Time Flying (2 page)

Gary used a tiny portion of his Google money to help found our company, along with a much more substantial codebase he had written in the two months after leaving Google. We had to make sure none of the code duplicated anything he had created for the search company, even going to the unbelievable (to me, anyway) length of emailing the code to one of the company’s founders to make sure he wouldn’t have any legal claim to what would be an important cornerstone of our company.  I, of course, told Gary no corporation in its right mind would fail to say, “OURS” when someone asked, but of course, Google isn’t a corporation in its right mind. Apparently, the founder dropped whatever he had been doing, pored over the code for at least half a day (even a super genius would have needed several hours to understand it all) and sent an email back to Gary with the simple message:

“I love how u propose sorting feedback in lines 1,045 to 2,889! I’ve Never seen it before in my life. Go for it.”

Gary rendered me speechless late on the same afternoon, when he forwarded me the email from the Google founder. I had figured we’d be lucky to get a response from Google in less than a couple months, and in all probability, there would be a number of problems with the codebase. When I expressed my shock they hadn’t held us up and claimed ownership of a chunk of code we couldn’t do without, my friend, puzzled, asked “Why would they do that?” 

To quote another geek I know, “Code is Poetry,” and I guess appreciation of good poetry is more important than ownership of it.

By the time I finished in the bathroom, showered, shaved, teeth brushed and “So-Cal” presentable, Samantha  had dashed out the door to school and Molly was hard at work on her computer in our shared office. Life on the West Coast isn’t always the laid-back experience the cliches suggest. Being three hours behind the East Coast means you’re always trying to get up earlier, groggy, sleep-deprived but still three hours behind the East Coasters. Dressed in one of my darker Polo shirts and standard hued Dockers, I kissed my wife on the cheek, looped the strap of my messenger bag over my shoulder, and left for work.

We like living in San Diego a lot. Molly loves the sun, the outdoor activity, and the beach. Samantha, her mother’s daughter, agrees, adding in a partiality for surfers, much to the concern of both of us. I would be happy living anywhere. I Have lived everywhere. I grew up in Indiana, and went away to college as fast as possible after graduating from high school. Before my injury and subsequent…complications, my life had been charted for me, and would include college basketball paying for my education (even though my family could afford tuition) and then a good job. Those plans didn’t end up working out, so without the rudder I always expected to have, I wandered a bit. States I’d spent time living in, included Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Oregon, Michigan, Florida and Georgia. I’d loved the Pacific northwest, hated the South, and tolerated the Midwest. The eastern states were ok. Neither good nor bad, just places to live, places to work. In a couple cases, they were places to screw up good jobs and get fired.

For the most part, my life hadn’t been particularly  epic, but couldn’t be called a complete disaster, either. I’d saved a little more money than I’d squandered, but not close to  enough, considering all the money I’d earned. By the time I moved to San Diego in the late 80s, a little wiser, but still fairly screwed up and directionless I wasn’t particularly worried about not having changed the world, yet. 

I met a girl who changed that, however, a girl with whom I fell in love and married. For reasons beyond my understanding, she gave up her dreams for me and did something inexplicable. 

She married me.

"Jeesh, I really don't want to go to Cincinnati," I told Gary pinning my Blackberry to my left ear with my shoulder as I slipped out of my SUV, a Jeep Grand Cherokee. The annoyance I felt with my partner was partly due to his insistence on using a bluetooth headset while driving one of the ragtop jeeps he bought, modified and then crawled all over the Texas outback in, requiring the person he was talking to work hard to pull his voice out of the heavy background noise the headset picked up. Most of the annoyance on this day, however, was because of his insistence I be the one to spend several months (winter months, no less) in Ohio, setting up an installation of our software which represented the biggest single sale of our company ever. 

The company, a Fortune 500 behemoth that produced hundreds of different products and services, in hiring LeftCoastX to build its in-house research and data-mining system, did three things. First, by moving from Windows to the Macintosh platform, a huge blow would be struck against Redmond, Washington's Microsoft. Second, by hiring us to build out the software running this part of the enterprise, they were making LeftCoastX a major player in the industry. 

The third thing our getting this job did, while not part of the public knowledge base of the transaction, would be to confirm a long-time friendship between two graduates of an exclusive Chicago prep school, one of whom happened to be Gary Danner, my partner and half-owner of LeftCoastX. Yea, the old-boy network at its worst. Or, at its best, if you happen to be on the team of one of the old-boys. On the one hand, the fact that Gary and the Chairman of the Board of the client went to school together would make Gary the obvious choice to go to Cincinnati, but, as he argued, this was exactly why he couldn't be the partner who made the trip. My going would make the arrangement less about the relationship between him and the Chairman (or, to be more accurate, Chairwoman) should their history ever come to light. If it did come to light, certain assumptions would be made regarding the nature of their relationship in the past and today, assumptions quite correct, Gary made clear to me. LeftCoastX got the company's business for perfectly sound business reasons, but reality would be beside the point. It would just be best for everyone if I went to Cincinnati and Gary stayed as far away from there as possible. 

That didn't stop me from trying to avoid a six month posting to Ohio, though, and as I slid out of the Jeep in front of a Chula Vista convenience store called, ironically enough, since the owners were two Chaldeans from Iraq, “Pancho’s,” I tried one last gambit to avoid the trip. "Dave would be so much better for this, Gary. He's what, 28, 29?" I said, pitching our top Development Lead, Dave Shuttman. "He's young, sharp, hungry for this. Hell, he'd..." 

"And they'll hire him away in about a week," Gary interjected. "We can't afford that. It'd be a mess. You'd have to end up going there anyway, and have to replace him in San Diego." 

“Right," I said, raising the white flag, as I walked into Pancho’s, silently waving at Terry, one of the Iraqi-born owners who, as usual, stood working behind the counter. I made my way to the back corner of the shop, to where the energy drinks were cooled and stored. 

"Okay. I'm on it," I agreed. "I'll fly out right after the New Year," I said. 

"Awesome," Gary replied. Strangely enough, he didn't just sound appreciative, he sounded...Relieved. Hmm, I thought, maybe there's more to this thing than I thought. But, I put those thoughts aside and made the decision to tell Molly that night I'd have to go to Cincinnati for no more than six months. I'd checked flight schedules, and found it wasn't the easiest trip to do non-stop on a regular basis. The best connections were Delta, and I hated flying Delta. 

I paid for the Rock Star energy drink, talked to Terry for a few seconds about the economy, the war in Iraq, how his remaining family was making out there, and a couple minutes later was back in my Jeep, crossing the trolly tracks, driving down Anita Street to our South Bay data center. 

So, in January of 2007, after the holidays, I travelled to Cincinnati on behalf of LeftCoastX for a six-month site setup. Even though the work took me away from my home and family and barely allowed me to commute every other weekend to spend time with said family (and home, of course), the money and prestige working for this client brought our company made the sacrifice worthwhile. Also, the job was only a couple hours from where I'd grown up, and I thought checking the place out might be fun, since I hadn't been back for over 10 years. My parents had moved right after I graduated from High School, and still live on the West Coast not far from my home in San Diego.      

All went well, we completed the project three weeks early so I took a couple extra days to get ready to ship my things, including a new car, purchased while in Cincinnati. With one more weekend to go before returning home to San Diego, since I had already visited my hometown a couple of times, I decided to drive a little further west and visit both the lake where my family had owned a summer home and my father's hometown, a little village about half an hour away from the lake. The spur of the moment trip, conceived of after an early Saturday morning latte at Starbucks would absolutely and profoundly change my life. 

The weather perfect and the traffic light, I skirted Indianapolis to the South, and an hour later passed through Avon on Highway 36. More than 20 years had gone by since I last drove the road, and much had changed. Traffic increased, but moved at a pretty good clip, and I was surprised and delighted to see an antique police car up ahead, and after a few minutes caught up with him. I'm not a car buff by any stretch of the imagination, but this particular classic squad car really impressed me. Little did I know at the time, but this particular sighting would be a foreshadowing worthy of a bad bit of short story sci-fi. Fortunately, I had my digital camera and was able to snap a couple pictures as we drove west.

The drive to our old  summer home, a cottage near a lake that US 36 crossed over was uneventful, though how little the place had changed shocked me. It had been 26 years since my family sold it, but it looked as though time had hardly passed. A tornado had taken out several big and old trees on the property, opening the view to the lake and destroying a portion of the deck that ringed the two story chalet. The owners had rebuilt the deck and added a larger sitting area on one corner.

The son and wife of the man who purchased the house and land from my father still owned the place, and were there when I drove up. They warmly welcomed me in and despite my not wanting to impose, insisted I take a look inside. We walked in and I stopped short. Not a THING had changed. Maybe the carpet and some furniture were different, but little more. The appliances in the kitchen were the same, the goofy colored glass light fixture over the dining area. Everything in the cottage was the same. None of this prepared me though, for what I saw when I reached the bottom of the stairs leading  down to the walk-out basement. For the second time since starting the  day, a bit of foreshadowing would intrude.

My family sold the cottage in 1979, when we moved across the country to San Diego. My parents had had enough of midwestern winters and wanted to spend the next phase of their lives in the sun, near the ocean, where they remain today, retired. For the most part, it represented a new start and except for some cherished pieces of furniture and heirlooms, we sent truckloads of stuff to auction. Halfway through my four years of college, I had decided to transfer to the University of San Diego. I’d had my fill of dorm life and decided apartment-living sounded much better, so we set aside a few pieces of furniture me, a sofa, big round oak table and to go with it, some cool (at the time) very 70s rustic chairs that looked like they were make out of barrels. My barrel chairs were actually part of a set that included a bar and bar stools, but only the chairs made the trip west, then elsewhere with me (until my wife made me give them away as a condition of marriage — they were truly hideous). The rest of the grouping stayed in Indiana. When I walked down those stairs, I learned the bar and barstools had remained in exactly the same place we had left them. Seeing them gave me a momentary, hint of vertigo.

For a second, 30 years hadn’t passed at all, but the feeling only lasted a couple seconds and just as quickly, I was back to the present. It was very odd.

A short time later, I made my goodbyes, getting assurances from my new friends, who promised to get in touch if they ever decided to sell the cottage. I’m not sure why, since there’s no way in hell my wife would ever consent to moving there with our daughter, but I asked anyway. An interesting, if slightly disturbing, experience out of the way, I continued west, next stop, Belton, Indiana.

In the years just after the Great Depression, Belton was a reasonably prosperous place to be. Home to a clay tile factory and surrounded by rich farmland, before World War II Belton had about 1,000 residents, 12 grades of public education and its own high school, Belton High School. It was every small town from the movies of the time. Depending on your perspective, a large Hickory (the town in Hoosiers) or a small Bedford Falls (the town in It’s a Wonderful Life).

I drove down the main street in Belton, and had the oddest feeling I could almost see my grandparents and great-grandparents going about their lives, walking into the post office, standing on the sidewalk talking,  in this now mostly dead town. I passed the vacant lot with the remnants of a house burned down decades before I ever visited, the fireplace and a few bits of concrete still visible. I used to play with my cousins around the ruin, 35 years ago when we’d all come from Indianapolis to the old family hometown for the weekend.

One of the Harper houses slid by my passenger window, then a left turn and I drove to my great-grandmother Margaret’s home. My grandfather, Harrison “Harry” Girrard was born in another house, still standing today, still solid and sturdy looking, though no one’s lived in it for years. Remarkably, Margaret’s place is still quietly occupying the ground it has for well over a hundred years now, looking like it was built after World War II, even though the foundation was dug long before Japan even began to think about attacking Pearl Harbor. I peeked in the window, past the real estate “for sale” sign and was surprised to see a large woven rug I remember from my youth in the middle of the living room. After a few minutes and a handful of pictures, I got back into the car and drove to my father’s boyhood home.