it's been a while since Alex died. i thought i'd write something like this soon after his death, but i guess i never solidified my thoughts enough to electrify them and put them somewhere. (goodness knows these hands don't actually write things down any more—who could think of a slower way to communicate ?)
i remember pledging to myself that i would try to think of Alex at least once a day for the rest of time, just to let him know that someone is still here thinking of him. not as if everybody's forgotten already, but you know. so far that's worked out all right, and thinking of Riptor every once in a while helps me get up those nasty hills or run around in a puddle just one more time before heading back home for the afternoon. sometimes i can even hear his voice. i suppose i forgot about writing something down in his memory ; maybe a combination of being busy and not thinking it that important for the time being.
but i recently got off my lazy butt and finally converted all those old papers from Science and Math and put them up on the site. googlebot or some other search engine found the pages, and suddenly we started getting a few hits from people looking for "alex rosefielde." (he was one of the coauthors of our project on Newton's method.) seeing his name on the webalizer made me wonder why people searching for him would find this tiny site. i searched at google. a few pages came up ; a couple at CalTech, the Newton's method paper, some news articles about the death.
reading them made me start to remember things i had forgotten, so that is why i wanted, after these long two years, to write my own memories down before they pass completely out of existence.
i met David Alex Rosefielde the first day i arrived at Science and Math, in august of 1995. he insisted on calling me "leaf" even after the seniors said it was "lafe." he thought it was funny, i guess. we both lived on second Hill ; i had total and blind respect for the rules that made NCSSM legally feasible, and Alex had nothing but contempt for them. he twitched whenever i threw the verbal assault of "responsibility" at him. he ran fast, cross country and track on a fucked up ankle that popped a lot. he was really smart, especially when it came to chemistry and math. he also liked physics and genetics and pretty much everything else except authority figures. anything he didn't understand provoked his attention.
Steve and i used to sit around in me and Pete's room senior year and watch Alex play nethack for hours on end. if the mood struck, we would talk about interesting stuff ; bitch about teachers or the administration, maybe the upcoming physics lab ; go over the moral ills facing his recent expedition to the Eno ; ridicule each other for our various faults.
i would go to sleep at night, and Alex would not. i still find it unbelievable that he managed to be fast, intelligent, and usually pretty coherent on the amount of sleep that he experienced. he would stay awake and talk to Steve or Freeman or anybody else who was up for the entire night. a sign appeared on his door after his sleep schedule became famous campus-wide : SLEEP IS FOR MORTALS, hand-colored in delirious crayon.
there are a million other things popping up in my head now, but if i wrote them all down i'd bore you to tears. amazing.
we graduated. he went to CalTech, some others to parts elsewhere, me and others to State. i didn't see or hear from him much, but he continued running on his crappy ankle and got really into psychology, relativity, genetics, and chemistry. the bomb hobby he started at Science and Math continued, with an exploded pumpkin to celebrate Halloween. he helped me dispose of Cheri's unwanted chemistry book at the end of our freshman year. he taught an origami class for little tikes in Chapel Hill during the summer of 1998. we went to the Pearl Jam show that august. that was the last time i saw him. he went to Canada to go hiking before CalTech started up again.
so one evening in Syme in september of 1998, i was in my room when Wingo came by and suggested we go for a walk. this usually meant something was on his mind, and it seemed urgent. "Alex is dead," he said as soon as we were outside. pow. i tried to call Matt at Rose-Hulman to see if he had heard, and then i learned what had really gone on (from his roommate—Matt was not there). the news on the internet the next day had a caption under a somewhat ambiguous photo : "Emergency personnel place the body of David Rosefielde on a stretcher after a bomb he and friend Matthew Roesle made exploded prematurely on Sept. 25."
<sigh> i have thought much about that sequence of events : Wingo's news, the widespread alarm among the Science and Math alums, the funeral, the gaping pure thought and wondering of the weeks after. i wondered why i don't think of my family or my other friends in the same way, and i think it has a lot to do with Alex himself, the fact that he's dead. seeing Ms. Compton at the funeral ... we were a graduate and a teacher, reunited after a year in a completely not-Science-and-Math setting. friends who had disappeared after graduating came back to the triangle for the funeral. something weird was going on. i helped bury Alex, my friend, in the soil in Durham. the tears came when i helped move dirt into that hole, the realization that he would never ever come back to us and that i had permanently lost something more valuable and less appreciated than almost everything else in life.
Created and published