QuaxiDanto: March 2009

QuaxiDanto

QuaxiDanto: If you speak K'ekchi, you know what it means, but don’t understand. K'ekchi is a Mayan dialect spoken in, among other places, Belize. I made several extended trips into the high bush in southern Belize at the end of the last century with a bunch of K'ekchis who gave me the nickname Danto, which means Tapir. That name had been taken so I added the modifier Quaxi, which means crazy. What does CrazyTapir mean as far as the title of my blog? Whatever!

About Me

Name: TOC

Location: Cleveland, Ohio, United States

I am an enigmatic anachronism, facing the world jaded and uncomfortably impressed. My chosen profession is archaeology, which turns out to be way more tedious than cool. I race yachts, hang with the bohemian artist crowd, and vacation at ancient Maya cities. Its no wonder I usually feel out of place, and am oh-so-pleased to be different (even if it is not in a good way). Why TOC?: I was participating through emails in a call-in radio show that didn’t accept phone calls (it’s college radio, which covers a multitude of sins). The host had a friend named Chuck who also wrote into the show so they started referring to me as “the other Chuck.” I started signing my emails TOC (The Other Chuck). A little later I started posting to a blog that was running live during the next program in the lineup and then a couple of other places and have just kind of stuck with it as a screen name. Again, whatever dude.

Saturday, March 07, 2009

Condolences

I put this up a while ago and then thought it might be a bit too harsh and took it down. I didn't know what to say to my friend and this kind of came out of what I was feeling about my need to try and make him feel a little better. After attending his dad's memorial I thought I should repost it and have finally gotten around to it. FWIW, Condolences Keith:

My Friend's Dad Died

To me Olaf Prufer is a citation in the text; One in a long list of people that had something interesting or important to say that I want to refer to. I am a friend of his son and only having met him a few times I don’t know him or what he felt. However, despite an impressive academic legacy reflective of his obvious devotion to, and passion for, education and archaeology, I feel confident that he considered his true legacy to be his progeny and theirs. I certainly do.

Harsh as it is, he is dead now. That is forever and forever is a very, very long time, which is a painful reality that hits too hard to ignore. Gone forever is an awesome yet forbidding chasm that is frightening, and the thought of it saddens memories. It is difficult to know what to say in the face of it to a friend who has lost someone close to them. Someone they love is gone. The only thing I can offer is that even though death does, grief does not last forever. In a not so very long time it will pass and the unavoidable sadness now accompanying remembrances will give way to the joyful memories they truly are.

Suffer the pain of the loss reassured in the knowledge that it is a short term (albeit bitter) price of happy memories, part of a human experience we are lucky to have had called love and friendship, the full value of which can best be appreciated in its ability to operate at the scale of eternity.