It’s November 14th Again, Isn’t It?

“HEY now, Popsie! Bet I could do that!” Douglas M. and Sherwood Harrington, January, 1967. Photo by Lynn Harrington.

Doug left us four years ago today. Between the above photo and then, he actually did manage to learn to play the guitar.

Just a little bit.

Forty-Four

Douglas M. Harrington
October 1, 1966 - November 14, 2006
Missed.

New Look at a Familiar Face, 25 Years On

Doug Harrington, circa 1985, by, courtesy of and copyright by Drew Fleming.

The web is an increasingly miraculous virtual place.

I have literally thousands of photos of my firstborn, taken during his 40 years here, but the web, just a few days ago, gifted me with this image that I had never seen before.

It stopped me in my tracks.

Taken by Drew Fleming in about 1985, it is the illustration for Doug's short entry on Wikipedia.

The Wiki article refers to Doug's partnership in songwriting and lead guitar performance with Jim Adams. Jim continues to keep Defiance alive -- along with his own successful IT career! -- and the band recently released a revival album, "Prophecy," much of which was actually written by Doug shortly before his death by melanoma four years ago. Even if thrash metal is not your cup of tea, I think you can appreciate the artistry involved in this two-minute home video of Jim laying down a couple of lead tracks for "Prophecy." Jim's fret-work is predictably impressive, but watch his right hand, too. Very, very cool stuff.

43

Douglas M. Harrington
October 1, 1966 - November 14, 2006

We remember.

Defiance Redux

Doug's old band, Defiance, is at it again. They are in the finishing stages of production of their first new album in years, and you can get a tiny taste of it below, in a video taken in studio by the lead guitarist's, Jim Adams's, wife, Siobahn.

Jim was always, and continues to be, just damn good.

Here's Jim, laying down some lead tracks. This ain't no flying-V ukelele player, folks.

Two Years On

Doug Harrington
October 1, 1966 - November 14, 2006

Yankees 3, Red Sox 1...

... and Most of the Players Are Still Alive.

That most of them are still above ground surprises me a little bit, since the game was played 50 years ago, on September 19, 1958.

(The illustrations in this post are smaller than usual because they are links to much larger and more detailed images in Flickr. Please click on them to see them as I intend them to be viewed. Thanks.)

Yankee Stadium, After the Game of September 19th, 1958

It was the only major-league game Dad and I ever attended together, and the first one I ever saw in person, so it holds a special place in my memory. I doubt that any of the living players remember it at all, though. It was very late in the season, both teams were insurmountably behind the White Sox for the American League title (in those days there were no "playoffs" -- you either won your league or you didn't), and they were just playing out the schedule because, well, that's what you do. But you do it fast; the game took less than two hours (today, a typical major-league game takes about three hours to complete.)

The inconsequential nature of that particular game is probably why Dad and I were able to attend. Dad hated the Yankees, so he sure as heck wasn't going to pay for his own tickets and travel all the way to New York City (which he also detested) to see them. We had a perfectly good minor-league team to go watch, too: the Binghamton Triplets*, just 40 miles down the Chenango Valley from our home outside Norwich, so why go to all that extra effort and expense, anyway? The company he worked for had a couple of season tickets to Yankees' games. The Yankees of that era were almost always in first place (a big reason why Dad didn't like them), so the corporate tickets were usually spoken for all year -- but not in '59, so Dad grabbed the languishing ones for Saturday, September 19th.

Watching Batting Practice from our Loge Perch

What I remember most clearly about the day was, oddly, our welcome at our seats. The seats were on the loge level (a narrow deck between the lower- and second-decks in old Yankee Stadium), with office-style chairs (not fixed to the floor) and a writing surface for keeping score or for resting hot dogs and drinks -- they were like desk seats. A very suave, tall, black usher greeted us at our seats, and whisked a dustcloth over the chairs. He said, "Welcome to Yankee Stadium" in a somber tone... with his palm outstretched in Dad's direction. I didn't notice that latter part, and was awed by the ceremony. I was twelve years old.

Dad was so caught up in the game in front of him that he didn't take any pictures during the action itself. This picture...

Dragging the Infield Between Innings

... is as close to an action shot as I can find in his slides. Too bad -- four players saw action in that game who eventually would be inducted into the Hall of Fame. Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle started at catcher and center field for the Yanks, Whitey Ford (whose fluid, powerful, left-handed form I still remember with snapping clarity) was their starting pitcher, and Ted Williams, at the end of his penultimate season, pinch-hit for the Sox late in the game. I don't remember that Teddy Ballgame grounded into a double play; I do remember his stroll from the dugout to the plate and the goosebumps on the back of my young neck as he approached the batter's box.

Dad took one more picture after the game was over:

Postgame fans' stroll.

After the game, fans were allowed to stroll on the field (except for the infield area, which you can see being politely guarded by red-jacketed ushers.) After posting this quartet on Flickr, and including them in a couple of NYC groups, I was astonished at the level of viewing they garnered. This shot, in particular, provoked responses from folks much younger than me. For example:

"Chocolatepoint" says:
Baseball looks so much more interesting way back when. I suspect that just being able to walk on the field gave fans a connectedness to the game, the stadium and their team.
Nowadays, we have to rebuild stadiums so that rich people can have more skyboxes, security will barely let people move around and we have far too many whiny overpaid yet underperforming athletes.

... and ...
"sds70" says:
No way teams would let their fans do this anymore :( :( . . Too many security concerns, issues with messing up the grass, etc. . . . That would've been cool to do once

... and ...
"Jersey2Bronx" said:
Its sad that this era is gone.
I did a Yankee Stadium tour 2 weeks ago, and while we got to walk the warning track, we were not allowed to step foot on (or even touch) the grass on the field. The stadium is closed - there will never be another baseball game there, and yet STILL - a "regular guy" like me was not allowed to touch the grass. That in and of it self is contrary to what baseball used to be about. Its gone from being one of the most accessible and inclusive sports to being one that caters to the exclusive who can afford it - "access" for a price.
Sad...

As "chocolatepoint" noted, the connection between the players and their fans has been broken. I don't know when it happened, precisely, but I know it was after 1964. I know that because, in April of that year, Dad and I went to see a spring training game while we were on vacation in Florida. The game was in Daytona Beach, and the teams -- "barnstorming" out of their Florida headquarters elsewhere -- were the Kansas City Athletics and the Houston Colt .45s (later the Astros.) We sat close to the plate, and chatted with the players exactly as we did with the people sitting next to us in the stands: comfortably, without any sense of separation, physically, economically, or otherwise. Two players, both near the end of stellar careers, who I remember talking to were:

Nellie Fox (closing it out with the .45s) and...

Rocky Colavito (ditto with the A's.)

Adam, my son, it was a different time, one in which the players were more like their fans. But it was the same for fathers and sons then, a game you either got or you didn't, and if you did, it was a bond that surpassed time. Really, really strange, when you think about it.

Doug, Adam, and Me at a Baseball Game, San Francisco, Summer 2001.

*I loved going to Triplets games, by the way, and followed several of their players through their careers after Binghamton. One of them was Alphonso Downing, a pitcher who later gave up Henry Aaron's Ruth-surpassing 715th home run; another was Deron Johnson, a big lug who could hit a baseball farther than you could launch it with a bazooka -- but just not very often.

100: Forty-Two

Grace on her father's memorial bench, October 1, 2008. Photo from Adam.

This 100th installment of SherWords comes on the 42nd anniversary of Doug's birth. This year, Grace was accompanied to her dad's bench only by her mom, her Uncle Adam, and her Aunt Reva. I had to teach, but my heart was with them today, too.

For another picture marking the day, please visit today's installment of PicShers.

Laughter Won

In the previous post, I waffled about whether today's family gathering on the anniversary of Doug's death would be one of tears or laughter.

It was a celebration, and I think we all in our own ways feel a little (or a lot) liberated by it.

The presence of very young children helped keep us focused on the future, and the positive, and the love, and the joy. Without that focus, whatcha got left but poopy diapers, anyway?

Parris snaps Adrianne and his granddaughter (Adrianne's niece) Kiana.

Instant gratification.

There were only 16 people at this little gathering. Here, the bunch gathers for a group portrait or two.

Table in the lower-left corner of the previous photo.

This table was the "workbench": a place where Adrianne had laid out tools for us all to add pictures and other memories to a scrapbook, and she had invited us all to bring whatever we wanted to add to it. The intent was to construct a tangible collection of words and pictures and memories of Grace's dad for her to keep close as she grows up and grows away from Doug. That will certainly be the lasting product of the effort, but its immediate product was a focussing of stories and joy and, yes, laughter from all of us about Doug. The scrapbook project provided a place of exuberance. I think we all felt a liberation from grief, and a permission to laugh. And we did. And we did. And we did.

Detail from the "workbench."

The man in the picture will be known to SherWords regulars; it is Grace's 12-th great grandfather. Well, one of the 4,096 of them, but the one through whom the Harrington name comes.

At the end of the gathering, we posed for group photos. (In a perhaps futile effort to not put too much personal information out there in so public a place as a blog, I'm going to not use last names in the identifications.) I took the first one:

CLICK THE PICTURE TO ENLARGE IT. REALLY.
Front and center: Adrianne
Arc behind Adrianne, left to right: Kathy (Adrianne's mom), Lynda (Adam's SO), Dierdre (Parris's wife), Parris (Doug's stepdad, his mother's second husband), Andrew (Lynda's son)
Third row, left to right: David (Reva's SO), Reva (Doug's half-sister, Parris's daughter), Kiana (David and Reva's daughter), Mike (bassist in Doug's band, Defiance), Mike's daughter Angelina, Mike's wife Toni, Adam (Sherwood's son), Diane ("Mrs. Fort," Sherwood's spouse & keeper)
Toppermost of the Poppermost on Uncle Adam's shoulders: Grace the Magnificent.

There will be a quiz. Just be thankful that Doug's uncles and their progeny were too far away to participate.


... and one last group photo by Andrew, which proves that I was actually there. It will be left as an exercise for the reader to figure out which one I am. (Hint: many, many years ago, when Adam was a small boy, a friend of his once described a suspicious character in the neighborhood as being "real white, you know, like your dad.")

The T-shirts we're all wearing were Adam's inspired idea and gift to us all. He showed up with a big cardboard box full of them, all correctly sized (except for Diane's, for which he earned many, many positive points from her). They bear reproductions of a flyer for an early headline performance in a San Francisco club of Doug's band, Defiance, in the 80's.

Adam, Andrew, and Defiance tees.

Doug at Boulder Creek

===========================================

An Anniversary

Doug, Grace, 2005.

So, it has been a year.

To celebrate and grieve, to support and be supported, to laugh and to cry, to eat and clean up afterwards...

The Harrington Clan will gather on November 14th in Doug's home to support one another in whatever way seems appropriate. Grace will be the initial focus, but who knows where the tone will eventually focus. My bet is on laughter and tears, probably in about equal amounts. Well, no, probably more on the laughter side.

Definitely on the laughter side. That was always the way with Doug: laugh with him or... laugh at him. Pretty much.

Adrianne and Grace will persevere. Adam will recover and hold the man. I will go on.

There will be some changes on sharrington.net, there will be some changes on this blog, there will be some changes between my ears.

There will be no changes in who Doug is.

[Click here for a short account of the gathering.]

================================

A Birthday

Douglas M. Harrington
October 1, 1966 - November 14, 2006

Doug and my Dad, his Granddad, 1969.

When I talk to Doug today, I will tell him that this first of his birthdays without him is still a day of joy and thanks.

Some family will gather at the bench today, and do their best to make that true.

Doug's Memorial Website Updated

"An Extraordinary Day in May" was more than a month ago, now.

I have finally updated Doug's memorial website to include the rich variety of recordings of the event, both visual and audio/video. The full panoply can be seen by clickng this link, and then exploring the hyperlinks, but there is one part of it that slices directly to the heart that I want to impose on the few readers of this blog:



Clicking on the little arrow in the middle of the above frame takes you to a moving performance. David Godfrey White, a sometime (repeatedly) bandmate of Doug's, sings his composition "In Memory Of..." at the end of the ceremony for Doug's bench dedication. The song was written just a few years ago, in part for David's late brother, Jeffrey, and is featured on Heathen's 2005 album, "Recovered".

Ronniecat says that my son, Adam's, hug with Dave at the end of the song is the most moving part of this performance. I would have a hard time disagreeing. The loss of a brother is something I cannot ever fully understand, but the two of them quite clearly do.

An Extraordinary Day in May

Please click on any image to see a bigger version.

This post is dedicated with deepest appreciation to Lynda Hermosa and Adam Harrington.

Douglas McMackin Harrington was born on October 1st, 1966, and died on November 14th, 2006. He left behind a brother, a sister, a wife, a daughter... and legions of others who were touched in some way by his force. His personality was bigger than most of the known planets.

He was:
a musician
a carpenter
a salesman
a father
a brother
a son
a husband
a scholar ( yes, he was, while he didn't view himself as such),
and a primal force.

He was one of my two sons, and his passing feels like it slices me by half. But a gathering of the extended tribe today in the hills above Oakland, California, made me feel somewhat less diminished.

More than a hundred of us who were touched by Doug gathered in Montclair Park, Oakland, California, on May 12th to celebrate his life and to dedicate a tiny spot of the Earth to his memory and to his enduring presence. In a comment to my previous blog entry, Ronnie (who has been down this road before) cautioned me against the word "closure." Gladly, that caution was (while heeded) not necessary. Without exception, everyone present wanted -- and thus guaranteed -- the opposite of any closing. We didn't want him to go in November, and we still don't in May. I heard the reminiscences, for the most part, in the present tense, not the past, and I never once even heard the word "closure."

The ceremony and the entire concept (placing a bench with Doug's name on it in Montclair Park) was the inspired idea of Doug's younger brother, my son, Adam. Adam and Doug were glued so close together that they might as well have been welded to one another. Their mother and I separated and divorced in 1972, when Doug was only 6 and Adam only two years old. After that, they lived with a sequence of family combinations -- all loving, but in-flux different -- which drove them to a more insular connection than might otherwise have been the case. However it was caused, Adam and Doug were a unit, one that the rest of us could appreciate but never truly understand.

Adam was, and is, devastated by Doug's loss. Today's ceremony is part of his coping, and how he went about it is a source of great pride to me, though I don't deserve any credit for it whatsoever.

We gathered at Montclair Park at a little before 2pm.

The only person present who did not know Doug before the ceremony was the bagpiper, Jeff Campbell. Here, he warms up to the amusement and puzzlement of random park clients.

The bench, shrouded before the ceremony. Its location was very carefully chosen: Montclair Park was where Doug's generation of "kids" (in their teens and even early 20's) went to hang out. The bench is positioned atop a knoll which views all parts of the park, including a wall by the basketball court where Doug, Adam, and their friends spent many hours of youthful exuberance. For many of those hours, they should have been in class, but the time for being concerned about that is long, long gone now. And now I'm not so sure about how concerned I should have been then, either.

The group marches from the assemby area to the bench for the ceremony. My wife, Diane, is carrying the video camera at left. In the center are Doug's daughter, Grace, and his widow, Adrianne.

Adam convenes the ceremony.

This is one of the strongest, most loving people I have ever encountered. She will need all of that, and more, to care for Grace. She also, clearly, has a multitude of people on whom she can call for help. A stereotypical thing to say here would be that "Doug chose well," but that might not be accurate. I don't really know if there was any "choosing" involved, or, if so, that Doug was the one who did it. What I do know is that if I had to choose a person to mother my granddaughter in my son's absence, I couldn't possibly choose anyone else. Adrianne is Adrianne, and nothing further need be said, and nothing better could be wished.

We love you, Adrianne.

Before the bench was officially unveiled, Adam (in charge of the whole operation) arranged immediate family on a short brick wall next to it. From left to right: me, David (Reva's SO and Kiana's father), Reva Kidd (Doug and Adam's half-sister), Kiana Kidd (one week old at this photo!), Adrianne Harrington, Grace L. Harrington, and Dr. Parris Kidd. (Parris is Reva's father; he married Doug and Adam's mom after we divorced and was very much a father to them -- in that sense, they were luckier than most: they had two fathers, not just one!) [Photo by Lucile Taber.]

The ceremonial first-sitting on Doug's bench -- Back: Adam Harrington and his SO Lynda Hermosa. Front: Parris Kidd, Adrianne and Grace Harrington, Reva and Kiana Kidd, me. [Photo by Lucile Taber.]

Mike Kaufmann, very close friend of Doug (and bass player for Defiance), expresses remembrances and emotions from the Doug Harrington bench. Adam solicited such testimonials, and many were freely given, and all were touching, happy, sad, funny, unexpected... and altogether surprising. Sort of like Doug himself. [Photo by Lucile Taber.]

Mike Chambers. "Big Mike" was Adam's closest friend since grade school, when Doug and Adam lived on Rosedale Ave. in Oakland (just a few blocks from the Hell's Angels international HQ!) Mike came from a very religious family, and Doug and Adam were an eye-opening experience for him. Mike was a constant, solid, grounding friend for Adam, and it was extra-special good to see him at this ceremony. [Photo by Lucile Taber.]

The two Mikes are pictured in this blog post to give a flavor of the moment, not an inventory. I very much hope that anyone not pictured here doesn't feel slighted, and everyone should be included when I update the memorial website later this month.

The recounting of tales about Doug from his bench were sometimes happy...

... sometimes riveting...

... and sometimes achingly sad. But they were always very real, and we all wanted them to continue, but, of course, they can't. (The women in the above picture are Mrs. Fort and Lucile.)

Dave White, Defiance and Heathen vocalist, played on the Neptune Society boat last December while Doug's ashes were being scattered. Today, he played and sang an achingly beautiful song at the end of the bench-dedicating ceremony. Diane captured it on video/audio, and eventually it will be on YouTube, but for now I'll just say... DAMN, Dave, we could have watered a castle's lawn with the tears you generated. Superb.

The official Doug Harrington Memorial Website will be updated to include things from this ceremony -- incuding YouTube video segments -- over the next month. We will attempt to notify everyone by e-mail if possible, but this blog will present notification, as well. And if you have any pics to contribute to the website, please send them to me: sherwood@rahul.net !

The bench after all the ruckus. It's there, people, a place for us to go to remember Doug.
And ourselves.


Montclair Park and Rec Center is just off California route 13 (The Warren Freeway) in the Oakland Hills. If you are ever in the neighborhood, please stop by. The bench is in deep right field of the softball diamond, and has a little plaque on it...