He talked with his hands, too.

How fast the days, months and years pass. It's been nine and a half years since Leif died, and over four months since I posted anything on this blog. I think about it often, just as I think of him, but I don't want to post the same things again, and I want new photos, new to me, at least. Photos I either haven't seen before, or that I haven't seen is so long i can't remember them. Today I found one. This photo of him in his classy purple suit was taken at a wedding in January 1993. He was explaining something to someone, talking with his hands like I do.

He was a senior in high school then, with long dark hair which he usually wore in a ponytail. He wore earrings in those days. His ears had been pierced, at his request, by Jennifer, our neighbor in Puerto Rico. He was tall, slim, and had his first job with a call center in Manhattan, Kansas, a rotten sort of job that seemed to keep coming back to him in other iterations wherever he went. He was good at it, but it was mind-numbing and, to use his word, "sucked."

Leif was a natural teacher, not necessarily the academic kind, though I think he would have been good at that if he had the inclination, but at explaining almost anything in such a way that whoever was his listener would get what he was conmunicating. He had an incredible memory and remembered practically verbatim just about everything he heard and saw, even when he didn't appear to be paying attention. He absorbed information and ideas like a sponge absorbs water, and he was able to figure things out and provide solutions to problems. He loved to "hold forth" on topics that interested him, and would amaze any listeners with the depth of his knowledge and understanding on a wide variety of topics, particularly because he never seems to make any effort to acquire the knowledge.

He was passionate about the U.S. Constitution, politics, beer, and guns, hated cruelty to animals, and liked to play pool and computer games.

I wonder what he was talking about in this photo. I will just have to imagine it. 

Leif the RC Car Builder Appeared in my Dream

I wonder how often I dream about Leif. Like most people, I rarely remember my dreams. When I do, it's almost always because something awakened me during the dream. That's what happened this morning. The phone rang and woke me from a dream about him.

I was talking to some man, no one I ever knew, about how Leif built his radio controlled cars, starting with the one when he was in sixth or seventh grade. That kit was made in China and had no instructions in English. I think it's quite remarkable that Leif was able to figure out how to put the whole thing together and make it work just fine. Later, he modified it to make it lighter and faster.

Leif had not been a very interested or avid reader, only reading what he absolutely HAD to for school until he discovered that there were magazines about RC cars and cool automobiles. He subscribed to them and devoured them with gusto.

Since he had a subscription to "Car and Driver" and some other adult car magazines, some list somewhere decided he was an adult male and started sending him credit card applications. He got a laugh out of that, and decided to have some fun with it.

One day, he took one of the applications and answered it all truthfully. Occupation: junior high school student. Income: $260 annually (his allowance), etc. He sent it back to them. Apparently, someone got the message, as he stopped getting credit card ads.

But back to the dream. Leif came into the room and I introduced him to this man, who was very impressed with him. In the dream, Leif was in high school, tall, handsome and very slender. He was wearing is trademark spiffy clothes (like he did at that time, not at the end of his life).

I wish I had been able to finish the dream and find out the rest of it, but if I had, I might not have ever known about it.

This photo was taken long before the Leif of the dream. It was in our garden in Sachsen bei Ansbach, Germany, in October 1979. He was four years old, and the hint of those charming dimples is showing here. He needed a haircut. I cut all the hair in our family, and it was usually overdue when it got done, usually because the boys didn't want their hair cut.

I don't know whether I ever saw this photo before. I hauled out some old slides and scanned them a few days ago. This darling picture was among them. I wonder how many more I will discover if I ever get the time to scan all of the slides we took.