest account on tekgen, a mainframe at Tek. (My username was 'jonh', mimicking his 'andyd'; it still is, to this day.) It was connected to the world by UUCP, and Andy tought me what that meant. I met a guy in Australia on comp.lang.c who taught me countless things about multidimensional arrays and pointers in C. Australia! In those days, kids still had pen pals in Australia with three-month round-trip times. My pen pal answered me every day, just a few >-quoted lines, like it was nothing at all. I tasted the Internet when computer networks were Matthew Broderick's WarGames.

I have perhaps one painful memory. Andy had been teaching me about computer security principles and practice. For some reason, this involved him telling me a password. Somehow, at a summer camp, I was drawn into a bragging competition, and ended up proving my l33t cred by revealing Andy's password to this group of middle schoolers. Later, I was mortified, terrified. In retrospect, it's possible I may have been overreacting, but it felt like I'd failed to honor the single most valuable word Andy had ever uttered to me. I had betrayed Andy's trust. I had betrayed the man who'd never offered me anything but good. I told my mom, and she helped me drum up the courage to call. I was terrified that I'd hear a stern, disappointed voice, that I'd have put an unrepairable dent in our relationship. I cried as I told Andy what I'd done. Andy replied in the most calm, easygoing voice, "oh, no problem, I'll just change it." And just like that, it was fixed.

At some point, I began visiting Andy at his house. It only made sense; all the tools and stockpiled supplies and books and magazines were there, anyway.

The Davidson place defined warm. Up on a hill, away from all the rush. The mailbox is painted in diagonal orange and green zebra stripes, with reflectors for ears: that solved the "which one is our house" problem. Turn into the driveway and wait for the sunbathing cat to move. Get out of the car, move the cat, get back in, and park.

Andy has emerged from the front door.

Julie waves through the kitchen window, above the high-water mark of cat nose smudges. By the time you're parked, Andy has emerged from the front door, and stands on the walk under the trellis, suspenders, one hand in a pocket, the other in a cheerful wave, smiling from behind a bushy grey beard.

The house was a country cottage: not so much small as cozy; not so drafty that the wood stove and propane barn heater didn't keep you toasty; always a list of broken things to fix but never anything that made it less than comfortable and welcoming.

The living room had a sofa and two chairs at one end joined by a little table crowded with magazines and just enough clear space for two coasters and their respective beers or scotches or teas. Andy held court from the chair by the front door and the electrical panel. Julie sat in the other, or leaned on a bookshelf, or asked what she could get you to drink and flitted back to the kitchen to grab it, or let cats in and out of windows. Cats hopped onto laps and oozed into the gap between your leg and the arm of the chair. Other cats danced on tiptoes like tiny ballerinas on amphetamines. Sweety was one of the oozy cats. His body was a furry watermelon rendered in black and white; his soul a complete surrender to entropy.

The open space in the middle of the house radiated heat from the woodstove and jet-engine noise from the barn heater. There are rows of paperback fantasy books on shelves over the barn heater. Little pewter knights, and a big lazy green wax dragon, napping — he blends right in with the cats.

The kitchen had a perenially-broken light fixture with a supply of stories about its demise. I am implicated in at least one of those stories. I sure wish I could remember how it went. Andy and Julie slept in the bedroom-cum-computer-room off the kitchen. A U-shaped table stretches out of the kitchen wall, under the broken fixture. It served raw broccoli and carrots before meals, and Muffburgers, and always Coke. Andy held court in the outside chair. Julie flitted between table and fridge, table and frypan. There is no chance you will be hungry at this table. There's no chance you will be bored, either.

The perfect lunch was Julie's classic Muffburger. A Muffburger is a pan-fried ellipsoidal hamburger of low aspect ratio, held plump with egg, seasoned with onion. There must have been other secret ingredients, or maybe the magic was the context. Always juicy, served with ketchup and mustard on a toasted English muffin. Divine.

Andy and Julie visiting at my folks house, chortling at a pun.

When the family ate together, we talked about what they were going to do that weekend — get a hundred pounds of cat food at Costco — or tell a story — the time the skunks adopted the outdoor cat food dish — or (and this really marked a Davidson experience) we devolved into a free-for-all pun cascade. The '>'-quote characters floated palpably in the air as each pun stretched the last, each groan declared that the prior groaner had suffered only a minor abrasion in comparison to the delightful dismembering horror of the next pun. I can't possibly do the experience justice — you had to be there, and you had to like puns. What I'd give for another one right now.

Back in the central space with the heaters. On the left is the door to the enclosed back porch. Just inside the door is a little table with magazines and the Well-Controller Elect. Outside the door is the deep freezer and endless bags of cat food. Beyond the porch is the flight of stairs I helped Andy build. See all the half-moons around the nails? Those are from a sixteen-ounce hammer in my little arms. I've built two decks since then; not so many half-moons now.

In the middle of the house, the floor slopes down a bit back to the bathroom, a brown silt ring defines the bathtub. Dozens of magazines in reach of the throne. Laura's room is in the back corner. The last room, between Laura's bedroom and the living room, is where most of the electronics action happens. That's where the busiest CoCo lives, and the smoldering soldering iron, and teetering piles of magazines, and reference books, and circuit boards, and the oscilloscopes and the VOM, and the loaner signal generator, and the wire wrapper. Go ahead and ask about wire wrapping — you'll hear a good story about Serial Number One of a new computer Andy helped build — by wire wrap. Hundreds and thousands of little square pins — but they worked, and it worked, and Serial Number One won a few important contracts. And then you'll hear about Seymour Cray.

A big tree shades the driveway, from the back porch to the shop. I can't recall just what sort of tree it is. It has broad leaves like an oak or walnut, but its main fruit seems to be cats. At the back of the driveway is an open-walled barn with rows of firewood drying to feed the stove. I spent one Saturday helpnig Andy feed the hydraulic splitter. A day splitting wood, another pounding half-moons into the porch steps: Andy never asked and only rarely acquiesced to my attempts to be useful. I couldn't ever begin to pay the Davidsons back for all they gave me, but that's as far as I got even trying to begin.

Sometime in my midddle school years, two friends and I plotted a big adventure: we road from Sherwood to Newberg on our little dirt bikes. I thought it would be pretty neat to trek all the way up the hill to Andy's place, but we were pretty beat just getting to the town. I think Andy made Newberg feel like the Enchanted Land of the West.

Andy taught me all about AppleTalk, but he got really excited when he told me about this groovy new long-haul protocol called IP. It was real time like a LAN protocol, but worldwide in scale like UUCP. When Tek started routing it to the general-purpose multiuser mainframes, I was there on tektools on the hundreds-of-milliseconds-latency Internet. Wow.

Andy took me in to work to show me the machine room. Raised floors, Halon, and the room-long row of racks that were the Vax 11/780. And the laundromat of disk packs. He spun down a disk pack for me, and told me about the time the disk pack had come out of balance and the drive had walked its way across the room until it came unplugged — they found out when the sysadmin saw the console message. He told stories about the ultra-fast line printer rated in sheets-per-second that moved greenbar through so fast that when it jammed, it compressed the paper into a tight, sprung wad under the cabinet. When the operator opened the lid to fix it, the paper ball exploded and shot paper up into the drop ceiling.

Andy taught me every two weeks for the longest time. That pattern finally tapered off a little when I got to high school. I was getting self-sufficient enough to look things up in books from time to time. (Although to this day, I still prefer to learn by the expert-opens-up-your-skull-and-crams-it-full method.) But every visit was still precious; moreso now as they were rare. We did different kinds of things.

Andy took me to the Company Store, or as Tekkies called it, the "Country Store." We drooled over surplus 'scopes. I bought a surplus desk chair for $5. I still use it. I bought a Tek 6130 graphical workstation that ran Utek, Tek's own Unix. (Find it in the uucp map, connected as qiclab!talon.) I used it from high school through my sophomore year a college.

One year, Andy took me on a camping trip to the Umpqua forest in southern Oregon. The first few hours on the road were the usual mode: math this, physics that. For some reason we got to wondering how expensive it must be to install all those "turtles" on the lane markers on the Interstate. (We often got to wondering all sorts of things for some reason. One of our favorite pastimes was to "pop the stack", working backwards from the present bizarre topic, to the topic that led to it, topic by weird topic, retracing our exploration for hours through the leafy underbrush of wondering all sorts of things.)

Andy marked out a mile on the odometer, and I counted the stripes in a mile, and we counted the number of turtles in each stripe, and multiplied by two for the two stripes that separate the three lanes. We had no idea how much each turtle cost, or the glue, or the labor for the men to stick them down one at a time, but Andy thought a dollar per turtle might not be an unreasonable order-of-magnitude estimate. Just as we worked out the final multiplication, three lanes gave way to two, and only shortly thereafter turtles gave way to painted stripes, and we had a good laugh. And some puns, I imagine.

Andy snoozing in front of our campfire.

It was sort of a strange trip, later on, as the rhythm of wondering conversation tapered and gave way to long silences. I remember trying to break them, maybe trying too hard. After that trip I long wondered why it "didn't work." Or maybe it did. Maybe that's just one way Andy experiences a good friend: sharing time together quietly, just enjoying being together. It's hard for me to understand — I don't often have a quiet mode. I have an alone mode, but even that's not often quiet. (See?) But Andy's LiveJournal post this week about his dislike of synchronous telephone calls gave me a lot of hope that maybe the trip actually "worked" just great, and I just didn't realize it. In any case, I'm still mighty glad I got to go.

On a visit to Tek, I saw a guy — tall, long haired, sinewy — Andy said he biked to work every day from fifteen miles away. Wow! Who could achieve a feat like that? When I left for college, Andy handed down to me his little yellow knock-off Campagnolo ten-speed that he rode in grad school.

When I was at college, I didn't see the Davidsons much at all — until the summer. Andy arranged for me to be a summer intern testing printer drivers in the GPID at Tek, where I learned a ton. Just today I wrote a PostScript program to solve a problem that was otherwise impossible in MS Office.

I rode that little yellow bike to work those two summers at Tek (about eleven miles, but only a couple days a week), and really got into shape for the first time. I rode that bike through my own stay in grad school. When I got a Real Job, I finally bought a bike that fit me, and my favorite sport is still cycling. I've crossed tinkering with biking, cobbling together a tandem bike in my own messy shop. I've ridden Seattle to Portland four times now. I've always intended to follow one of those trips with a ride out to the Davidson cottage on the ridge, dealing with the washboarded stretch of gravel road at the end one way or another. Traveling along the top of the ridge is a homecoming. I'd still like to, even though the the finale will be more bitter than sweet.

Andy's handwriting was deliberate and elegant. Long vertical srtokes, very deliberately formed lobes with squared features. He formed his "—Andy" on a yellow sticky tab as if with a fountain pen on parchment, signing the Declaration of Independence. He carried a stack of 3x5 index cards in his breast pocket; on them, shopping lists, books to read, things to fix. There had to be a dozen and a half cards there; I never could guess what they were each for. At the store (we made more than a few visits to Radio Shack and NORVAC), he always gave his address like this: "Write small or it won't fit: '20440 Northeast Ribbon Ridge Road' — that's okay, it's hard to fit even when you know it's coming."

One day Andy told me about a lunch conversation at work, wherein he and his coworkers, who built the crayon-jet printer for Tek, designed the ultimate ink-jet: a computer-controlled (yea, even PostScript-controlled) servo-steered pneumatic paintball gun. Paint a mural on a three-story building! Years later, I saw a sidebar in Wired: someone had done it. I mailed Andy a clipping. Sweet validation.

Grief is a bizarre emotion. I keep thinking about the strange timing of Andy's leaving us, and of all the conversations I still want to have with him that the icy road stole away. But I finally realized that I'm looking about it all backwards. The only reason I so desperately want those conversations is that I have already had the privilege of having so many conversations with a man so rare. How can I complain? Andy didn't touch my life, he picked it up and plopped it down in an intellectual wonderland that I've been playing in ever since. Andy is the rare freshwater Martian spring; no matter when the last jug is drawn, it's too soon to go back to barren stretches of red desert.

You know the Shel Silverstein book called the Giving Tree, wherein the kid meets a nice tree, and the tree keeps giving the kid stuff until there's no tree left? When I read that book, I knew immediately who the tree was. Maybe the thing I regret most is that I never really got to give much to Andy. My whole life is built out of wood he supplied, and now he's gone. Maybe that's the point of that story: that some relationships are inherently unidirectional. But oh, do I miss playing in Andy's branches.

Julie Davidson passed away on December 12th, 2006. Andy Davidson passed away nine days later, on December 21st, 2006.

Comments

[tigerchild.livejournal.com]

What a beautiful, moving tribute, Laura.

Thank you for sharing this, I'm wiping away tears.

[kyrielle]

I had the same reaction, which is part of why I asked for permission to share it. I'm so glad Jon was willing to have it shared; I am not sure I could have remembered those parts of my parents' lives so clearly, let alone described them so eloquently.

[callibr8]

What a beautiful tribute. Thank you for sharing it, and Jon for writing it.

*wipes away tears*

[kyrielle]

*hugs* Thank you.