Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

The cars lined up for the funeral procession at half past noon, a chill in the air made worse by a steady breeze. The entire cemetery was covered in a thick blanket of Massachusetts snow – acres and acres of it. As we slowly drove to the burial site, I could see a patch of green in the distance sheltered by an open-sided tent.

My mom’s casket was waiting just off the road, a group of grave diggers waiting for us to arrive.

We got out of our cars, around 25 of us total. All of our immediate family was there – my wife and kids, my brother’s family, my dad, my aunt and her family. A number of cousins on my dad’s side also joined us; they had graciously made arrangements for all the catering after the funeral. My mom originally had 50 first cousins, and over the years we’d seen the number in attendance at family events whittle down due to the inexorable passage of time and the tyranny of distance. One cousin and her husband joined us.

I had never met the rabbi before, but she was very kind, offering us condolences individually then discussing with us the order in which we planned to talk. The funeral director pinned a black ribbon on my overcoat, just over my heart. As is custom in some branches of Judaism, I immediately rended it, ripping it down the middle.

There was one row of chairs in front of the casket. I sat down with my dad, brother, aunt and uncle. Wasting little time, the rabbi began the ceremony by asking us to repeat the traditional blessing for the newly departed:

Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu melekh ha’olam, dayan ha-emet.

Blessed are You, Lord, our God, King of the universe, the true judge.

After saying a few more words and acknowledging the immediate family that was present, I was invited to give the first eulogy. I had struggled to come up with the right words – in our family, eulogies have always been a delicate balance of humility and humor, and I knew this was the only chance I’d ever get to eulogize Mom. So I decided to focus on something she said to me not long ago:

When Mom and I first talked last month about her reaching the final stages of ovarian cancer, I commented on how she had beaten the odds of what was initially a very grave diagnosis, and had survived for 19 more years, well beyond any length of time we could have dreamed of.

“Not 19,” she corrected me. “It’s been 18 years and change. So much for 18 supposedly being good luck.” In Hebrew, the number 18 also spells out the word chai, which means “life” – as in the traditional toast, l’chaim.

“But it was good luck,” I replied without hesitation. “18 good years that your doctors never expected you’d ever have.”

And she took full advantage of those 18 years, whenever and however she could.

First, if any of you have gone out to dinner with my mom, you’d probably experienced one family tradition: those innumerable plates of food she asked to have sent back to the kitchen. Too cold, too undercooked, too overcooked, not what she thought she ordered, not the way they used to make it before the new owner changed the menu. If it wasn’t what she had expected, she’d flat-out reject it.

Could it be embarrassing? Sure – though even I am known to do the same thing every now and then. But Mom knew she didn’t have that much time left on earth, so she wasted none of it. Why have a bad meal when you don’t know how many good meals you had in front of you? Besides, there were those innumerable glasses of white wine expecting to wash down something or another.

She lived her life to the fullest. There were the two dozen cruises she’d taken over the last 18 years with my dad, my aunt and my uncle. And countless countries visited, too: Panama, Columbia, Spain, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Russia, Turkey, Israel, Japan and China. And those are just the ones that come to mind.

Over those 18 years, there were more than 35,000 sweepstakes entries she’d sent out – give or take – a few of which actually paid dividends.

There were the five final seasons of Seinfeld, some of which were pretty good. The 94 episodes and two god-awful movie versions of Sex and the City. And at last count, 224 episodes of NCIS, not including the LA spin-off.

And then there were the things that really counted:

Eric and I each getting married, bringing Kim and Susanne – the two daughters she’d never had, she often said of them – into her life.

The three grandchildren – Kayleigh, Sean and Sophie – three grandchildren she never thought she’d live long enough to meet.

The close friendship she developed with my mother-in-law, Mary.

The countless evenings she spent with her friends over a bottle of wine at home.

The three cats and the 130-pound dog who tried to sit in her lap whenever she visited my house.

The 15 more years she cherished with her mom, my grandmother Theresa, before she passed away six months shy of her 95th birthday.

The 18 more years with her sister Brenda and her family, including the birth of six grand nieces and nephews.

The 18 additional hours she and I had to visit one last time, after Delta abruptly canceled my flight home to DC due to mechanical difficulties two weeks ago.

The 18 precious, wonderful, additional years she spent with my dad.

18 good years. 18 years of good luck.

So Mom, as you sit down for your first of many heavenly meals with Grandma and Grandpa, I have no doubt you’ll still exercise your right to send the food back. After fighting the good fight for 18 years, you’ve earned it.

L’chaim, Mom.

——–

The obituary for my mom that ran in the Boston Globe, February 13, 2013:

Nancy Ellen Carvin, 69, of Indian Harbour Beach, FL, passed away at home on February 11, 2013 after a long battle with cancer.

In lieu of flowers, the family encourages donations in Nancy’s memory to The Women’s Center In Brevard County, FL, or a favorite cancer charity.

I can’t believe it’s 25 years to the day since the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. I remember it as if it were yesterday. I remember seeing it with my own eyes.

In January 1986, I was an eighth-grader at a junior high school in Indialantic, Florida. Like so many other kids in my community, I’d grown up with the space program. The launch pads of Cape Canaveral were around 40 miles north of my house, just north of the barrier island that I called home.

I’d probably seen at least 20 of the previous space shuttle launches, going back to STS-1 in April 1981, when John Young and Robert Crippen piloted the Enterprise. The local newspaper even ran a picture of me on its front page awaiting that first launch, eagerly scanning the sky with my parents’ binoculars. John Young had even come to my elementary school to dedicate a mural we’d created in honor of NASA.

Growing up along the Space Coast, you couldn’t avoid a shuttle launch; if you didn’t happen to be outside to follow the flame and the contrail coursing through the sky, the sonic boom would rattle the neighborhood with such resonance that it would vibrate your doors and set off car alarms.

Our community was immersed in NASA culture, whether or not your individual families contributed to it directly. My elementary school had been named after the Gemini program; our rival high school was named Satellite High. The establishing shot for the TV show “I Dream of Jeannie” – the building with the rockets in front of it – was filmed just north of us at Patrick Air Force Base. A neighbor friend of mine even had a life-size mockup of a Gemini mission capsule in his garage, left over from when a NASA engineer lived in the house. We’d played inside it so many times, flipping every switch in every conceivable combination, that eventually we just used it as a clubhouse to swap baseball cards.

During my lunch period at school that chilly morning in January 1986, the space shuttle Challenger was scheduled to launch. Normally if a launch were taking place at that time, I’d eat quickly and wait outside to catch the entire take-off. That day, though, I wasn’t in a rush. It was ridiculously cold outside, to the point where there had been a frost warning the previous night for the orange crops. The native Bostonian in me had become so acclimatized to Florida weather that I didn’t want to be outside in such frigid temperatures. To complicate matters, I had a big test later that day and wasn’t particularly prepared, so I kept my head buried in a text book while scarfing down lunch.

As lunch period wrapped up, I figured I’d poke my head outside, just in case the launch had taken place. I didn’t expect to see anything, since I couldn’t imagine they’d proceed with a launch in such cold temperatures. Stepping out the front doors of the school, a small group of students was staring slightly upwards, facing due north. No one was talking. I looked up, expecting to see either nothing or the shuttle barreling towards space, its contrail arcing gently through the sky like the world’s largest lowercase letter r.

What I saw, though, didn’t make any sense.

The contrail was shaped like a gargantuan capital Y, as if two stunt jets had flown in a tight formation and then parted in separate directions. The two contrails subdivided again and again, a weeping willow-like fractal pattern splitting into hundreds of faint lines, all drifting slowly downward towards the ocean.

I walked back into the school, unable to process what I had just witnessed. Throughout the hallways, students wrapped up the final lunch period and were making their way to their next class. There just seemed to be more commotion than usual. I was settling in for my French class when a friend of mine came up to my desk and said, “Someone just told me the shuttle blew up.”

I shrugged and told him it was crazy. My head still hadn’t processed what my eyes had just witnessed.

Sitting in French class, confused and in denial, I half-expected the period to begin as it always did. Instead, the school principal came over the PA system and announced, with great emotion in his voice, that the Space Shuttle Challenger had exploded about a minute after takeoff.

Most of the class sat there, stunned. A few students began to cry. Others rushed out the door without asking permission, no doubt eager to get to the main office and call home to check if their parents – NASA employees – were safe. I asked my teacher if I could be excused. She just nodded her head in silence.

I left the classroom and went straight to the small media lab in the school library. It was probably the only place in school outside the principal’s office that had a television, and I just couldn’t sit in class not knowing exactly what had happened. I needed to learn more. Every channel covered the disaster non-stop, but the coverage was all chaos – no one knew what caused the explosion or if the astronauts could have survived. It certainly appeared that it had been a fatal accident. I kept thinking of those hundreds of delicate contrails I’d seen outside, descending inexorably towards the sea. Which of those hauntingly beautiful weeping willow branches trailed the astronauts’ launch chamber in their final moments of life?

I must have sat in the media lab for two, three, four hours. I honestly don’t know. Time flowed into irrelevancy that afternoon. At some point, my American history teacher, who happened to be my French teacher’s husband, came into the room. Normally a real jokester who couldn’t stop talking, he was grave and somber, silently watching the television with me. It must have been his planning period, I thought, but I never asked him; I couldn’t keep my eyes off the TV.

He then grabbed his class materials and began to walk out the door. I looked back and we made eye contact for the first time that day.

“This is your Kennedy,” he said, glassy-eyed, closing the door as he left.

Eventually, the school day came to an end. Many students had departed earlier. There was no point in staying in the media lab any longer when I could get on my bike and go home.

Stepping outside, I looked one more time in the direction of the weeping willow contrails. Incredibly, they were still hanging in the air, as if the explosion had occurred moments earlier. Normally, a shuttle’s contrail evaporates within an hour of takeoff, if not sooner. But the air was so cold and calm that particular day, it remained etched in the sky, as if to etch in our memory – or scar into it – what we had just witnessed.

I’ve thought about the Challenger disaster countless times since then; the events of that day were so formative to my teenage years that I even wrote my college entrance essay about it. The Challenger explosion was indeed my Kennedy. As the JFK assassination had been for my parents, and September 11 would later be to the generation after me, the Challenger disaster was one of those rare life-altering events for which you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing at that particular moment – whether you wanted to remember that moment or not.

A few days ago during a #pubmedia chat on Twitter, we were talking about the complex relationship between public media – NPR and PBS stations – and community media such as cable access TV. Someone brought up community media centers that also serve as telecentres – places that provide free/low-cost Internet access and training – and I mentioned Lowell Telecommunications Corporation (LTC) in Massachusetts, one of several community media organizations that pioneered this model.

I’d hoped to tweet a link to a book on telecentres I co-wrote and edited for IDRC in Canada a number of years ago called From The Ground Up: The Evolution Of The Telecentre Movement, since it included a chapter on LTC. But I discovered that the online version of the book was no longer being hosted by telecentre.org. Thanks to Archive.org, though, I managed to find a PDF of the book. It’s a big file – seven megs – but the book is very heavy on photography, so the PDF version does it justice more than the Web version ever did.

I’m uploading a copy of it here to ensure that it doesn’t vanish again. I wrote the chapters on Ghana, Hungary and India, and co-edited the rest of it. Hope you enjoy it. -andy

Video of my March 2010 TEDxNYED talk, The New Volunteers: Social Media, Disaster Response And You:

Here are the slides from the talk:

TEDxNYED Talk: Social Media, Disaster Response And You

Thanks to the good folks at iBiblio, I’ve switched my blog from Movable Type to Wordpress. My MT database had been having problems for many months, which is why I haven’t been posting very often. We’re still working out some of the kinks, but hopefully the blog will be stable fairly soon.

A soldier who was wounded in Afghanistan, one of several rehabbing at 
Walter Reed that we saw at the Silver Spring Thanksgiving Parade 
today.  His mom says he expects to have another year of rehab before 
he gets to go home.

Posted via email from aka @acarvin