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Johan memories
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ariannawyn held a wake for Johan last night. There was a
book in which people were writing memories, but I decided to write mine
with the benefit of a text editor and without imposing the burden of my
penmanship.
I have a lot of good memories of Johan. Here are a few of them.
Johan and Arianna moved to Pittsburgh the summer before I began shopping
for my first house. Johan gave me a lot of useful advice, and when I had
narrowed the choices, Johan offered to do a pre-inspection before I made
an offer. He did this for lots of his friends
Johan warned me that he'd had a bad day at work and he was probably going to be extra-picky, and I should take that into account when evaluating his comments. After about an hour and a half of him poking and prodding at various things ("look", he said, pulling back a loose electrical plate and poking a tool into the wall, "no insulation here"), he said to me "you're going to buy this house, right?". So I did.
Johan didn't yet have a full-time job and there was work I wanted to do on the house, so I hired him to do some carpentry and related work. Everybody won: he got some income and I got to help a friend instead of a stranger. He also taught me how to do grain-painting, as part of restoring the living room. The oak fireplace he restored (after removing seven layers of paint); the cheaper trim we faked.
By the time Dani and I got married and bought a house together, Johan was a licensed engineer and we hired him to do the real inspection. The best line from the inspection report, about a partially-completed bathroom, was approximately: "the pipes are not sound and are venting sewage gases into the house; however, this is unlikely to be a problem due to the large gaps in the exterior walls in that room". And you thought inspection reports had to be dry and boring. :-)
Johan was a fantastic cook, both for parties in his home and for SCA
events. (In fact, he ran the first inn at Pennsic, but others can talk
about that.) When I wanted to try cooking an SCA feast, I asked him to
be my mentor.
He liked to talk about the difference between "Laurel kitchens" and "Pelican kitchens". The Laurel is the SCA's highest award for arts and sciences; he posited that feasts run by Laurels are tasty, authentic, beautifully-presented, and rarely on time or done without kitchen panics. The Pelican is the SCA's highest award for service; Pelican feasts, he asserted, might not be as pretty or as authentic, but they will be filling, tasty, well-organized behind the scenes, and on time. Johan was a Pelican. I was by then both a Laurel and a Pelican, and I think he was curious to see what would happen.
We prepared a menu that met the constraints of authenticity (my domain), ingredient balance (shared), and best use of the kitchen tools available at the site (his domain). He taught me that volunteers are valuable and sometimes it is better to buy the more-expensive ingredients that don't require a lot of annoying human effort, such as bags of frozen chopped onions, and budget accordingly.
In cooking, Johan always struck me as fairly casual. I was, therefore, quite surprised to see him, on the morning of the event, alphabetizing my ingredients along the counter. Not within class, mind (like all the spices together) -- apples, basil, beer, cabbage, flour, peas, pepper... all lined up.
The kitchen ran very smoothly. At one point, mid-afternoon, the person in charge of the event walked in to find us all sitting around and chatting. Ultimately, though, we missed our on-time mark: we served 30 seconds early. Johan was disappointed by this; he thought we could do better.
Johan would have been a great talmudist or (I gather) Jesuit if he'd been of the
right religous bent. He had a keen analytical mind and enjoyed digging
into questions, even the irrelevant or unanswerable ones, just for the fun
of it. He argued with pushy evangelists for sport, but was respectful of
people who weren't pushy.
He often asked me hypothetical questions about Jewish law -- things like whether, if we could completely fabricate a pig from chemical processes involving no actual animals, the result would be kosher. Or when Shabbat starts at the north pole or on other planets or on the space station. I enjoy those sorts of discussions too, as many of my readers know.
On the night before he died, Dani and I visited him and he asked me about the use of a plural word for God in the bible. Particularly in Genesis, God is often referred to not by name but by a word with a plural ending. I said that Judaism had been monolatrous before it had been monotheistic, but that said, at least some of the time that word wasn't grammatically plural; it just looked plural. For example, the opening passage of the torah, "bereishit bara Elo[k]im", or (roughly) "in the beginning God created", uses a singular verb ("bara"). (There are other words that don't follow the rules of number and/or gender, so the E-word isn't a unique case.) He found this interesting; I said I didn't know how often the grammar suggested singular versus plural for God but that I would look into it for him. (Obviously that never happened.)
And now one Johan told about himself. One year at Pennsic he was doing a party crawl and was quite inebriated. He had also picked up two women who joined him in party-hopping (and helped keep him vertical and on the roads when walking). This trio went to a particular closed party, and Johan presented his invitation. The gate guard said "this invitation is for one person, not three". Johan replied that the two women weren't guests; they were his supporters. The guard let them all in.
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Sorry I couldn't be there on Saturday. By the time I found out, I'd already committed to teach at University of Atlantia.