The Bed's Too Big Without You

My wife left yesterday morning for Florida. She is trying to clear up the affairs of her deceased aunt. We got up at four and I drove her to the airport. After dropping her off I drove to Balboa Park and caught the first rays of light on the magnificent buildings.

The park is so magical at first light. It was practically devoid of people. I noticed a security guard by the Museum of Art and a few homeless people by the fountain, standing at a tangent to the sun and trying to warm their bodies still chilly from the cold night. I tried to say hello to one of them, a black man whose prematurely aged face looked like an old weathered navajo. He grunted but chose not to respond or engage.

I walked over to the rose gardens and caught some pics of the many flowering aloes and succulents in the cactus garden. It was there that I ran out of room on my sdcard and had to curtail my photography, first deleting all the substandard shots I could find on my card.

I then drove through the gaslamp and the homeless scene downtown, always interesting from a photographic standpoint and ended up driving to O.B. for a chorizo and egg breakfast at Ortegas and a walk around Sunset Cliffs.

I miss my wife terribly when she is gone. I think that she has less of a problem with me being on the road. I find myself engaging in a lot of one sided conversations with the cat in her absence. My wife left me with several days of prepared food including chicken soup and salad, clean sheets, clean clothes, fresh towels. She is so thoughtful and takes such good care of me. I wake up in my solitary bed and feel at a loss without her presence beside me.

There is no doubt that Leslie is the greatest gift I have ever received. We may fight like banshees on occasion but we both give as good as we get. Smart, loving and beautiful, she is the total package. Fiercely faithful. We are soul mates in the truest sense of the word. I loved her from the moment I first set eyes on her 21 years ago and it's never going to stop.

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Bucky Fuller

The absence of a long time companion can be like the loss of a rudder or stabilizer. Last week Drew asked me if I knew Buckminster Fuller's epitaph? It is Call me Trimtab. Like something from Melville, only we aren't talking whales but instead a geodesic dymaxion in a sea of forward thinking. What is a trimtab, you might ask? I confess to not having known either. Here is Bucky to explain things:

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trimtab.
It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trimtab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.
So I said, call me Trimtab.
When I thought about steering the course of the "Spaceship Earth" and all of humanity, I saw most people trying to turn the boat by pushing the bow around.
I saw that by being all the way at the tail of the ship, by just kicking my foot to one side or the other, I could create the "low pressure" which would turn the whole ship. If ever someone wanted to write my epitaph, I would want it to say "Call me Trimtab".