Interesting things about my uncle, Larry Kenyon (1936-2007)

• He had a lifelong fascination with professional magic, the circus, and vaudeville, which meant fascinating old chests of stuff in his childhood bedroom at my grandparents' house in Lebanon (a small farming/mill town about 40 miles north of here).


• He was the first member of my family to live in a city. After attending various colleges (Oregon State, Southern Oregon College, and maybe UCLA), he worked on the Krofft Puppet Show, I think in New York City, and then settled in Seattle by the early 1960s, where he lived the rest of his life. The Kroffts created H.R. Pufnstuff and other large, psychedelic-style puppets.


• His profession was "lighting technician," and he worked mostly at the Seattle Opera House, including rock concerts staged there, as well as on numerous movies shot in Seattle.


• He knew lots of actors and rock stars, at least enough to be able to give first-hand testimony on what they were like be around. When he worked on the movie Harry in Your Pocket, he pointed out Walter Pidgeon to us when we picked him up after work, but since I misheard him to say, "There's a pigeon in the parking lot," I didn't get to see the actor.


• He had an unpleasant and long-lived miniature schnauzer named Paco.


• After divorcing my favorite relative (Aunt Wilma) in the mid-1970s, he vowed never again to marry. He mostly raised my cousin and took him to visit England and Egypt.


• The last time I saw him was at my Grandpa Ben's funeral. All the old ladies were aflutter with how sharp my uncle looked, with his curly salt-and-pepper hair and a very stylish grey and black suit.


• The last time I talked to him was after I started working at ORI - he called because he heard I'd worked on tobacco cessation grants, and he wanted to be sure I understood that there are people who like smoking and do not want to quit. (Yes, I know that, but uncle, if you hadn't smoked, your lungs would have been stronger against pneumonia.)

More on sighing

Telling my mom about her little brother wasn't great, and I slept rather poorly last night, and Lillian put some rather nasty scratches on my leg, but there were some cheerful things today, too. One was a conversation with owl_of_minerva and her friends about Descartes, and one was the surprise of encountering an old friend whom I hadn't seen in about 10 years, a woman I really like.

Here's how Descartes explains the phenomenon of sighing:

"For whereas we are moved to weep when our lungs are full of blood, we are moved to sigh when they are almost empty and some imagined hope or joy opens the orifice of the venous artery which sadness had constricted. Then the little blood remaining in the lungs flows down suddenly into the left-hand side of the heart through this artery, where it is driven by the desire to attain this joy. At the same time this desire agitates all the muscles of the diaphragm and chest, so that air comes rapidly through the mouth into the lungs to fill the place vacated by the blood. And that is what we call 'sighing'."

Source: (The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. 1, ed. Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Cambridge UP 1985, pp. 375)