for Betty Lou Kibbe, nee Kidwell, 20 July, 1929 to 16 October, 2009

As I flew west towards Omaha with my wife on 15 October, my brother and I still had a mother. Only a little over a day later, we wouldn’t; in fact, within 5 hours of landing we’d lose all of her but the waning rhythm of breath and pulse as she slipped into a coma that evening, lingering for about 21 hours before her improbably able heart finally failed. It is perhaps too melodramatic to say it was broken after the death of her husband of almost 50 years just over 4 months ago; but perhaps not.

There was little left of the woman who’d raised us when I walked into her room and kissed her forehead hello at the rehab center where she’d been on and off since falling 6 weeks before. But she was alert and fully there, and we shared an afternoon of voluble companionship before our role shifted to sitting vigil and talking in unnecessarily hushed tones as she ebbed. In the days that followed her death, two brothers who see rather less of each other than many would reminisce and go through pictures and work on rebuilding our image of our mother. Like putting flesh back on her by-then sub-80-pound frame, we set about redefining the twinkle in her eye and putting a spring back in her imagined step.

More in images and less in prose than for my father, here are snippets of her expansive life.

Born in Saint Louis in the Great Depression, upper-middle of six siblings (4 still living), she posed for this picture at age 2 before the family headed for some possibilities in California, ultimately resettling for good back in Saint Louis.

A slight but natural beauty, she had a career at Purina as a nationally-noted feed microscopist, which is an optically-armed industrial spy of sorts, divining the makeup of competitors’ feeds, mostly from gross examination by microscope (in those days before mass spectrometers and gas chromatographs).

While taking one of her sisters to visit that sister’s boyfriend in a mining operation in Colorado in 1957, she was fixed up by said boyfriend with his friend, the temporarily wayward engineer-to-be Jack Kibbe, and they were married the day after Christmas in 1959, seen dancing here at their reception in the house of her sister Peggy and husband John.

Family legend has my father off on a compulsory engineering-school graduation fishing trip when I was born — my mother caught a cab to the hospital when her waters broke, and I narrowly missed being born in the back seat. Jack had taken a job in the iron ore industry in Venezuela, went on ahead after I was born, and Betty traveled unaccompanied to Venezuela with 5-month-old me to join him there. She later bore a second son, Douglas, and raised her two boys in an expatriate community of Americans given to the living-large lifestyle of the 60’s; easily recognizable to their stateside counterparts but with the exotic tinge of the latin locale, forging a new city in a fledgling country of boundless natural beauty.

While in Venezuela Betty traveled extensively about the country with us, including on Jeep expeditions into the mostly-uncharted Gran Sabana jungles. She learned to golf, and even learned to fly, piloting a single engine, low-wing Piper Cherokee my parents co-owned with another couple. Here she’s on the Auyan Tepuy above Angel Falls with her mother, and more or less cheerfully enduring the ritual ablution in used engine oil after soloing in the Cessna behind her.

After leaving Venezuela (the second time and for good), they settled in Albuquerque, where their second house was nestled in the scenic foothills of the Sandia mountains.

From there they traveled to many places, including here for Tricia’s & my wedding

and Fiji, amongst many other fascinating and remote places (she and my dad are to the far right).

This last was taken shortly after my dad died as we were cleaning out their house for sale. We’d gotten her the roses, which here, I guess, served as a sort of stand-in for my dad in this family photo (that’s Suzanne with Charlie and Doug with Sam). She bravely left that house and the life they’d known and went to live in Omaha with Doug & Suzanne, but her roots were done growing and she never settled in. Near the end she told us to make sure to enjoy life.

We are who she raised us to be. We dearly love and miss you – ‘bye, Mom …

for Betty Lou Kibbe, nee Kidwell, 20 July, 1929 to 16 October, 2009

As I flew west towards Omaha with my wife on 15 October, my brother and I still had a mother. Only a little over a day later, we wouldn’t; in fact, within 5 hours of landing we’d lose all of her but the waning rhythm of breath and pulse as she slipped into a coma that evening, lingering for about 21 hours before her improbably able heart finally failed. It is perhaps too melodramatic to say it was broken after the death of her husband of almost 50 years just over 4 months ago; but perhaps not.

There was little left of the woman who’d raised us when I walked into her room and kissed her forehead hello at the rehab center where she’d been on and off since falling 6 weeks before. But she was alert and fully there, and we shared an afternoon of voluble companionship before our role shifted to sitting vigil and talking in unnecessarily hushed tones as she ebbed. In the days that followed her death, two brothers who see rather less of each other than many would reminisce and go through pictures and work on rebuilding our image of our mother. Like putting flesh back on her by-then sub-80-pound frame, we set about redefining the twinkle in her eye and putting a spring back in her imagined step.

More in images and less in prose than for my father, here are snippets of her expansive life.

Born in Saint Louis in the Great Depression, upper-middle of six siblings (4 still living), she posed for this picture at age 2 before the family headed for some possibilities in California, ultimately resettling for good back in Saint Louis.

A slight but natural beauty, she had a career at Purina as a nationally-noted feed microscopist, which is an optically-armed industrial spy of sorts, divining the makeup of competitors’ feeds, mostly from gross examination by microscope (in those days before mass spectrometers and gas chromatographs).

While taking one of her sisters to visit that sister’s boyfriend in a mining operation in Colorado in 1957, she was fixed up by said boyfriend with his friend, the temporarily wayward engineer-to-be Jack Kibbe, and they were married the day after Christmas in 1959, seen dancing here at their reception in the house of her sister Peggy and husband John.

Family legend has my father off on a compulsory engineering-school graduation fishing trip when I was born — my mother caught a cab to the hospital when her waters broke, and I narrowly missed being born in the back seat. Jack had taken a job in the iron ore industry in Venezuela, went on ahead after I was born, and Betty traveled unaccompanied to Venezuela with 5-month-old me to join him there. She later bore a second son, Douglas, and raised her two boys in an expatriate community of Americans given to the living-large lifestyle of the 60’s; easily recognizable to their stateside counterparts but with the exotic tinge of the latin locale, forging a new city in a fledgling country of boundless natural beauty.

While in Venezuela Betty traveled extensively about the country with us, including on Jeep expeditions into the mostly-uncharted Gran Sabana jungles. She learned to golf, and even learned to fly, piloting a single engine, low-wing Piper Cherokee my parents co-owned with another couple. Here she’s on the Auyan Tepuy above Angel Falls with her mother, and more or less cheerfully enduring the ritual ablution in used engine oil after soloing in the Cessna behind her.

After leaving Venezuela (the second time and for good), they settled in Albuquerque, where their second house was nestled in the scenic foothills of the Sandia mountains.

From there they traveled to many places, including here for Tricia’s & my wedding

and Fiji, amongst many other fascinating and remote places (she and my dad are to the far right).

This last was taken shortly after my dad died as we were cleaning out their house for sale. We’d gotten her the roses, which here, I guess, served as a sort of stand-in for my dad in this family photo (that’s Suzanne with Charlie and Doug with Sam). She bravely left that house and the life they’d known and went to live in Omaha with Doug & Suzanne, but her roots were done growing and she never settled in. Near the end she told us to make sure to enjoy life.

We are who she raised us to be. We dearly love and miss you – ‘bye, Mom …

Pardon some of the incomplete, rotated croppings, but I squeaked out a few more via
some “processing” … I don’t think the blog has much interest in them, but you might.

Adam

Adam suggested adding these to his last comment on Recent Travels, but I figured they’d be overlooked. Click on them because the thumbs represent about half the image.

Blogmeister

Mike,

Last week I went on a factory junket to BK Lighting in Madera, CA (outside Fresno – they provided the lights for my bridge at illuminale). They put us up in Tenaya Lodge just outside Yosemite, where we hiked on Saturday (flew out Thursday, flew back Sunday, Friday at the factory, Saturday at Yosemite). Attached are a few images – tough metering conditions, with massive contrast (I blew many … ).

Adam

For over a year now, all the lighting consultants from Boston to Providence – over 35 of us — have been working on a lighting festival for Boston, christened illuminaleBOSTON08.

Patterned after Luminale, a much bigger festival accompanying a massive, every-two-years trade show in Frankfurt, ours was originally slated to coincide with the May 2008 AIA convention, but city politics presented a denser thicket than imagined and we failed to get ready for that date. Serendipitously, a better date presented itself – the City of Boston had scheduled an outdoor party to celebrate the “completion” and handover of the Rose Kennedy Greenway for October 4th and asked that we put up our festival around that. Darker sooner, a captive audience, City alignment – more better. So we did.

The tale of getting there — the obstacles overcome, the favor chips cashed, the debts incurred, the vast amounts of meetings and work — would take a novella. Suffice it to say that it was a more massive undertaking than we could have imagined, and we were called far beyond any commitments we thought we’d made. It almost crashed and burned many times, and frictions threatened to sabotage it. But when it was turned on in a ceremony with Mayor Menino “throwing the switch” at Rowe’s Wharf on the 1st of October, and we got to drive and wander around and see the 10 sites we’d all done, it was pretty thrilling. The Custom House tower, not quite complete when the pictures were taken, and the Moakley bridge are permanent things, and there are already noises about implementing two of the other sites permanently as well.

It only ran 5 days and is already over. I apologize for telling about this after the fact – it was pretty all-consuming at the time, and what advance notice I did give at the time didn’t inspire a wider broadcast. But at least I took pictures. Of some sites, anyway — mostly my own, including some behind-the-scenes prep work (Site 6, the Congress Street bridge, executed in conjunction with Horton Lees Brogden Lighting). One can see a great deal many more by going to Flickr and searching for “illuminale” – you’ll get 16 pages of images; every night I was out there I was tripping over tripods – all the city’s nocturnal shutterbugs were busy. One in particular, though, and that could only be seen opening night (perhaps the best story of the festival – but for another time) is this, which my partner Lukas did in conjunction with Sladen Feinstein Lighting.

And there it all is — a glimpse into a unique, exhausting but rewarding chapter in the lives of Boston’s lighting community. For those further interested, also check out the festival’s website – in particular, if you scroll right for each site under the Sites link, that’ll show you some before images of each site, a few the sketches and renderings done by each team, and photos and bios of the team personnel. Enjoy!

Adam

by Adam S. Kibbe

Normally you couldn’t pay me to enter an area of this level of boundary-oblivious human density, but grandchildren must be free to enjoy these spectacles, and free of the curse of curmudgeonry. Last time Ivan hid under a blanket — this time he enjoyed it almost as much as his mayhemphilic younger brother, Avery.

Tricia and I recently popped in on my parents to see how they’re doing, lend a hand about the house and yard, amble through a few galleries, and sample the ample takeout opportunities of the southwest. Just a quick visit, bracketing a weekend a few days either side. But always with time for a few photographs — many of which were taken from the airplane window — great cloud formations just one of the many things to see from aloft (though whereas rakkity got landforms topography, I got pretty much the opposite). And as usual, I’ve willfully (and inaccurately) rendered a world completely unpopulated by humans …

Adam

Some of you will remember the “Wee Beastie” post of two years ago, in which a tree-destroying vehicle shows up on our neighbor’s lawn and the next day begins some deforestation leading up to demolition of their split-level ranch, to be replaced with better, as you’ll see.  As I got into my car to go to work each morning (and sometimes on weekends), I’d snap a picture of their progress (though the intervals lengthened as the process wore on — it kind of ground to a halt last spring for reasons unknown before a final landscaping spate).  The hydroseeded front lawn is where I leave it last September.

The curious factor for me is that their children are coming of college age — arguably an odd time to decide to rebuild, especially at such scale.  The in-ground pool needed $40k of work, Tricia gleaned third hand, so I guess that’s reason enough for some to build themselves a half-million manse — kinda like buying a new (and much bigger) car ’cause you need brake work …

Without a trace of self-consciousness he said, “I am from Iraq,” but the declaration seemed brave to me anyway, as blue as the state through which we drove is.

Unless someone’s waiting for you in the terminal, I consider it a ridiculous sign of addiction (or posing) to turn on your cellphone or Blackberry and call someone while the plane’s still taxiing in from the runway — rude, even, if you’re too self-absorbed to have set your device to vibrate when following the flight attendant’s reminder to turn it off before the plane took off, the cabin thus chirping with all these little pacifiers ringing back to life, each in their “declaration of unique individuality” mass-produced ringtones*. So I was still engaged with checking my own messages curbside when it came my turn to climb into the next waiting taxi and head into Dallas from DFW, my driver assigned to me by chance.

He made some chitchat before noticing I was bidactily absorbed in composing emails, so he gave me some space before resuming his gregarious interrogative about where I was from, what brought me to Dallas, had I ever been here before, etc. It seemed only friendly to respond in kind, hence this sudden knowledge of his ancestry.

I allowed as how he must find it difficult to live in the very state from which our Commander in Chief chooses to currently hail — he who invaded his homeland on a pretext, casting it into deadly chaos. But my cabbie (I didn’t get his name clearly at the time and don’t now remember what I thought his name was – no matter), was more philosophical than that. He knew the common man’s fate is largely chosen for him by others and with nary a hint of aggression, he wondered how it was for me to have George represent me. I assured him I didn’t feel that W in fact DID, and we spent the next while discussing American politics — how we come by the people from whom we get to choose the next POTUS, what it’s like for Americans abroad to be considered representative of America and answerable to the follies and crimes of our leadership, how it is that we vote against people we don’t want in office as much or more than we vote FOR someone, how only the rich or their designates will ever be POTUS, and some of my vague understandings of the historical reasons why we’re a representative federalism more than a true democracy, even though technology now allows the latter.

We also talked about family and patriotism and living abroad, I having grown up in Venezuela an American, he now having been here 15 years but with family in Iraq to whom he sends money. Bonds of family, torn allegiances, prejudice, finding belonging. The miles from DFW to the architects’ offices fairly flew.

And then we were there. We both got out, and he helped me with my bags then gave me his card – generic, just the name of the cab company, not his own. He thanked me for our conversation and my insights into this country, that he had much to think on, and he said he’d love to drive me back at the end of my trip if that worked for me. I told him genuinely that I had enjoyed our conversation, wished him luck, and then summoned the only Arabic I know, torn between presumption and respect.
“Salaam aleikhum,” I wished him, hands clasped before me, hoping that was all at least close to appropriate, and with a broad smile, hands clasped before him in a small bow, he wished me the same. And I wheeled my bag inside the sprawling modernist building, feeling more like I’d just arrived from an international trip than a cab ride, and thinking this must be a little like what it must feel like to travel as Michael.

* I only ever heard one ringtone I thought was truly original – a landscape architect had recorded the night chirpings of crickets and had used that as his own.

Dear Mr. Miller,

Nice day for one — I hope you were out, too, ideally at the beach of which you recently spoke.  I posted some pics.

Your Humble Servant,

A.K.