Here's Leif in Canada, August 1989, age 14, already six feet tall, wearing his snappy gray outfit with his Member's Only jacket. I think this was taken in Quebec City, but unfortunately, the slide wasn't labeled.
He always loved guns of any kind, climbed on every cannon he saw from the time he was very small. I wonder, now, how many he clambered around. He was curious about how the mechanisms worked, and from a very young age could figure out how machinery operated.
He had a quick mind for anything mechanical and could figure out how to fix things. When he died, for an apartment dweller, he had an amazingly good collection of tools. He worked on his cars and his motorcycles, and on some of our cars, too.
It's too bad that we don't foster all the kinds of intelligence there are in this world. We seem to think academic learning is the only way to go, and often don't understand or respect other kinds of intelligence and talents that don't require "book learning." I think someone like Leif might have been a lot happier if he hadn't thought it necessary to go to college, but could have found another path to use his mind. He was certainly not averse to learning . . . but he liked things like the real-time collaboration he found in online games requiring strategic thinking, the hands-on use of skills and mechanical understanding, the mental repartee of ideas he seldom found in classes (with a few outstanding exceptions).
He would have made a good Viking. His name fit him.
We so seldom remember our dreams. I wonder how many times I dream about Leif. When I woke up this morning, I had been dreaming about Leif. In my dream, he was eating cookies and drinking milk, and he was wearing the blue sweater he is wearing in this photo with his dad. It was so clear, and there was more to the dream than that, but all I could keep in my memory was the darling little toddler with the cookies and milk. I wish I'd have more dreams of him to remember.
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