I just finished preserving a recently deceased
friend's website. That means I put everything into past tense and added a few lines, such as RIP. It was frustrating, because he and I both made our personal sites in iWeb, which is long since orphaned by Apple, and it's hard to manage without specific files, which only exist on the computer the person made the site on. I don't even have my own, and I certainly don't have his.
But I cobbled it together in Dreamweaver, copying and pasting code when the drag-and-drop wasn't happening. And it's done now, not updated, merely archived. There for readers of his work, his friends, his family, and maybe to help me feel like I could do something.
I meet Edward Readicker-Henderson in late summer of 2003. We're both writers, though he worked for magazines, and I took the slower, less profitable book-writing path. He liked to write about travel, as I do, but he actually made a living at it.
A year or so later, ERH went on a press trip to Jordan, where he met Amanda Castleman. We soon met over email, and before you knew it, Amanda, ERH, and I had the virtual watercooler. This was pre-Facebook, so we gabbed endlessly via emails, the three of us freelancing from home or from our laptops from any number of global locations.
We were fast friends for more than a decade, the three of us. You might remember seeing Amanda show up here occasionally, or even as a special guest in Sydney during MariesWorldTour.com 2011. But as ERH become more tired, and Amanda and I stayed busy or used social media to keep up, we drifted off to an extent. He had always been ill--in fact, he used his illness as a point in his work--but he became steadily more sick. I can't say more seriously ill, because he had in fact had very little time to live on many occasions. It doesn't get much more serious than that.
You can cheat death many times, but the house always wins. And we weren't surprised, not much, but in a way, we were. He'd bounced back enough times to where nothing would surprise us.
I was somewhat relieved for him when his pain passed, and he went in the best-possible way, in palliative care after having been visited by family and friends. But it still hit me today, while sorting out his virtual record of being. I can't ask his advice or send him a joke, or ignore his emails when I'm exasperated, then guiltily write a few days later. There's one less person in the world who actually "gets" me now, and there weren't many to begin with.
Here
is Edward Readicker-Henderson speaking about the nonsense of having a bucket list. Those are my coffin photos he borrowed. But you know, he didn't go in the airplane coffin after all. He chose cremation. Which is just as well--I am not even sure you can get one of those coffins without a special trip to Ghana.
I don't have a travel or experience bucket list, but that might just be because I've long since caught on. Life's not about country counting or bragging (even just to yourself). Getting on a plane and visiting a location doesn't make you a better person than someone who stayed home. I don't know what the point of everything is, or how to have the best life one can--all I know is there's one less person I can say something like that to now. One less person who won't judge me poorly for not being positive and cheerful. One less person who won't judge me when I snarkily say you can't magic your life or your health with your mind. I'll miss you, my friend.
There were two possible solutions. One was to dismantle and rebuild the chimney. The other was to ask BBF to quietly go up the roof hatch with new tar.
I wanted to go to the Batcave in the Hollywood Hills, but BBF had heard from so many people that he shouldn't miss the Museum of Jurassic Technology. I hadn't been, because it's located on the moon from where I live and work, so on Sunday, we caught the bus south, then west, and it dropped us off in front of the front door.
We were almost to the beach anyway, so we caught the bus the rest of the way to Venice. The bus dropped us off near where I lived in 1995, in a part of Venice that is now hip but was then skeevy, like many of my former habitats. We walked along the manmade canals of Venice, strolled the beach (which is essentially unchanged to my eyes), and caught the bus east for the long journey home. 
The guy in charge of the bikes explained to us the best places to ride, we put on the supplied helmets and off we went, a bit wobbly at first, but it got easier as we rode. 
We walked through the garden, reading explanations of plants, then zipped back through town to the mountainside. I loved the electric bike! The only problem is with the battery pack, these things aren't light. I couldn't life one up or down so much as a curb. 
I'd booked us to San Pedro after noticing the Silver Line Express Bus was right outside the San Pedro port. We walking from the ferry port through the container industrial equipment, me again fighting off the nostalgia of departing here in January of 2001 on my first trip around the world. 
When I'd initially gone to the Catalina Express site to purchase two ferry tickets from Long Beach to Catalina, there had been plenty of tickets. Naturally, I did nothing.
The long hallways and our state room looked incredibly similar to my cabin on the QE2 some 15 years prior.
Being docked with no engines running was odd to me, but this feeling of something being not-quite-right was pushed aside and overridden by two other gut reactions. One was the sense of tragedy over the fate of the QE2, the other the sharp pain of suppressed nostalgia, as I stared through the porthole over at the world's largest container port, the origin of my most incredible trip and one I'll never surpass, if only because after two trips around the world, running a company in Cairo, and living in...eight?...countries, I am seldom surprised by adventuring. I won't get that back, and that hurts a little.
BBF was in town last week, so I did a bit more here in LA than my usual eat-work-sleep routine. Well, we did plenty more eating, like at the Monday night half-price menu at a place called Off-Vine, or the regular menu at a place on Cahuenga called Running Goose. We went to the Egyptian to see Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, and the Arclight with the Cinerama to see the new Star Trek film (but it was in the multiplex, not the dome). I learned a bit about how to play my new ukulele (BBF plays guitar), and we even walked up to Franklin Village to eat one night, but the crowds were too thick and we ended up at the Oaks.
And we did some sightseeing. Last time BBF was in town, we packed a lot in—Griffith Observatory, DTLA, Hollywood of course, a look at Burbank, and the Grand Canyon, Vegas, and Hoover Dam. This time we kept a saner pace, but still busy enough to classify as a Marie-special.
Years before he died, my friend Edward Readicker-Henderson, a well-known travel journalist, asked me what I'd like him to leave me in his will. I said "Nothing, I have enough stuff." But once his will was executed, our mutual friend Amanda wrote to say he'd left me a stuffed llama as a gag gift. I know he laughed when thinking of my reaction upon learning I was getting a stuffed llama, but I changed my mind about wanting nothing after his death. Did I want just a stuffed mangy llama to commemorate our 13-year friendship?
