Missing Him So Much

Sunday, November 29th I attended a lovely Christmas concert. A part of the program was a sing-along that included "I'll Be Home for Christmas." I couldn't sing it, just as I couldn't sing it seven years ago, the first Christmas without Leif in 2008. I still got all choked up with tears in my eyes, but I couldn't let myself cry. I didn't want to spoil other people's good time, and I was also the "official" photographer for the concert. I had to keep my mind on my task.

But it wasn't easy, and it hasn't gotten easier in the two days since then. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Leif's birthday. They are always hard. I miss him every day of my life, but I miss him doubly at those times, days we always shared with him throughout his life, with the exception of a very few years when he was gone in the army. But even then, most of the Christmases he was able to come home to be with us, and could still talk to him on the other holidays. I miss the sound of his voice, his laugh, his rascally twinkling eyes. I miss his teasing and his holding forth on any topic.

He would sure have a lot to say about the current presidential race. I wish he were here to say it. He'd have plenty to say about the Middle East mess, too. And strong opinions about the poor treatment of veterans, and the importance of the lives of soldiers. He would understand and agree with "Black lives matter," and he would undoubtedly add, "Soldiers lives matter." We should not waste them!

He would have a lot to say about the events of the day, from support for Planned Parenthood to dash cams for police officers.

And he would be reveling in the upcoming release of the new Star Trek and Star Wars movies, and grinning over the exploits of Super Girl.

There is so much of the world today that would make him angry, and so much he would enjoy, if only he were here. If only. If only. If only . . . .

-------------

This photo was taken December 10, 2006 when we met him and Donna for dinner at a Japanese restaurant in Brandon. He's opening a phone we gave him.

Avatar - The Movie He Would Have Loved

It was two years ago that Leif bought his Xbox 360 precisely so he could play the game Mass Effect. He was completely mesmerized by it and talked to us at great length about how good it was, in every way, story, graphics, music. He played it for many hours at a time, creating more than one character and playing different choices to see how the game would play out. He was fascinated that he could create a character much in his own likeness, and he did. Leif also liked to play role-playing games from the viewpoint of different characters, and always created female as well as male characters to play, whether in his CyberPunk games, Mass Effect, or others. He took many screen shots of his Mass Effect games and characters and some movie clips of his games, all of which I found on his computer. These are a few of the character shots. I don't know which game he used her in, but one of his female characters was named Arielle.

Leif loved science fiction, from Star Wars and Star Trek to Battlestar Galactica, and it was sad that he didn't stay alive to see the end of the Battlestar Galactica series, one he had watched, purchased through iTunes, watched again, and extolled in many ways.

Leif loved James Cameron's movies and watched them over and over. He had a lot of analytical things to say about them, as he did all the others above.

Yesterday afternoon we went to see "Avatar." Part of the way through it, I turned to Peter W. and said, "This is Leif's movie." It was the quintessential "Leif's movie." How he would have loved it! He would have seen it over and over. He would have purchased it. He would have memorized it. He would have analyzed it.

There were so many themes in this movie that were Leif's, from the injured and crippled marine who found a new life plugged into an avatar link ( which reminded me of the novel he began, the extant chapters of which I posted here), to the blue-skinned and wide-golden-eyed women of the Pandora planet. When he was working with the ZAON designers, one of the things he liked to do was experiment with the "look" of "other species" invented for the game, and change skin color, eye color and mix ethnic characteristics to get startling and striking new combinations. He would have loved the willowy blue beings in Avatar.

He would have loved the individualistic, defiant and courageous Jake Sully, and reveled in the battle scenes, the visual richness of the Pandora world, the incredible technology used to make this film. He would have thrilled to the mission Jake took on to save the Na'vi people and their planet from destruction at the hands of greedy humans from earth.

How I wish I could have shared this experience with him! How I wish he had seen it! The film made me cry, but I cried as much for Leif and the fact he could not see it with me as for the story itself. This was HIS movie.

Leif's CyberPunk Space Ship Drawings - Group 3

The top drawing has the most complete labeling of the nine space ship drawings in this series. It is the "S.S. Sorchalynn Fulcrum Class Corvette" commanded by "Captain Cailus Brietei. It is 90 meters long, 65 meters wide, 20 meters high and the cargo capacity is specified. It carries a crew of 30 and has 2 ion cannons, 2 laser cannons, 6 double laser cannons, 6 medium laser cannons, 1 tractor beam projector, and 2 proton torpedo launcher.

The middle and bottom ships are of a very different design than any of his other ones, following a curved motif. The middle one is the "S.S. Soriano, a Tomahawk Class Destroyer," and the bottom one is a "Barbier Class Scout," showing side and back views as well as the view looking down on the top of it.

Last night we saw the new Star Trek movie. We all (Peter Anthony and Darren were with us) commented on how Leif would have enjoyed it, wished we had his opinion of it, and I was also thinking about how his space ships corresponded to those we saw in the movie.

Leif's Kindergarten Art - Spring 1981 - Age 6

Leif had a lot of art talent, but he didn't pursue it. As I've written before, as a child he was immensely frustrated when he couldn't make his drawings look like they did in his head, or build models perfectly. He did a lot of drawing in elementary school, but less and less of it as he got into the later years of elementary school and junior high school. He started drawing again when he was in college and after the army while working on developing cyberpunk games with his friend Jason but other than that, he didn't spend time sketching or drawing.

When he was in kindergarten, his teacher and the art teacher thought he had a great deal of ability in art. Not only could he draw much better than most kindergarteners, he could portray motion and action, something extremely rare in young children's art, which is generally quite static. His kindergarten teacher at Sagamihara Elementary School, Mrs. Snell, collected about a dozen of his drawings for a portfolio which was displayed at a school open house. I kept it all these years until we were moving to Florida. It was done on large sheets of coarse manila paper which had begun to oxidize badly. Leif seemed to have no interest in it. I had thought I'd save it for him and for his children, but it wasn't going to last a lot longer and there wasn't anyone to give it to, so I scanned the drawings and very reluctantly discarded them. I'm so glad I have the scans.

In one of my posts in June 2008 I posted one of the drawings, of the Spaceship Enterprise from Star Trek. If you want to see it, look for the "drawings" keyword in the list at the bottom right.

These drawings had captions on them which Leif dictated to Mrs. Snell. I think they are too small to read here, but I'll put a list of them in order below. They are quite sophisticated for a six-year-old.

1. A secret gun I designed. You can click on a part and make it a laser. The view finder is really a finder, but push a button under the trigger and the finder shoots. The locking button is another trigger to shoot. The gun is now being charged with lasers!
2. Colonial Vipers (green) are exploding Cylons (black). Ion cannon shooting.
3. My own designs after the USA Enterprise space shuttles.
4. Some ships are disintegrated. Red lines are explosions.
5. A space cruiser and armed scout ships. The cruiser has a magnetic field.
6. Space cruiser (blue) exploding another space cruiser (red/black) and two asteroids.
7. Space shuttle -- my own ship. Smaller than the Enterprise. The cockpit holds nine people. It has three rockets but the big storage tank for fuel is smaller.
8. UFO

Leif's 9th Christmas 1983 - Honolulu, Hawaii - Almost 9 years old

In the summer of 1983 we moved from Sagamihara, Japan, to Honolulu, Hawaii, were we lived in a townhouse on the outer rim of an extinct volcano at Red Hill, overlooking Pearl Harbor and Pearl City. Leif was in third grade and growing fast. You can see he is maturing a lot from the last photos.

He was always bright, but in Hawaii he was pursuing a lot of ideas, drawing, planning, constructing plastic models, and so on. He still loved his E.T. "dolls" and kept them by him while he worked. He was deeply into his GI Joe phase, as well as his continuing fascination with Star Wars and Star Trek.

Although I no longer know for sure what he got for Christmas in 1983, I can say with some certainty that it must have involved some space and or GI Joe vehicles.

It was in Hawaii that he became so focused on GI Joe that he would save up his pocket money and we would go to Long's Drug Store in Pearl City, which had a huge selection of GI Joe figures, so that he could select one. That was always a traumatic event for him, and I may have written about this before. He usually only had enough money for one, but would want 3-5, and it was just about torture for him to make a decision. As soon as he chose one, he knew he'd have to leave the others behind.

I would point out to him that if he really didn't know which one he wanted most, it really didn't matter which one he picked, he would like it. And he could save up to get another one next time. That didn't help. He would stand there nearly paralyzed with indecision until tears welled up in his eyes. I felt bad for him, coming there to get something he wanted to give him fun and pleasure, and have the choice be so momentously hard.

But at Christmas, he didn't have to worry about choices, at least not at that age. Someone else had to do that, and he could just open his gifts and have fun.

In Hawaii, we were still very far away from the rest of our family. My mother did come to visit once a year, and Peter's mother, Ellen (Oma to the kids), made it once, but those visits were rare.

Christmas in Hawaii was a new experience for us because it was hot weather. It made me realize how all our cultural expectations for Christmas (and thus those of our children) were for it to be cold . . . and wishing for snow. Thus it didn't SEEM like Christmas, despite the Christmas carols playing in the department stores and on the radio. It seemed especially silly to be hearing, "Jingle Bells," for instance, and see fake snow in the windows of Pizza Hut! We talked about how in probably half the world, it wasn't cold at Christmas time, and why weren't there songs that went with warm weather??

We took all that in stride, though, and we had fun together, enjoyed our family traditions as always, and could even look forward to heading for the beach.

Garretsons - Hawaii - June 1985 - Age 10

We all enjoyed our three years in Hawaii. We were so fortunate in being able to live in so many wonderful places, but that didn't mean Leif enjoyed posing for family photos. This photo was taken either before or after Peter Anthony was in a performance of the Hawaii Youth Chorus, in which he sang. He's wearing his chorus uniform. Leif is expressing his disgust with having to stand still and have a photo taken, and he is wearing his signature black leather Members Only jacket. I think I've mentioned before that he loved this jacket and wore it no matter how hot it was.

We lived in Hawaii, at Red Hill, in a military housing area, from the summer of 1983 to the summer of 1986, in a town house. The back of the house faced Pearl Harbor and Pearl City, and we got a beautiful view of the lights at night from our lanai, a porch which went across the back of the house. Leif went to the Red Hill Elementary School for grades 3-5 and his best friends in Hawaii were named Michael and Joey. We lost contact with them when we moved to Chicago in August 1986.

While we were there, Peter W. worked at US CINCPAC (Pacific Command) in the JAG Office at Camp Smith. Jerri was a student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and got her MEd in Educational Technology there. Peter Anthony completed his freshman, sophomore and junior years of high school at Moanalua High School.

Leif was interested in GI Joe figures and vehicles, Star Wars, Star Trek, space, guns and weapons, and especially cars. He was one of a group of gifted underachieving boys that were selected for a special class to motivate them, and it was very successful, at least for that class. :)

Hawaii was really the last time that Leif was a "little" boy. By the time we moved to Chicago in the summer of 1986, he was shooting up in height, and he had always been the tallest on in his classes to that point.

Leif's giant R2D2 cookie

Leif and his brother loved Star Wars and Star Trek all their lives. Those movies and television shows influenced their views of the world, the future, morality, and more. They were significant far beyond their entertainment value.

When Leif was 9 years old, he wanted to make a giant R2D2 cookie. I helped him to figure out how to make the cookie shape and we rolled it out. Then he decorated it in amazing detail with frosting. He was so cute and earnest about it.

We were living in Hawaii at that time and Leif spent a lot of this time with big imaginative things from Star Wars to GI Joe figurines and vehicles, from his black Members Only jacket to toy guns. More about that later. I think it was in Hawaii that he first began to get the idea of being "Mr. Cool," though you can't really tell that in these photos when he's wearing his pajamas.

Leif - Enterprise Drawing - Kindergarten

Unlike some kids, Leif's interests were remarkably consistent throughout his life, although he didn't always express or pursue them in the same ways. One of his enduring passions was space ships, which of course went along with his passion for science fiction. He was a young child when the Star Wars and Star Trek movies were coming out, and they affected both him and his brother deeply.

Leif had a great deal of artistic talent and mightily impressed his kindergarten teacher with a series of drawings of space ships in motion and in battles and space guns firing. She had him make a portfolio of them for display.

His talent was particularly noteworthy because most children at the age of 5 or 6 are drawing very simple figures, often stick figures, and don't have any idea how to show motion or draw complex objects.

This drawing is one he made of the Space Ship Enterprise, and he drew it from memory when he was only five years old, which is even more impressive. We were living in Japan at that time and he was also influenced by the Japanese children's shows on TV, which were not broadcast in English, so he had to pay close attention to the graphics. He loved playing with his Japanese toys, which were incredible sci fi toys that transformed from robots into everything from planes to trucks.

Leif drew often, expressing ideas about space ships and space weapons, until he was in about six grade when he became more or less obsessed with radio controlled cars and also got very interested in music and playing electric guitars. He pretty much dropped drawing until he was in college and playing CyberPunk with his friends.

He took an art course in college to fulfill an arts requirement for his liberal arts degree and again showed some remarkable talent with the things he produced for the class, but didn't have the interest to pursue it further.

I treasure these drawings and will post a few more . . . the antecedents of the copper penny space ship I posted yesterday.