Memories of David Paul Taylor
2-4-1957 — 9-7-2020
Some of these comments are about David and some are about the family in general.
Everyone in the family seems to claim to be the black sheep. Our father (John, or "Jack" to his family), Aunt Maryanna, David and I all thought we were the black sheep. (I think of him as "David", but he prefered "Dave".) None of us really have terribly impressive credentials to support our "black sheep" claims.
I don't think he was particularly big on suffering fools gladly.
Religion was an awkward subject in our household because of our parents seldom talked about their differences, at least in front of us kids. She was Protestant and he was agnostic, from a Catholic family. This became a bigger issue when she got sick with breast cancer and started going to a Pentacostal (Assembly of God) church. I was 13 when she died. Dave was 2 and a half years older, and had a more adult view of both religion and death.
Neither of us got along with our stepmother, until I got divorced, and discovered that she was the one who would still talk to me about my divorce when everyone else was sick of hearing it.
Stories:
I don't remember this, but Dave and I reportedly used plastic dinner plates as Frisbees on at least one occasion. Some of them ended up on the roof.
We built plastic airplane models. Dave built and painted a particularly nice F-4 Phantom II that hung underneath a shelf in his room. Aunt Frieda, who had a "helmet-head" hairdo like Marge Simpson, was cleaning one day underneath it, and when she straightened up, she knocked the model on the floor, destroying it.
Our father bought a 1964 Chrysler New Yorker that had been in an accident, and repaired it, but it had front end damage, and was never quite right. There was a straight stretch of country road near our house in Wycombe, and Dave liked to open it up on that stretch. I think he hit 80 mph. 1964 was before seat belts were mandatory, so it had provisions for seat belts, but didn't actually have the belts until I installed them, years later.
We liked to play Avalon Hill wargames, such as Midway and Luftwaffe. I don't think we ever quite figured out the rules to Luftwaffe.
We also played Diplomacy, a multiplayer game, with the Hallingers and other friends. This game involves a lot of deception, making and breaking alliances. On one occasion, Dave showed three different sets of written orders to three other players, proving that he would do what he promised them. Of course, at least two of these were false. This severely pissed off Kris Hallinger.
One time, we were painting a car. He started off as a perfectionist, but got impatient halfway through, and started painting before I was done with my part of the preparation. The moral of the story is, don't be a perfectionist at the start of a job unless you're also going to be a perfectionist at the end of the job.
After he graduated from college, he went on an "insanity tour" of Pakistan, back when that really wasn't insane. He found leather goods prices irresistable, and bought me a nice leather coat. Unfortunately, I last saw it in a restaurant in Oklahoma, where my kids were playing with it.
Likes:
Mountain Dew (maybe me more than Dave). We also drank a lot of tea, especially around Aunt Frieda: mainly Constant Comment, Earl Grey, and Red Rose. Dave liked Twining's Blackcurrant Breeze.
Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies (this may have been more of an Aunt Frieda thing). Aunt Louise made a meat dish called rouladen that we both liked.
We were discussing church music (Keegan and I have been church shopping), and Dave announced the Aunt Louise criterion. Church music should sound like something Aunt Louise would play on a piano or organ. This is old school, no "drummer in an aquarium". (No drummer, and hence no need for a plexiglas muffler.) An example (something that at least makes me deeply homesick):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6RdZZIDMgU
Dave also liked Hayden's Nelson Mass, particularly a performance conducted by Neville Marriner.
Händel's Messiah was my mother's favorite piece of music, so it's a family tradition, especially around Christmas time. I particularly like this Collegium 1704 performance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JH3T6YwwU9s
Dave liked Dickens' "A Christmas Carol", but he was very particular about which version (or versions). He liked the Alistair Sym version. Accept no substitutes (or at least, very few substitutes). He got my son, Keegan, interested in this, but Keegan likes the Patrick Stewart version.
When we were small, our family had a phonograph album of sea shanties that included The Flying Dutchman and The Walloping Window Blind. He was looking for that album online, but I don't think he ever found it. He introduced me to Steeleye Span when we were in college. Steeleye Span re-did old, mostly Scottish, ballads in a modern rock style. I got my girlfriend (now wife), Carol, into them. People had been telling her for years that she would love them.
Another Taylor family favorite was "the paratroopers' song", Blood On the Risers (Gory Gory What a Helluva Way to Die).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWgsdexkv18
Marty Robbins was also popular. There was a song John Taylor liked called "The Bull Rider Song". I have the words in a book of cowboy songs he gave me. It is a variation on "The Strawberry Roan".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJxz2psv5GI
Dave also liked Christopher Frye's play, "The Lady's Not For Burning". (A depressed soldier, returning from a war, decides to help a widow whom the mayor is trying to have burned as a witch. The mayor can't get the widow to confess to turning old man Skipps into a dog, and he can't get the soldier to stop confessing to Skipps' murder.) There was a very nice performance with Richard Chamberlain in the lead role. It's a good story when life is dark and bitter. Speaking of dark and bitter, he also liked a Peter Sellers movie, "Hoffman". (A divorced businessman, bitter to the point of being creepy, blackmails his secretary, who is engaged, into spending the weekend with him.) It's a love story, but it doesn't look like a love story until near the end.
Dave liked C. S. Lewis. I remember the book, Poems. He gave me an audiobook version of The Screwtape Letters read by John Cleese. One of our more recent conversations involved the book, Miracles, which he recommended highly, but he thought there were parts of it that were intended as a response to academic criticism, and were a waste of ink.
Dave liked, or at least tolerated, Jordan Peterson. Or at least he seemed to think Peterson was the closest thing to a good influence that Keegan and I had in our lives. That could be damning with faint praise.
Peterson is a clinical psychologist who likes to give lectures on psychological interpretations of Bible stories, but he won't say whether or not he believes that the stories like the Resurrection are literally true. Paul VanderKlay (CRC minister) described him as "an unauthorized exorcist." Peterson made the Bible intelligible for a generation of (mostly) young men for whom it had been unintelligible.
He liked Dashiel Hammett, James Branch Cabell, Dave Rubin and the Weinstein brothers (Eric and Bret). He didn't like Robert Bly.
Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon, and a number of stories about "The Continental Op". One of his favorites involved a man who disappeared, and wasn't found until years later, by accident. The man had decided, after a near-death experience, to abandon his wife, children, and career, and start a new life. But when he is found, his new wife, children, and career are exactly like the old ones.
Cabell wrote fantasy stories. The main character in Jurgen is in a not very happy marriage, and gets a chance to live his life over again. In the end, he returns to his wife. The High Place was a cross between Sleeping Beauty and Bluebeard. The back cover of the paperback edition says, "Winning the enchanted princess was easy. Living with her was another matter."
Dave Rubin is a Youtube talk show host that we both liked. Bret Weinstein is a biologist (also a Youtube personality) who discovered that the medical research establishment emphatically did not want to be told that their testing on laboratory mice was bad. He explains, "All of our mice are broken." His brother, Eric Weinstein, is a mathematician, investment manager, and Youtube talker, who met Jeffrey Epstein, and has a lot to say about how powerful institutions suppress information they don't like.
Robert Bly is a poet and author of Iron John, who was active in the mythopoetic men's movement in the 1980s. I liked him, but Dave didn't.
My reaction to Dave's death:
I was informed of Dave's death by his boss at Langley. I got a work email from some NASA person I didn't recognize asking me to call him. I was expecting to get chewed out for not signing some paperwork on a urine tank for the Orion capsule. His death still hasn't really sunk in.
I mentioned that religion is an awkward subject for me. There was a pop psychologist, Sam Keen, who said that there were seven questions that any serious religion has to answer. One of them is, "Who are my people?" I have always had trouble with that question, and it just got harder. I wasn't expecting to outlive Dave. I'm the black sheep, after all, with the crazy life.
Part of the friction between me and Dave was that we both took religion seriously, and we were both low enough in agreeableness that neither of us was willing to go along with things that we didn't think made sense. My lack of conventional religious belief is the basis for my claim to be the black sheep, as least from our mother's perspective. I'm currently reading Tom Holland's Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. In an interview, Holland asked, "If you cut the root off of a flower, can you still get the bloom?" Again, it's an awkward subject.
My mother's advice about religion was, "Eat the chicken and leave the bones." I'm still trying to figure out how to do that. I wish I still had Dave to talk to about it.