Rose, my wife

Our Wedding Day

Hale-Bopp

Birth Plan

Weaning Isaac

Toilet-Training Isaac

Bunk Bed

Omi Marga

Dziadziu, my Dad

Felicia, my sister

Our Cottage

Waller Street

18th Street

pets

more pets

The comet was very bright in the San Francisco sky in the autumn of 1996, when my wife and I were planning our wedding. Wherever we went, we could see it in the evening and night skies. It became a bit of a comfort to me, something larger than ourselves, something on a cosmic scale. An astronomy buff since childhood, to me Hale-Bopp was exciting, everything that Hyakutake and that other incredibly dissapointing comet weren't.

The combination of planning in the long term and having a comet bright in the sky brought Mark Twain often to mind. Born when Halley's Comet was visible, Mark Twain predicted (in 1909) that he would die when it returned. He was right. He died on April 21, 1910, while Halley's Comet visible once again.

Of course, Hale-Bopp will long be associated with Marshall Applewhite and the Heaven's Gate suicides. On the afternoon of Wednesday 26 March 1997 strange news was coming out of Rancho Santa Fe (San Diego County), California, a town about 20 miles north of San Diego.

 

There the bodies of 39 men - participants in a mass suicide - were discovered. Commander Fulmer of the Sheriff's Department said "they're dressed similarly, all lying in a prone position, hands at their side as if asleep". He said the men were wearing dark pants and tennis shoes, neither sign of trauma nor blood were visible.

 

By now the group's web sites, one for the cult (Heaven's Gate) and one for the web page authoring business they ran (Higher Power) are well known, but then the red letters flashing "Red Alert - HALE-BOPP Brings Closure" were new, creepy, and only later downright disturbing. (The web pages weren't well done, and the JavaScript rollover code was terribly simple; it didn't preload the images and users suffered a strange graphic delay the first time a cursor was moved over a button. I remember because I had just tackled that problem for the project I was doing at Charles Schwab & Company.)

 

I find it strange, that such a happy time in my life and such a bizarre act should be hung off the same neuron in my brain.

I believe the image of Marshall Applewhite is from CNN. I know the image of the Nike-clad body ("Just Do It"?!?) is courtesy of KCAL. Used without permission, but I hope their attorneys are gentle.