The Blog Nobody Expected to be Written

Nobody, By the Way, Including My Own Blogging Self

This is about A. Heather Wood. She is currently dead. She has been dead for almost three days as I write this. It was her intention to live forever. There is a good chance that if you know me, you knew her as well. That's because I met her in 1975 and have been in touch with her continually since the day we met. She died after a very, very short illness on Monday. She got sick overnight and stopped breathing. Life support was removed that night.

If you know Heather, you will agree that she lived a life devoid of sentimentality, religion, and, to a large extent, patience. She had no family or next of kin, and therefore I can write an obituary in the same vein, with no fear of legal action or, most likely, contradiction. Be prepared to endure a bit of irony and eccentricity, hers and mine, in this obituary/appreciation.

Short Circuit

Before I start, I'm offering the opportunity to skip my personal thoughts by linking to her web site, with a bit of added link history.
If the last link—her actual words and fun illustrations—has vanished, please let me know and I'll resurrect* it here.

Her Apparition and Employment

My friend Steve Katz, (likely a different one from your friend Steve Katz) introduced me to Heather in 1975. As I recall, they both agreed that he sent her to New York City, more or or less in care of the Audio Engineering Society. She was instructed to look me up, too. We were exhibiting at the AES convention and Heather soon joined us in our commercial endeavors as our marketing department. It was a match made in more than one mythical location; I was attracted by her impeccable literacy and competence and enthusiasm and workaholicity and imagination and just plain her. We became good friends almost immediately.

Heather was British. Even her name, Arielle Heather Wood (with or without the Arielle) sounded British. The accent sealed the deal, although she of course asserted that I and my USA conspecifics were the accented ones. She characterized the Fourth of July holiday as Ingratitude Day. She wasn't dogmatic about British variant spelling, though, writing material as she did for our benighted American corporation. She spoke posh with remarkable charm. She eventually became a USA citizen. There's a written test for that. She told me she corrected the test.

Given the above, one would expect that she would have remained employed with us almost to this very day, but it was not to be. She was too good, which demonstrated itself in part by her criticism of others who didn't meet her standards. Being the boss to some extent exempted me from her verbal ministrations; others weren't so fortunate. May I for a moment turn this over to Terry, another long-terms*** employee who worked with Heather in the early years.

"You know, for better or worse, Heather was my career mentor for 20 years or more.  Eventide, followed by Audio Techniques, then part-time work at Country Music Magazine.  She probably saved me from a career on an assembly line.  She was tough and unfair and mean. Still, I was a sponge and learned a lot including, apparently, how to be a bear to work with. I don't envy you your task [of writing this].  Mostly because I can't decide if her "scorched-earth" wake of previous co-workers was a good or bad thing.  Certainly interesting."

Since we're being unusually honest for an obituary (but not for an appreciation), I'll admit that I enjoy using the term "mixed curse" rather than the opposable cliche. I loved Heather's work, as did almost everyone. In the beginning. Her impatience with lesser mortals after a tenure of months to years did not enhance her climb up the career ladder. In addition to her peregrinations in the audio industry, she held a dream job as the assistant to the publisher of a major science fiction house. Didn't last.

Her métier in her later decades turned out to be gigs of premeditated organization. She would freelance at a number of small companies, foundations and organizations and rescue them from the chaos that afflicts the well-intentioned but inexperienced. If your mission is discovering extraterrestrial life, you don't want to personally maintain membership rolls or file IRS forms. She did that for The SETI League and many others, allowing her to support her lifestyle, including lodging, eating, and less salubrious habits, about which more later.

An interesting history, encapsulated in part by Terry who knew her well and experienced a certain side of her more than did I.

Her Writing Career

Heather was accomplished and famous in the folk song world. She was originally in the band The Young Tradition with Royston Wood (no relation) and Peter Bellamy. Fatefully, their manager in England, Ioan Allen, was asked to join Dolby Laboraties which subsequently moved to San Francisco. Ioan has kindly provided some background as to her westward migration. As an unreconstructible rock & roll devotee, I wasn't a big fan of YT music, but I was one of her own lyrics. (Yes, she wrote folk songs, although that might seem unlikely due to temporal proximity and Heatherian proclivities.) They were incredibly clever, easy to sing even for me, and occasionally unprintable. Also poetry. Also short stories.

And restaurant reviews. One of her gigs was visiting restaurants and writing friendly and favorable reviews about their yummy fare. I know a bit about this because I was often recruited to join her in the endeavor, mostly so she could sample more menu items. Not that I'm above eating restaurant food, although I lack foodie-like discernment of subtle flavors. Now that she's beyond retribution, I might mention that the reviews appeared in a magazine that was distributed almost exclusively to advertisers in that magazine but never to any candidate diners. Unsurprisingly, the restaurateur/advertisers neglected to ask for audited circulation data and were most likely unaware of this anomaly. Her Career in Song I strongly encourage reading her web site for more on her singing career. She put together festivals. She frequently sang at venues in the New York City area. Living too far away, I haven't attended any in many years, but I can't imagine them being anything but fun. (Heather liked "fun." One of her quotes when exhorting people to undertake activities, was "It's fun" spoken inimitably.) Heather having been of the elderly persuasion, had a literate and readable web site uninfested with gratuitous videos as are so many others nowadays. She even sang a capella. The Heatherian experience was usually unadulterated.

Heather singing a duet with Isaac Asimov

Heather The Iron

Here I borrow a trope from Spider Robinson. Heather was a science fiction fan, worked for years in the field, was an SFWA member, and was a fan of Spider Robinson. I believe he was at least an acquaintance, as were many other authors. Heather's death was imbued with Irony, some of which I detail below, beginning with her 'live forever' theorem.

The last line of her blog before the administrivia is this:

• I am never ill.

Yes, with a bullet point. And she almost never was, at least to my knowledge, until she became terminally so. In the almost 50 years we've been friends, I heard her admit—once—to having had a cold. Due to our geographical separation, we hadn't gotten together for the better part of a year. One of my activities on rare visits to the east is to galumph up to the Budapest Cafe, about two miles from my usual haunt, for a supply of Linzer tortes. Heather joined me and shockingly, about half-way home, declared she needed to take a bus. My first intimation that Something was Wrong.

I wasn't shocked. She was a smoker. She would often go outside to "Indulge my habit" as she put it. You don't remain a heavy smoker at age 79 without repercussion. Even so, she went to her cardiologist, a scary doctor-type if there ever was one, who told her she was OK despite her smoking and drinking. He asked how she accounted for her good health and replied (of course) "My smoking and drinking." I wasn't there, but fully believe the second-hand report.

When I got a call from her friend Leslie Berman, with whom she happened to be staying, I was told she was rushed to the hospital Monday morning, her heart having stopped after a night of gastrointestinal distress. Whether she in effect died almost immediately from oxygen deprivation or later from "general organ failure" isn't clear, and there was no autopsy. Totally sudden, and for me and many of her friends, totally unexpected. She planned to live forever, and at least those of us close to her age surely never expected this day to come in our own lifetimes, hence the title of this blogitem.

She smoked and drank to excess. Excess by definition for the smoking, a bottle of Zinfandel per day for the drinking, as I was told. She didn't drink water; the wine, 14-17% alcohol by volume, was a substitute. I hate obituaries that only say "cause of death was undisclosed." Heather had no close relatives, and possibly none at all. So there it is, no reason not to "disclose."

Heather and I emailed each other both for official SETI League business and for personal babble. The most recent email I received from her was on the 10th of July. It was a warning about the impending postage-stamp price increase four days hence. Leslie had the opportunity to collect some of the items that Heather had in her custody on behalf of the organizations for which she was toiling. She's planning to return everything as appropriate in good time which should alleviate concern. As you can imagine, she's whelmed. Among the items she found? Many rolls of postage stamps.

Forever stamps.

A last words: Sui Generis

She was that from the day I met her. It's still hard to believe that she will be permanently missing from my life and those of so many others who—improbably—survived her. While I was writing the string of complimentary adjectives in the apparition paragraph, I suddenly flashed back to a different obituary I wrote almost 18 years ago. In it was this sentence about Susan, also deceased: ...sweet, goofy, earnest, funny people, and I have no trouble coping with flaky... In addition to everything else, Heather was the anti-Susan! I understood she took many young people under her wing. If you are one of them, I issue a condolence, along with many more to her folk music, science fiction, and audio industry associates and friends.

* As I typed this, I realized that that may have been a poor word choice.
**My Steve Katz, earlier a co-founder of my company, just died last year. Plenty of history there, too.
***Three, as it has turned out so far.
****Her name adjectivizes well. I've taken advantage of that in naming a dish she invented: Heatherian Chocolate Gloop. Her name also verbifies very well.  For decades Paul Shuch of the SETI League would prevail upon her to Heatherize his writing.

Additional Heather Wood links:

The Guardian 29 July 2024
The SETI League
Colin Randall Salut! Live
JohnRobinsonWords

Yesterday  |  Tomorrow