Thursday 07/17/2025
In the morning, wrote two carefully composed and highly thoughtful emails. Well, that takes time. They were so much on my mind that I didn’t go down to the gym, as I had sort-of planned to do. Later did some music practice.
After lunch, edited 3 more chapters of Joyce’s book. One very long chapter about her not-quite a year in the Poor Clares monastery, and a couple of chapters after. I appear a couple of times, she treats me very kindly. And again, she tells about things that I absolutely do not remember. To be fair, she was writing in the 1990s, about events of 1967-69. Maybe I would have remembered some of these things if you asked me in 1995. But now, when it is 50-60 years ago? Nuttin’. Could have been some other guy than me.
Although one thing was helpful to me. She says she and I moved into the apartment we shared on 25th avenue in 1967. I remember the place well, and I remember that at the time I was working for IBM, but still as a unit-record (punched card equipment) repairman. I remember that sometimes I would be on call, and a few times I got service calls and Joyce was highly indignant on my behalf at being called out late at night to fix some machine. I can also remember sitting in that apartment, at a big desk that she remembers we had Emil make for us, and studying the schematic for the 029 keypunch until I had it memorized.
Point being, this nails down a date I was kind of fuzzy about. I would have been not more than 18 months with IBM at that point. I knew enough to be useful, so it must have been more than six months, but by 2 years in, I switched to maintaining software. So thanks to Joyce’s recollection I can be pretty sure it was 1966 when I started with IBM.
Codgerville 