People – Page 4 – Caro Babbo

Greg James, The Accidental Village and the Binary Roller Coaster

Ko Olina Marina, Kapelei, HI, 24-MAY-2020 — The binary roller coaster we ride, we’re sailing to Alaska, we’re not sailing to Alaska, was turned on its ear and into trivia when we learned our friend Greg James drowned a mile from shore.

Jennifer learned about Greg’s death through a post by Kevin McBee (who you can see in the attached video) on a sailing group.

I called the local police, who were closed, and eventually the coast guard to try to get ahold of Greg’s family before they learned about his death on the internet.

Our friend, Greg James, dies in boating accident one mile from harbor

Mooloolaba, Australia, 18-May-2020 — Jennifer and I had texted Greg the previous few days discussing what he expected to happen when he arrived unannounced in his 34-foot sail boat in Australia.

We watched his progress as his inreach satellite phone posted on the web. We teased him when it appeared his boat was in the surf off Mooloolaba, the site of a large marina. We figured Greg had carried his sat phone with him ashore in his pocket. When the posting stopped, we were certain he’d turned it off. Had the aussie border people taken exception to his arrival, we laughed.

But, Greg was dead by then.

Pumps

Ko Olina Marina, HI, 4-APR-2020 – In the 1980s, the circle I lived in, mostly PhD psychologists of one stripe or another, mixed with some computer scientists, a bunch of neural network people, a physicist or two and who knows who else, looked at the current computer architecture as a model of how the brain works. A homologue for the CPU was easy, RAM was short term memory, disk storage was long term memory, we were certain we all knew how this fit together.

We were sure we were that first to find our current technology explained the least understood mysteries of the human body. A historian in the group pointed out that when pumps were the technology rage, technocrats of the day explained how the human body, including the brain, was just like a series of pumps.

We meet James, but not Kimi

Ko Olina Marina, 12-MAR-2020 — It’s always interesting meeting someone with whom you have corresponded but never met.

I’ve been writing professionally, in one form or another for something approaching forty years, but I find I still get spooked writing for a new audience, and so I did writing this. The obvious audience is followers of my blog, but this post will also get read by the members of the WhatsApp group of Zingaro Patrons and other invitees. They know James better than I do. James is a celebrity with this group who are fiercely loyal. I find myself worried that I’d somehow lose face with them, or even with James.

James and I started corresponding off and on just after I discovered his Zingaro YouTube channel. There were few enough episodes that they could easily be watched back-to-back in a couple of hours. I think he had met Kimi by then, but perhaps not. James figured prominently in a piece I wrote about why there would never be a Caro Babbo Youtube channel. He has an easiness about him, mixed with competence that make him interesting and easy to watch. The first few episodes could have been titled this week’s pretty girl, because there seemed to be a new young woman in every episode. There wasn’t any mystery about why these women would spend time with James.

And then, at some point, an 18- or 19-year old named Kim shows up and James loses his heart. He and I corresponded about what a lucky man he was.

When we saw James this past week he talked about how much money he blew through in those early days of the romance. Unlike the eighties pop hit, Kim stayed after the money was gone.

It’s All About Prep… and Dreams

DL2680 ATL-SEA 18-FEB-2020 – We’re our way back to Port Townsend before making the hop to Honolulu on the 20th.

Jennifer and I often think we have few friends, but our week was full of seeing friends. It was a busy week with full days of house maintenance and full evenings with friends.

We’ve been following the travails of James and Kimi on Zingaro, and the dreams following my father’s death have begun.

This Time of Life

DL SEA-ATL 12-Feb-2020 – it’s getting to be a more and more difficult time of life: in my email this morning was a notification that Jennifer’s and my dear friend, Judie Romeo, died.

Judie was loud, opinionated, and, I suspect, could be difficult to work with. She was, recently, on the wrong side of the backhand of the new Center for Wooden Boats (CWB).

Babbo, My Father, Dies

16 Shamrock Rd, Rocky Point, NY, 1-JAN-2020 – This past Sunday, December 29th, 2019 at approximately 3:30 am, eastern time, my father, Babbo, died of coronary arrest after suffering a major stroke four weeks earlier.

There was no DNR (do not resuscitate) in place. He was on the Neurology ICU floor at Stony Brook Medical. All attempts to resuscitate him failed.

I had wanted to name our boat the Vincent A, after my dad, but Jennifer didn’t like all the pointy letters. I turned to a dear friend in Milan, Franz Rossi for a name. He suggested Caro Babbo, which is Dear Daddy in Italian. It was a name that fit and one in which he took great pride.

Zingaro makes it to Kona on Hawai’i, damaged. James and Kimi safe.

[Updated] Stony Brook Hospital†, Stony Brook, NY, 27-DEC-2019 – My friends, if I may call them that, James and Kimi on the sailing catamaran Zingaro made it safely to Kona after basically having their boat break up.

I’ve written about their Youtube channel and struck up a long distance friendship with James.

Youtube channels are generally disjointed from the actual goings-on on the vessel. Most channels, including Kimi and James’, are months behind where the boat actually is. On the Zingaro channel, they are still in Central America, while they have been in French Polynesia for a while.

In the last bunch of weeks, they sailed to the Line Islands anchoring at Fanning Island with our friends Merv and Sharon aboard Southern Cross IV.

Two days ago this email arrived:

What broke when, 2019

Stony Brook Medical Center, Stony Brook, Long Island, NY, 15-DEC-2019 – I’m sitting in my Dad’s hospital room.

We’re in the belly of his recovery. The immediate recoveries have slowed. He is able to move is his right thumb and right index finger. If his right arm is supported, he can flex and extend that arm. He can inconsistently move both his legs a bit. Nothing in left arm. He is beginning to swallow a bit, but can still not move his tongue, nor move his eyes right to left.

More devastatingly, he has dropped into depression becoming difficult to engage. When asked if he thinks he will improve, he says No. He can show his emotions in his face and he cries. This morning during rounds when he started to cry his nurse started to cry, as did his doctor. When his doctor recovered she said to me quietly, he can show emotion, that is a good sign.

Locked In

Rocky Point, NY, 5-DEC-2019 – On a nondescript day in March, 1977, my mother drove towards McCarrick’s Dairy, the local convenience store, three blocks away. As she crossed Prince Road a car on her right ran the stop sign pushing her car into a LILCO light pole that was so far into the road way that the paving crew paved on both sides of the pole.

The impact of the car hitting the pole, together with the twisting force of the car on her right, caused her head to hit the “A” pillar between the windshield and the car door. She severed her spinal cord at ‘‘C4’’, the fourth cervical vertebrae. She was a quadriplegic for thirty-one years.