🦋 In memoriam
Hershel Toomim
1916 - 2011
I know Los Angeles much better as a setting for stories and novels and films (and blogs) than as a location. Visits to my grandparents' house once or twice a year over the course of my childhood were enough to familiarize me with a little eastern corner of Beverly Hills, and the Tar Pits, and one or two beaches; the city at large remained terra incognita, hundreds of miles of undifferentiated streets and freeways. The last time I was there was in 2005, to memorialize and to mourn my grandmother Marjorie. Yesterday we gathered in Marina del Rey to bid farewell to my grandfather Hershel's earthly presence; and today I am bidding farewell to this great unknown, Los Angeles, for what I imagine will be a long time.
Hershel looms large in my memories and aspirations. He was a man of science and an inventor, something I have wanted to be (or "wished I were", or wished I could be) at moments of my life. Together, Hershel and Marjorie founded the Biofeedback Institute of Los Angeles. When I was visiting with Hershel after Marjorie's memorial service he showed me a project he was working on, a simple virtual reality which the user controlled via headband-mounted EEG electrodes -- it struck me as the coolest thing I had ever seen and prompted me briefly to question all the choices I had made up to that point, choices that meant I was not working on something so amazing. Aside from being a brilliant man and an innovator, Hershel was a deeply thoughtful, analytical man. When I am at my intellectual best I like to think I am carrying on some of the behaviors and thought patterns I learned from him. Very glad I was able to be present at his memorial, listen to people's memories of him and reconnect over his past. I do not feel it is appropriate to say he should "rest in peace" as he was, for all the years I knew him, a firmly committed atheist and materialist -- instead I will hope that his memory continues to live on after his presence is gone, and continues to affect the people who knew him.
posted evening of Sunday, August 21st, 2011
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