Gloria Ferris

Or should it be the long “tale”? Last spring Tim and I lost a long time friend Gordon Findlay.  Actually, my friend Rick and I had known Gordon longer than anyone else in our immediate circle of friends.  In fact, Gordon had stayed with Rick for a short while before the reality of his situation set in and he accepted a move to a nursing home which probably prolonged his life by at least two years.  He ate regularly, took his medication on time, and no longer became engrossed in his ‘project of the moment’ to the detriment of his health.

At the time, we had no clue on how to contact Gordon’s family.  We had bits and pieces of information  but nothing that would have helped us locate anyone.  We knew his former wife -an MIT alum like Gordon- still lived in the Cambridge area. I knew that she had been the alumni fundraiser for MIT but we all figured she had long since retired, and no one had a clue to her married name.  We knew he had two children, Jim and Heidi, both engineers that lived on the west coast.  Heidi in Washington, Jim in California.  But that was all  we collectively knew. It wasn’t nearly enough information to help us find anyone who might want to know that Gordon had died. 

So we all did the best we could and called everyone we could think of here in Cleveland and we had a nice little turnout for Gordon’s send off.  He loved enormously extravagant parties but he never was much for the small inimate gathering that ended his stay here on earth.  He never let his emotional side take over his analytic engineering personality.  Better to analyze and probe without ever going too deep.  He always particpated in the rounds of holiday parties but never committed himself to a “Merry Christmas”.  His toast was always to Saturnalia.

Tim posted an online notice of the passing of our friend and we thought that that would be the last we would hear of Gordon except in stories when our group got together and began “a remember when” until today.  Tim received an email from Gordon’s daughter.  She had found the post about her dad on Tim’s website and she had written to thank him for the nice words and for the closure that she, her mother, and her brother would now have about her father.    She wondered if we would be willing to talk to her more about her dad since she had not been able to locate him and he had not contacted her in many years.

Gordon was a scientist.  An only child who had an inventor’s spirit, but an unwillingness to let those closest to him know much about his whereabouts and such.  He always thought he would live forever so he probably never envisioned a day when he just might run out of time.  In the eighties, he told me that some day that we would do all of our shopping on line even our groceries.  That we would never have to venture out of electronic cottages to do the everyday tasks that take so much of our time.  He felt that we would truly be able to create, innovate, and invent because we would be freed by the internet.  He talked about fiberoptics long before anyone else ever mentioned the word to me.  He talked about light rail allowing us to move about freely when Peak Oil happened.  He was a man of ideas who envisioned much of what we are experiencing today long before others noticed what was happening. 

He had a strong distrust for the government due to the fact that he and other MIT grad students were asked to combine their studies with a classified government project during World War II.  Gordon was suspect of the plan because he was afraid that none of them would be able to publish their work and therefore, not receive doctorates.  The other students and the scientists convinced him that he was worrying for nothing and that this project was HUGE.  I remember when he called me in the late 90’s to tell me that he had just been notified that his graduate work was no longer classified and that he could publish his thesis.  He was well into his seventies, and his doctorate no longer mattered. He laughed at the irony of how time had flown and how something that had meant so much no longerhad any importance.

Gordon was a man of dreams-some of them broken, some of them realized.  I think that he would be pleased that his beloved internet brought his daughter and two of his friends together over many miles after much time had passed.  He told me many years ago that our definition of time would some day shift.  I wonder if we are approaching the day that Gordon  talked about with such passion.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 31st, 2007 at 6:51 pm and is filed under Cleveland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.