The Enchanter's Theorem

Hugh Hyatt & Hans Melberg, originally uploaded by quennessa.

Today would have been my father's 65th birthday. Official retirement age. Not that he would have. My father was not the type to retire. Retirement would have been just working on his *own* projects, his own experiments and devices, not anyone else's. Maybe he would have finally gotten around to working on the big projects he kept putting off for bread and butter money. The truly big science projects that he would occasionally talk about and jot on restaurant napkins to explain to me and the Ant.

I wish I'd kept those napkins and paper placemats. No napkin or placemat was safe from him. He'd get to talking and the next thing you knew, the pen was out and equations and diagrams were spooling out on flimsy paper, sometimes bleeding from the ink, unable to contain the strength of his thought.

I kept some of them for many years, but over time, they degraded and would fall apart. I didn't have a scanner back then. It was before the technology was available. It's not a great regret of mine, but it is a regret.

I do have all the cards and the few brief notes he wrote to me and to my grandparents over the years. They comfort me, though I can't look at them very often. It's like the photographs I have of him.

But today I'm going to try and look at the photographs again. I want to remember. I want to celebrate how much I loved him, even how much he aggravated me and how much he challenged me to be the woman I am now. I am who I am today because of how often I was pounded against the anvil of his intellect.

He wasn't an easy man. But as I grow older, raise my own girls, I grow to appreciate more and more what a gift that challenge was. The fact that he wasn't easy. That he didn't make it easy for me. He never let me skate.

He always forced me to think. Above all, think.

This picture was taken in April of probably 1976. This is the first shop that was in a tooshed in our backyard of the house in Walnut Creek. The man next to him was his then best friend and business partner, Hans Melberg. The picture came to me in a huge padded envelope from my Aunt Rosie, along with all the other pictures that apparently my father had sent back to my grandparents over the year.

I know why he sent it to them. It was his first official shop, the second generation of Hyatt Tool Company, the first of which was my grandfather's machine shop, the first generation Hyatt Tool Company.

When I founded Hunt Press, I actually struggled for many days over whether or not to name it Hyatt Book Company. I am a third generation entrepeneur. This life is in my blood, a gift from my father and my grandfather.

I love this picture.

It hangs on the wall of my house, even though I don't know who of his friends took it. The signature isn't hugely clear, though the date, 4/22, is. Plus or minus the beard, it's how he looks in my memory and dreams now. Forever young. He aged wonderfully over the years, but that's not how I remember him. I remember him through the eyes of my younger self. When he was a giant and the center of my universe.

Happy birthday, Poppa Bear. I baked you a cake. I'm afraid you're granddaughter's eaten most of its frosting though.

Wherever you are, I hope the test bench has all the 220 you can eat and all the tools you can use. After all, the Universe itself has to be the greatest lab ever built.

I love you.