Follow-Ups

Often I tell a story to show a snapshot of an idea, but since these are all real people they have continued their lives. Here's what happened to a few of them:

My friend from Jump is in a happy relationship which has lasted over a year. He bought a house, and they happily live together in it.

The man from the fruit stand in Better People never even called me back to say he didn't want to hire me, but I did get a job with one of the better respected computer-related companies in the world. Go figure.

I did in fact almost fail my background check, but not because of all the moving, but because it was a little tough to prove I ever worked for the feds. Crash sorted me out, he's the man.

The bounty hunting team lost. We were carrying the robot live (long story) and the motherboard shorted literally as we placed it on the competition field. We lost the competition but wound up with lots of interested sponsors. Pippin and I lost track of the team after that, he's still being completely absurd and enjoying it.

I'm no longer homeless. My first housemate I lived with for a year. He has a little dog, but it's well trained and well mannered. Now I live in another crazy community, but thankfully I don't have to run it, so I never feel like I have to stop anything from happening.

Being barefoot at my new job is much better tolerated.

I did call Nexus once when I needed a hand. He hung up.

Scavenging never goes out of style, the Torii and my new home both have furniture from the adventures with the feds.

Joat had a baby.

Magpie and Gilby lived together for a whole year. Impressively, nobody wound up getting punched, though there were a few close calls.

Gadget is still the politician, and is happily doing grad research.

Mime got her life together and is now getting licensed to do real estate. She's still boy-crazy, but I feel her taste has improved significantly.

My new meds cause me to bruise all the time now. Hilarity ensues. Related: I did lose the weight again, but I never managed to get my little plant.

3Stack runs the program I ran with the feds now. He's grown a lot in some ways, but is still a little silly.

My grandmother from Rice is fairing poorly, and has trouble remembering a lot now. She's scared, and we're trying to be comforting. My other grandma is comfortable and as happy as she can be, given the circumstances.

I do less breaking and entering now, and mostly scheme about taking over the world with varied success.

The project from Up is put on hold more or less indefinitely but has been absurdly educational.

Drummer's geographical challenges haven't prevented him from getting an extraordinarily respectable series of software jobs.

My friend from Las Vegas and I realized the situation was a little impractical but we're both still good friends and remain in touch.

Vex runs his own company now, where he makes tools that suck less.

Arbor totally still is bitter about that damn burrito. He ran into PJ recently and brought it up.

Real

"Pika," she asked, "Tell me a story about my life."

I am always amazed at how the very old and the very young are similar. Firefly use to ask the same things, "Tell me about when I came from China," "Tell me about when I was little and we drove to the beach."

Grandma is dying of Alzheimer's, but she has an usual variety. She can remember recent events well, but her early life has become a blur over the years.

"You were a total badass Grandma!" I exclaimed, "You went to Rice at 14 for mathematics. It was completely unheard of! Then you kept getting all the A's in the classes until the professors told you you were ruining the curve for boys who needed those A's for their career, so you got a degree to be a schoolteacher."

Grandma smiled.

"So then World War II happened, so you became a spy in the Navy. Not like a secret agent, but you listened in to tapped phones to see if anybody in Hawaii was conspiring against America. That is where you met grandpa. He was working in the army as a Rabbi.

Gramdpa was an amazing man. I never met him, but I wish I had. He was a Rabbi who did not believe in God, but his family had put him in rabbinical school when he was quite young and so that became his profession. He came to terms with it by decided that even if God did not exist, that belief in God was an amazing and powerful positive influence in people's lives, and that by helping other people believe in God he could make people's lives better. They say he died 5-10 years early because he kept sneaking out of his hospital bed to do last rites for other patients."

Grandma chuckled a little bit, "Oh Pika, you don't need to make up things like that to make me feel good. Why don't you tell me a real story?"

***

"I wasn't always old you know."

"Of course not Grandma!" I said, "Everybody was young once, and you were so cool too!"

Grandma smiled that smile which says she thinks I am humoring her again. I suppose some people can not be convinced...

"Tell us a story grandma!" I said. Grandma never brings up being young unless she remembers something.

"I use to ride horses. I use to gallop across the fields..."

"That's wonderful!" I said, "English or Western?"

Grandma tapped her hearing aid, "What?"

"I said English or Western riding?"

"What?"

"Did you jump?"

"What?"

"Did you ride the horse over jumps?"

"No."

The room gets quiet as the debris of my attempt at polite conversation settle. Grandma looks ashamed at having to ask me to repeat myself so many times.

***

Three years after my attempts to tell Grandma about Rice, Grandma barely ate in front of us anymore. She had trouble using a fork to put food in her mouth, and she was very ashamed of it.

"Nathan liked this," she says as she passed time rearranging the food on her plate with the tines of her fork.

I catch the cue and ask loudly, "Tell us about Grandpa!"

Grandma smiled, "Well, Nathan was a very interesting man. He proposed to me on the very first date."

"No!" I say. Grandma finds it easier when I talk more in emotions than words, and with very few words at a time.

"Yes, yes he did." She smiles one of the first genuine smiles I have seen in a while, "He really did." She paused and then laughed, "I thought he was crazy."

"Well," Mom asked like you might ask a small child, "What did you do?"

"I went home to my father and told him about it."

"And what did he do?"

"He said that sometimes in life you just have to take a chance."

"And you were happily married until he died!" Mom finished.

Grandma nodded.

"That's beautiful Grandma," I said, but Grandma was done talking. I could tell she was having problems with the subtleties of what Mom had said, but she didn't want to go into a "what" cycle again. I'm never sure if Grandma can catch the horrendously condescending tones of voice Mom uses on her, or if perhaps I'm just sensitive to her because I have seen a great deal of her interactions with very small children.

If our culture had stories like The Fox and the Bear, maybe they would tell us that old people lose their hearing but not their speaking because they don't need to hear as much anymore, and because it is their turn to be heard instead.

I wonder if I was to tell her this story again later if she would not believe this one was real either.

***

"But it’s the truth even if it didn't happen."

I'm awkwardly balancing my books on the little L which forms the armrest of my seat, unable to move my feet very far because I'll kick the person in front of me. High school and air travel both sometimes seem to be the fine art of getting people to accept being treated like cattle.

"What did Ken Kesey mean by that?" My American Literature teacher is pacing the front of the room.

"Wasn't he high all the time?" one girl asked, twirling a chunk of her hair in her fingertips, "Maybe it is just nonsense."

Junior year of highschool meant I had already had several experiences of hallucinating from the medication I was being fed. Perhaps that is why this book was probably the only piece of literature I was forced to read that year that I liked.

"Maybe," I said, "These things seemed so real that they impacted him and had effects on him as if they were real things."

"Ah," the teacher asked, "So that makes them real?"

"Of course not," I said, "Real things are real, fake things are not, all I'm saying is it doesn't have to be real to be important." I'm sure at the time I was nowhere near as eloquent.

"Yeah," another student said, "Otherwise real things could be fake if everybody forgot them."