It was a nice service, and nice weekend with my family – a group that I love and admire so much. Everyone who spoke about Gigi talked about her sense of humor, and her sharp tongue. And when the church pastor, during the homily for your funeral, mentions how sharp your sense of humor is, well, that’s something distinctive. (He quoted Jack as saying, “She could bury you with a single word.”) Makes me smile to think of that – and I guess I know that I myself come by that particular character trait honestly.

And of course, books and Gigi reading them to kids, were featured prominently.

There were probably a couple hundred people there, from the island, from Brunswick, from Jacksonville and beyond. I think we had the service that she wanted. (And in fact, I know that we did, as she left extremely detailed instructions regarding, well, pretty much all the details. Also characteristic of her.)

And while only my brother David and I will really feel this, it’ll always be hard to think of this weekend without thinking about another day in August in south Georgia when we buried my dad’s father (Grandee is what we called him) 15 years ago.

The two experiences were incredibly different from each other – just as different as the two families are, really. Quitman, where Grandee lived most of his life and where my dad grew up, is a tiny, tiny town about 60 miles north of Tallahassee – and what I remember the most from those days was the funeral procession through the town, with the police at the intersections with their hats over their hearts, and then how impossibly light he was in the coffin was when we laid him to rest.

Gigi’s service was very different, though – she was cremated a couple of weeks ago, and before the larger church service we had a very small gathering of just the family and the pastor to put her ashes in the memorial garden of the church. No body, no pall bearers like at Grandee’s funeral, just us, with my uncles and brother putting her ashes into the garden. It was a good remembrance, and honored who she was.

What connects the two events most viscerally for me, other than the obvious relationship, is that I think I’ll always remember how hot and humid it was both times – a characteristic Georgia heat that makes you sweat almost immediately when you step outside – and all of us in our ties and dresses and nice clothes.

Anyway, two completely different experiences, different families, separated by 15 years. But for my brother and me, these two August days will always be connected by the heat of the Georgia summer, and of remembering and honoring our grandparents.

But I’ve been struggling with moving between roles the past few days — and it’s got nothing to do with online life — but I would wager is a decidedly non-modern one.

Kathy & I took SPL to Disneyland for his first trip there. We’d been on some smaller outings, like to Legoland, but I’ve really wanted to take him to Anaheim for quite a while. There are lots of reasons to be cynical about Disney and Disneyland/Disney World, but I’m not — I really love it there. I love how it feels, even with crowds. I love all the colliding mythologies. Most of all, I love how it makes kids feel when they ride Space Mountain or interact with characters during the parades or watch the fireworks over Sleeping Beauty Castle.

I’ve been to the parks in Anaheim and Orlando both many times, but obviously it was our first trip as the parents of a 5 year old — so lots of new things to consider in that role.

But we knew earlier in the week that Gigi was in the hospital and might not make it out — and Friday morning before we left the hotel I got a call from Mom about Gi’s prognosis; a few hours later Mom called again to let me know that Gigi had passed away. We were in line for a ride at the California Adventure side of the park (bumper cars for the Bug’s Life section), but the specifics aren’t that important, really.

What is important was that at that moment, a bunch of roles I have all crashed into each other at once. I was trying to be a good son for my mother, who had just said good-bye to her own mother. And I was trying to communicate at least a little bit with Kathy, my partner in all things, so she would know what was happening. The line was moving, though, and SPL was anxious to get into the seat of the bumper car so we could crash into his mother’s car — and so I wanted to be a good attentive dad for him. Over the top of all that, though, and of course, I was mostly Gigi’s grandson, and mostly Gigi’s grandson just felt sad.

I felt those roles all collide with each other a lot over the next couple of days — sort of like waves crashing at the beach one would come in, and then later be overwhelmed by a different one. It was a hard set of feelings to really understand and process and deal with appropriately — I don’t honestly know whether I’ve processed this much yet at all. (Which is one of the reasons that I’m  blogging it — to be able to understand it a little bit better.)

I do know that I was much more aware of the roles that I play in life this week — and in particular, the roles that really, really matter a lot to me. I think it helped me clarify some of the things I love about being a father, a husband, a son — but I know this is all a bit of a moving target. Things change, relationships change.

Mostly, I was very happy to be able to spend so much time with Kathy & SPL at a difficult juncture for me. That, I know for sure.

She was my mother’s mother, and I never knew her as May, really, but rather “Gigi,” a name she gave herself when I was born. It came from the old Pogo comic – there’s a character called Grundoon in it – a wrinkly baby woodchuck that always spoke in gibberish – and she thought I looked a little like that. Thus G.G. for “Grundoon’s Grandmother.” I’ve never really known what to make of that story (although, in retrospect, not really all that flattering) but she’s always just been Gigi to me.

A couple of little glimpses into my memories of her:

When I was growing up, she always used to send cards for about every holiday — birthday, Christmas, Easter, Halloween, whatever – and they always had a dollar bill in them. She moved to two dollars in the eighties, when I was in my teens and able to spend with more velocity. Those cards continued into college for me, and even after. In 1997, after I’d been working at Trilogy and then Apple, we saw each other at my Mom’s graduation ceremony (for her Masters in Library Science) and I remember proudly giving Gigi one of my Apple business cards. Without missing a beat, she said, “I’ve been sending $2 to a Senior Scientist at Apple??” Pretty funny. She was always super quick and super sharp with her humor — so that, at least, I come by honestly. She’s been sending SPL cards with a couple of dollars in them since he was born. A nice tradition and connection to her that always made me smile.

But the thing that I really remember about her is all the books. She owned a bookstore on St. Simons called The Shorebird, and one of my favorite things to do was to go to work with her. I would sit in the back and read everything back there, for what seemed like hours (but probably wasn’t) and remember feeling like I was a very lucky kid – and, of course, that’s exactly right.

I’ve been thinking about her a bunch the last few days, naturally, but especially because we’ve been at Disneyland, for SPL’s first visit there. One of my earliest memories is going to Walt Disney World with Gigi and the rest of the family (since they lived pretty close to Orlando), and it brings a lot of things full circle for me to be here now. More on that in a bit.

She leaves behind such a good family — my mom and her two brothers, who have been wonderful uncles (and now great uncles), and the seven grandkids (my cousins, my brother, and me), who are such a smart, funny, diverse, and talented group. No small feat.

Anyway, Gigi lived a good life, and I’ll miss her a lot.

R.I.P., May Pearce Korb, 1923 – 2010

I’ve been thinking a lot about books lately — obviously because of the developments of eBooks, but also because I’ve been home sick the past few days, reading as I get better, and just generally around all my books more of the time.

I happened to walk by a shelf in our living room filled with books from our family — mostly older books, and mostly from my dad’s mother (she was always “Grandmother” to me). When she died, I inherited a number of her Latin books, since I really loved learning Latin, and it was something that was important to her, too. For whatever reason, I picked one up off the shelf today — Cooper’s Virgil — an annotated collection of the writing of Virgil (who wrote The Aeneid, among other things).

Just picking it up, a million different things came up in my mind. Some reverence for how old it is. Fondness for the Latin work and friends I had in high school. Memories of Grandmother, always teaching, and pretty often whipping me in double solitaire, which I’m starting to teach SPL now.

Here’s the back cover page (you can click through to see it bigger):

Now the first thing you’ll notice is that the book is old. It looks like Gussie Raysor acquired it (or just signed it) on May 26, 1895, just about 115 years ago now.

Think of that. 1895 was when the first movie projector was patented. Queen Victoria was still alive, and Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t yet President of the United States. The Ford Motor Company wouldn’t be founded for another 8 years.

The next thing that I noticed was the name at the top — Laura Lilly — who is definitely not my grandmother, but instead was her sister-in-law — my grandfather’s sister. So that’s a little bit of humor there. I guess my grandfather stole the book from his sister (although I have to say that I can’t really imagine him giving much of a damn about Latin — unless it was some sort of prank, which I can imagine him caring about), and then the book got absorbed into Grandmother’s collection (given her love of language and learning and books, not too surprising). Gussie Raysor was my grandfather’s mother.

And so through this artifact that I’ve moved around several times over the past couple of decades, and that surely frustrated any number of Lillys as they tried to learn their declensions and conjugations and gerunds — through this simple artifact, a connection across the years was made. And with real impact and emotion in the present day.

That is a hell of a thing. It’s just really astonishing in simplicity and power.

Now, I’m not very nostalgic about books, I have to say. I thought I would be — I thought I’d miss their paper & binding shape with the advent of eBooks. But I really don’t — not at all, honestly. I prefer, in most cases, to read books on my Kindle now — which tells me, as I’ve written elsewhere, that what I really love is reading, not the physical forms themselves.

Still:

There’s something about physical artifacts that reaches across the ages. As I look around my own house and think about what objects with meaning will persist and SPL’s grandchildren will look at a hundred years from now, I’m not sure there are very many at all. There are lots of electronic artifacts, like this blog, even, if we can manage to keep them alive and safe from inevitable(?) bit-rot. But precious few things that will make it through the childhoods and moves and marriages and storms and whatever else that the next 100 years will bring.

So I’m glad to have these books of my grandmother’s with me. They mean something and they change who I am and how I experience the world because they’re here with me. And it’s probably time to think a little bit not in the backwards direction, but in the forwards direction, about what we want people to reflect over a hundred years hence.

Inspired by the movie trailers & John Hodgman’s tweets, I downloaded Coraline to my Kindle this weekend and read the book — it’s a short & fun read — took me less than a day.

It’s a fun story aimed at kids — a little dark, naturally — and I liked it a lot. Better, I thought, than his recent The Graveyard Book.

I’m getting more & more interested in stories and fairy tales for kids as SPL starts to experiment with points of view and narratives — so have been thinking a lot about Narnia, of course, and Tolkein, and Alice, and on and on. Thinking about the characteristics of the most memorable serial stories — I think the very best of these were basically constructed on the fly with an audience of 1 or 2 specific kids in mind.

I’m trying out modeling some of our nighttime stories on ones that I’ve read; sometimes it works, sometimes not so much. But it’s fun to think about, fun to experiment. It’s such a cliché to talk about “seeing through the eyes of a child,” but I have to tell you that it’s one of the chief aspects of being a parent — trying to understand how things must seem to the kid, what will be fun, what will be scary, what will make sense, what will teach. It’s a neat activity, and changing the way that my interactions work throughout my life, really.

Every so often I find myself in a situation with family or work and realize that something’s different, something’s new — and I try to take myself out of the moment a little bit to notice it.

This morning at the breakfast table, as I was packing up and getting ready to head into work, I was half-listening to SPL and his babysitter — they were talking in Mandarin to each other — but when I looked up, the subject matter was one of my own books from when I was a kid: Richard Scarry’s Busytown. And that caused me to think about how many of the little vignettes of our morning were incredibly traditional, but also incredibly modern.

- Kathy & I had already read the morning’s news — but me from my laptop news reader and Kathy was scanning through on her iPhone — we haven’t gotten a daily or weekly newspaper for probably 10 years

- We were all dressed appropriately for the weather — but not because of information in the paper or the morning TV news, but over the Web, naturally

- SPL & his babysitter, reading Busytown, but talking about it in Mandarin

Anyway, today felt like a rich combination of new and old to me — and, really, something that felt very California modern. I have a sense/hope that 20 years from now the differences will be not so much about information usage but about materials and energy usage. We’ll see, I suppose.

A few months back, my grandfather Monte (my mom’s father) and his wife Myra came to visit us here. (From now on, though, I’ll call him “Bampa,” which I named him back about a million years ago.) This was no small feat — they rode Amtrak out from Georgia — up through Washington, DC, over to Chicago, down to Austin to spend a few days with my brother’s family, and then west all the way to Los Angeles, where I picked them up. I’d been looking forward to spending time with them, and had been meaning to have Bampa tell me more about his life. He’s led an interesting life, growing up mostly in Washington State, but really moving around a lot, was a GI in WWII, got his engineering degree at Georgia Tech, worked at Bethlehem Steel in Baltimore in the 50s, in the rocket engineering field in the 50s & 60s, and eventually settling down for good in St. Simons Island & Brunswick, GA, where they live now, and he’s still a practicing civil engineer, at 85 years old. He’s also the person who was most influential in convincing me to apply to Stanford for college, and that’s had obvious & far-reaching implications for my career and life.

So we were touched and excited that Bampa & Myra went to such an effort to visit David’s family and then ours. It’s one thing to go visit your family; it’s another to be able to share with them some part of your own adult life, and learn about theirs in kind. My dad’s parents both passed away before I had really established much of my own life; my mom’s mother is past the point of being able to travel out to California (although she did when Kathy & I were married in 2000, which I’m grateful for). Sometimes I feel very distant out here on the left coast. Most of both Kathy’s & my family live so far east of here: my brother in Austin, Kathy’s folks in San Antonio, my parents in Nashville and Atlanta, most of my extended family in Georgia. Being able to share some of it when our parents visit is wonderful — and it was great to be able to share some with Bampa.

On the drive up, we drove along the coast for a while, then inland — and drove by Camp Roberts, where Bampa was actually stationed in the 1940s, and he told us some stories about that. Yet another reminder that we all walk an earth that’s been traveled much before us.

The whole week was wonderful. We spent an afternoon at Stanford — sat in on a d.school class that I helped with (a tiny, tiny bit). It was projects that had a real focus on Facebook — not sure Bampa totally got it, but he understood the design process very well — recognized it from his own experience — which was great. We spent time in the Marin Headlands (beautiful as always). We went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium (top five favorite places anywhere). Had a just-about-perfect Italian dinner in North Beach. Couldn’t have been better, really.

What I didn’t really anticipate is how it felt to see things simultaneously through Bampa’s 80+ year old eyes and through SPL’s 3 year old eyes. Old & new, experiencing the same things. Just a reminder that the world is both incredibly modern in many ways, and the same as it’s ever been in so many others. It was just a really good time we all had together, and was great to share it with family.

So now to Tokyo — gotta figure out what some very interesting bloggers in Japan will be interested in hearing about from Mozilla.

I’ve mentioned Adam before — he & I were in 7th grade together, a million years ago in Las Vegas. We were great friends at particularly itinerant parts of our lives, and the time we spent together in school and outside (playing Enchanter & such) was really meaningful to me.

Anyway, in what is maybe an unsurprising twist of fate, we’re both nerds now, working in technology — and so he was in San Francisco this weekend for some training and was kind enough to come over for dinner.

We had a great time — it’s amazing to us how much in common we have, even after 25 years, and how comfortable it was to sit and visit together again. Really awesome, and I feel very fortunate to be able to connect. Wonderful weekend.

[ps -- decided I was interested in revisiting Enchanter et. al. -- any ideas for the z-files?]

[warning: doesn't seem to load right on firefox 3 nightlies at present]

I’m finding it both harder to really understand how I feel about time lately, and easier to just enjoy its passing. Yesterday was a rocky day, with the aforementioned naplessness — and SPL subsequently falling asleep in my arms when we walked around the block later. But after a short nap & dinner, the two of us just kicked around the backyard, throwing the frisbee & kicking the soccer ball — and time could have stood still, for all I noticed. It was just a sweet, carefree bit of experience we shared — the type of time that I’m learning to appreciate more & more.

Anyway, because of Independence day, this is my third day off, with a couple of weekend days to look forward to — I’ve found that adjusting to “kid time” takes a couple of days — getting used to not being too worried about getting anything done on a timeline — but that once you’re there it’s a great thing.

2 is a tough age — lots of new capabilities, growing language & understanding of the world, and lots of random emotions that are tough for a kid (and his parents) to sort out.

But he’s such a generous, happy, funny kid that I know we’ll miss this random time — such a good ime of exploration and coming into his own.

Well, now that I’ve posted a video to She’s So Hot (BOOM), I’ll post something a little more family-friendly — about the launch of Glubble.

Glubble’s the brainchild of Ian Hayward, a longtime friend of Mozilla, who contributed his own time & his company’s time over the past several years to help us build SpreadFirefox, the Joga extension, and others. He’s obviously an important community member, and a devoted dad to his children — and that intersection is where Glubble comes in.

They’ve built a pretty major extension for Firefox that enables kid-browsing. At the basic level, they’ve built a UI on top of Firefox that simplifies the user interface for kids. You can recognize the basic elements of Firefox, with the back & forward arrows, the URL bar and the search field, but it’s of course simplified for smaller kids to use, with cool visual thumbnails at the top for quick navigation.

In addition to the UI reworking, they’ve implemented some whitelists & search filtering, so you can make sure your kids are surfing stuff that’s appropriate. But they’ve also built in a communications mechanism — so that as your kids (inevitably) click on links that are outside their Glubble-world, you as a parent will get a message in your browser — at home, work — wherever you are — and it’ll let you grant or deny access to what they’re trying to look at (and clicks beyond if you want).

I think there are 2 particularly neat things about what they’ve done here. The first is that Glubble isn’t trying to dumb down the Web — they recognize that the whole Web is important — that the whole Web has legitimate and useful content on it, depending on context more than any particular key word. The second is that this is a whitelist combined with active parenting approach — which means that the parent should get more involved as the child surfs.

This won’t be for everyone — our best guess is that at present, most of our users may not have kids — but I think it’s a tremendously good addition for families. My wife & I are thinking about this more and more for ourselves — we’ve got a 2 year old at home, and he’s been fascinated with pictures from Wikipedia (Emu) and videos from YouTube (mostly Moose & Garbage Trucks) since he was maybe 9 months old. He’s got his own (not-connected-to-anything) keyboard that he types e-mails to grandparents on, too. Wanting control on the Web can’t be too far away, so I’m glad that Glubble is thinking about it & innovating in such great ways.

for some reason, he loves gardening gloves (even while napping). goofy kid.

Similar smile

Originally uploaded by khowe.

kathy’s great with the camera, and this is my absolute favorite picture.

Letter H goes there

Originally uploaded by khowe.

Great puzzle time with Sam lately. Learning a few more each day.

and i got this feeling that i’ve been having a lot lately, where i just enjoyed watching sam, interacting with him, sometimes explaining things to him, sometimes listening to him. and i guess i realized that “dadness” — the feeling of being a father, and feeling good about it and happy — it’s one that sort of sneaks up on you. it’s always been terrific since sam’s been here (and even longer, since kathy & i have been together, for sure), but there’s something about this feeling that’s just amazing, and it pops up during funny, often simple times.

even this morning, as sam woke up around 6 (what last week before DST was 5!) and so we came out in the dark, but spent time looking at the moon and mars and talking about the stars and sun — even bleary-eyed, pretty fantastic, and getting better each day.

happy post.