The passing of a flinty Canadian scientist

Uncle Merlin---also known around these parts as Dr Frigidaire---lost his dad yesterday.

Dick died of complications following a stroke back in August.  He was 84.

I may need to clarify something.  Uncle Merlin is not my uncle.  He’s an uncle to the Mannion guys, Ken and Oliver.  Their Uncle Merlin’s been like a brother to me since his mother Rosalie adopted me back in high school.  I was something of a stray she found on the street and took in, and although Rosalie often did things that baffled Dick, on matters of people and their feelings he trusted to her judgment.  So when I started showing up at their dinner table three and four nights a week, Dick never said a word about it except “Please pass the potatoes” and “Would you like some more spare ribs, Lance?”

I was already friends with Merlin, but things fell out this way.  Every Saturday, spring of my junior year,  I used to ride my bike out to my girlfriend’s house.  Neither of us had a license yet.  She lived across the river, not too far away, but it was uphill all the way back.  Merlin’s house was at about the halfway point and on the return I would make a pit stop there.  At the time, Merlin and Dick were rebuilding a 1958 Edsel together in their driveway.  I’d hang around with them for a while, helping out when they needed an extra pair of hands.  Mostly I held things while Dick or Merlin bolted them down or pounded them into place.  After a bit, Rosalie would call me inside for a drink of juice and I’d visit with her.  Next thing I’d know Dick would be announcing it was time for Merlin and I to go out and pick up the spare ribs, egg rolls, and won ton soup that we were going to have for dinner.

Even though I never did anything to help with the Edsel that amounted to real mechanical repair, I somehow picked up a lot from Dick, who was prone to lecture as he tinkered on the car.  If I learned nothing else from my long acquaintance with him it was this.  There is nothing around the house that can’t be fixed if you have the right tools and there’s never been a machine built that a human being can’t outwit.

I learned how to use the tools in my tool kit from Uncle Merlin, who of course learned what he knows about how to use tools from Dick.  But the fact that I have a tool kit is due to Dick’s teachings.

He was quite an accomplished handyman.  He was a more than competent electrician and carpenter.  He was also a talented cabinetmaker.  He fiddled around with gemstones for a time too and showed that if he’d had a mind to he could have been a jeweler as well.  But these were hobbies.

Dick spent his career as a research scientist.  There are more than eighty patents with his name on them.  He ran his department at GE’s research lab.  He had a Ph.D from MIT.  You’re getting the point of this, right?  He was an extremely intelligent man.

And he never showed it off.  You knew it about him, instinctively, but it wasn’t because he’d made any point about letting you know.

Smart and accomplished as he was, he never lost his wonder and delight when introduced to a new technology, theory, or gadget.  I remember one time when he and Rosalie were over at the Mannion house for dinner and Pop Mannion showed Dick a brand new device on the market at the time, a CD player.  Dick sat next to it all the rest of the evening, a big boyish grin on his face, playing CD after CD and saying nothing except, “Wow!” and “This is incredible! Incredible!”

I have to tell you, I was never all that impressed by his brains or his accomplishments, because I grew up thinking that every father of his generation was brilliant and accomplished, far smarter and far more successful than their sons could ever hope to be.  In short, I grew up thinking that we, the sons were born disappointments, or at least this one was and that’s why it was such a relief for me to be able to go over to Uncle Merlin’s house and sit and talk with Rosalie who made sure I knew that as long I was kind and honest and helpful I didn’t need to do anything else to impress her and I would never be a disappointment in her eyes.

And, like I said, when it came to people and their feelings, Dick took his cue from Rosalie.

Dick was a highly successful man who at a time when I was busy being highly unsuccessful never appeared to judge me.  He kept his opinions about my perseverance in failure to himself.  In fact, I don’t think I ever heard him express a personal opinion or judgment about another person.  I’m not sure if it’s a lesson Dick intended or would have even approved of as a lesson but this is something else I learned from being around him.  Keep your mouth shut about other people.  Don’t judge them.  Don’t expect them to do what you’d do in their situation or to be like you when they’re having a hard enough time just being themselves.

Of course, I think it suited him temperamentally to keep his opinions and feelings to himself and this was a source of frustration for Rosalie and Merlin.

Dick was one of the last of the generation of scientists for whom slide rules were second nature and reaching for one a reflex even after the introduction of computers into their labs.  He was one of the last who went to work in white short sleeved shirts and narrow black ties and pocket protectors.  Dick even smoked a pipe.  He was still wearing that uniform long after other scientists of his vintage, like Pop Mannion, had changed into plaids and turtlenecks.   The uniform expressed an attitude of cool rationality, of the importance of function over form, of objectivity always trumping subjectivity.  By training Dick was inclined to think and speak in what he knew to be facts and hold back on what he believed ought to be true.

And he grew up on the plains of western Canada where I think he learned a very practical sense of detachment.  Too much of nature is uncooperative, too much can go wrong to spend your time worrying about every little problem and mishap.  In fact, it’s almost a waste of time to have feelings about troubles.  You’re much better off just buckling down and solving what needs to be solved and fixing what needs to be fixed without getting in your own way by complaining about it.  I have no idea if that’s how Dick really thought---he would never have talked about it---but it’s how he behaved.  There was always a certain toughness about him, a stony aloofness, a quality Uncle Merlin likes to call “flintiness.”  Dick was flinty.

When the blonde and I started dating, Rosalie adopted her immediately.  Which meant that Dick did too.  Sadly, Rosalie died the year before the first young man Mannion came along, but she left her heart behind for him and his brother and in lots of little ways she has managed to make them feel her love for them, usually working through their Uncle Merlin, but often working through Dick, who along with his second wife Alison, herself a flinty Canadian scientist, kept up a connection and a sincere interest in our family, his adopted family, over the years.  Oliver still has the stuffed dinosaur Dick and Alison sent him when he was born and yesterday when Uncle Merlin told me Dick was gone I brought Dino downstairs and he’s sitting here in the chair in the living room across from me, apparently looking out the window and lost in thought---probably thinking flinty Canadian scientific thoughts.

After he retired from GE, Dick got involved in local conservation efforts.  He began working on some theories about music and mathematics and taught himself how to play the keyboard and how to program his computer in order to follow up on those theories.  He resumed his interest in gems.  He and Alison travelled.  And when I say travelled, I meant they travelled, they did not tour.  They went places to get deep inside them and learn about them.  They went to China and taught school there.  They went to Iran, twice, and always planned to go back.  They loved the Iranian people they met and made a point of getting to know.  Here at home they hiked and they canoed and they went camping, in every season.

A few years ago, however, Dick’s body just broke down.  Flinty and tough as he was, he couldn’t make it do what he would have liked it to do.  It began sitting still a lot.  He didn’t complain much, of course.  But he didn’t like it.  After a while of sitting still, it began to seem as though he’d actually outlived himself.  I am not someone who will ever think that anyone else’s death can come as a blessing.  I feel personally betrayed when anyone I know fails to live forever. 

But I have to remember yet another thing I learned from Dick.  How to be flinty when flintiness is called for.  When there are things that need to be solved, you solve them.  When there are things that need to be fixed, you fix them.  But that’s when those things that need solving can be solved and those things that need fixing can be fixed, and sometimes they just can’t be.  That doesn’t mean you start complaining.  There are other problems to solve, other repairs that need to be made.  Move on.  I’d expect that would have been Dick’s advice to his doctors and nurses if he’d been in a condition to give it.

At any rate, we’re all trying to be flinty in his honor.  Uncle Merlin’s doing his best.  He sounds ok.  I offered to come up to help him out in any way I could, you know, by holding things up while he bolts them down or pounds them into place, but in his own flinty fashion he’s ordered me to stay away.

He plans to come down here and collapse for a week or two when he and Alison have got things settled.

I want to wrap this up with my favorite story about Dick.

Once upon a time, he and Rosalie were on their way home from Boston where they’d visited Merlin at school and where Dick had taught some classes at MIT.  Rosalie was driving and Dick was napping in the passenger seat.  All of a sudden a cat dashed out onto the highway and Rosalie jerked the wheel to avoid subtracting one of its nine lives from however many it had left.  Their car swerved off the road and onto the median which was soggy to the point of swampy from a recent rainstorm.  The car buried itself in mud up to the windshield before it came to a stop, at which point Dick woke up.

He sat up in his seat, looked around, surveyed the scene, and then turned to his wife, who was sitting there bug-eyed and shaking, her knuckles white on the steering wheel, and asked her, quite calmly, “Rosalie, what are you doing?”

And that, folks, is what Uncle Merlin means by flinty.

Comments

[Kevin Wolf]

RIP, Dick. And condolences to his family.

Lance, your description of him and his mindset and his accomplishments reminds me of someone I knew and lost about two years ago. I feel that maybe I and my cohort haven't come close to filling the shoes of the particular generation we are beginning now to lose in numbers.

[Ian Welsh]

I've known men like him, but not quite him. My condolences, all of those who have our heart are a loss when they go, but he was a man we can all regret losing, I think.

[actor212]

I'm sad for your loss, Lance. You certainly gave immortality to Merlin's father here in this post.

[mac macgillicuddy]

In hopes that Uncle Merlin reads this, I just want to say that I have my own memories of his father, and Lance's eulogy strikes a very familiar chord. Your loss, Merlin, is ours too, and I am very sorry for it.

[Uncle Merlin]

Wonderful Lance! Just wonderful! We did it right in Schenectady didn't we!

Uncle Merlin

[Linkmeister]

My condolences to Uncle Merlin and his family.

[Cleveland Bob]

Condolences all around, Lance.

Would you be so kind to eulogize me when I pass? You've got a special gift mon ami.

[Anna and Lee in Salt Lake City]

Thank you for sharing and giving such a warm remembrance of the king of flinty. Our condolences to Uncle Merlin, who always remains in our hearts and stories.

[Lance]

Bob, I'd be glad to but I thought you knew. There's an implicit agreement between me and all my friends and acquaintances---none of you are allowed to die before me.

UM, when you get here, the first dinner the blonde is planning to make for you is one of your favorites, but for our second dinner we should order up a real Schenectady Special---a feast of egg rolls, won-ton soup, and ribs!

[Uncle Merlin]

Oooooo Won-Ton soup, I'm on my way!

UM

[Greg Bradt]

"What is more wise than to be kind, and what is more kind than to understand." Good job "Lance"
"Merlin" old buddy, You know how deeply saddened I am for your loss. While the miles keep us apart, I keep you and all the wonderful, riotous times we shared next to my heart. Love you, man.
Greg (Sorry I have no alias)