My first IBM Blog post - Autism and hiring

For three years now, I have had an interest in hiring people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). People "on the spectrum" often have incredible talent despite their diagnosis. Like many people with disabilities, just providing simple accommodation and promoting understand in the work place can help people with ASD become incredible, productive, happy, and loyal employees.

I've worked within IBM to promote a hiring program, spread understanding, and banded together many employees affected by autism by forming a small community inside IBM called an ERG (employee resource group) or BRG (business resource group). My reputation grew to the point where I was asked to write a short blog for IBM on the topic of autism and hiring.

We have just recently started a hiring program in Lansing, Michigan, that aims to hire 3-5 developers on the spectrum. If that succeeds, we hope to replicate the model in other cities and divisions of IBM.

Stay tuned and we may update that site with news in the next few months!

Eulogy For My Father, August 2014

Last year, at my father’s 81^st birthday, my cousin Linda remarked that we had to get together more often. I am sorry that it has to be under these circumstances.

Thank you for coming to comfort my family and my mother. My siblings and I may have lost a father, my nieces and nephews may have lost a grandfather, my uncle his brother – but my mother lost her companion, best friend and partner of 56 years. I don’t think even his brother could have lived with him that long.

For those of you who have not seen it, the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington, D.C., is a long, granite wall lining a tear in the earth on the National Mall. On it are the names of fifty thousand Americans who gave their lives in that conflict.

My siblings and I are fortunate that my father’s name is not among them. He came home, raised us with my mother, and together they saw their grandchildren and great-grandchildren come.

But as the sun set on that chapter of his life, it cast long shadows into the rest of the story. My father struggled to reconcile his distinguished military career with the horrors he saw in Indochina. Of the many demons in his life, this may have been the most formidable.

Still, he was a good father and a good man who instilled in us many virtues – among them patience, tolerance, selflessness, gratitude and charity.

He lived in the bosom of an extended family that welcomed him despite his troubles and eccentricities. For that he was ever grateful and fortunate.

I’ve heard many of you speak fondly of him over the years and now these past few days. I want to thank you for all the love and comfort you showed him.

In his memory, please think kindly upon veterans of war, for they are the ones who went to do what was asked of them by those who could not do it. Lastly, if you know of a person suffering from addiction, do all you can to help them. I would not be here if it were not for such help.

This Is How We Live Forever (Eulogy For My Grandmother Domachowski, 2009)

[A quick note...I asked my mother for permission to read a small message at my grandmother's funeral the day before at the wake. Within earshot when I asked were my mother's siblings, my Aunt Fran and my Uncle Jim. Both extracted oaths from me that I would not blaspheme or pull funny "masonry shit" (I am, in fact, a freemason). I have a reputation of being irreverent, yes, but I ascended the dais the next day without thunder or lightning, and this is what I read.]

My grandmother’s given name was Bertha. She didn’t like it; she chose to be called ‘Lena’, instead, and fought tooth and nail with her mother over it. She wanted the name because it sounded more American. She was proud to be an American, and she wanted to live like one, without any airs of the old world that her family might press on her. The name stuck.

The story may be utterly false, or at least warped into legend over time. I don’t care. It fits her, because she was stubborn.

When Lena was a teenager, her mother insisted she meet, and consider marrying, a young lawyer of Polish extraction. Lena would have none of it. When her family welcomed him through the front door of their house, she ran out the back, perhaps into the orchards nearby.

It was in those orchards that she would climb a tripod ladder – ostensibly to pick fruit – but also to get a look at that handsome young Anthony Domachowski. There are 33 people who are alive on the planet today because of her stubbornness – from Frances Gocek all the way down to Elle James Anderson. We’re all grateful.

I cannot think of a more perfect and loving couple. Maybe she drove grandpa crazy, but she was crazy about him. Grandma said that long after Grandpa died she still talked to him aloud, or wrote letters to him and took them outside to burn, as if the smoke would carry her message to him.

Grandma was always giving – not just of money or gifts, but of herself. These stories she told me, are a gift; so were her hugs, calling all of her children her “million dollars”. She really felt that. And she was that rich because she gave everything she had. She got so much back in life because she gave so much. You’re all here right now because of that.

This is how we live forever – by selflessly touching so many other lives that your soul lives on through them.

Grandpa, you have lived on this way. Grandma has returned to you. We will keep you both in our hearts, through all that you have given us, done for us, and taught us.

Eulogy For My Mother, 12/2014

[I do believe that, just before I read this to the congregation, I noted to my Aunt Fran and Uncle Jim that there was not a cloud in the sky and I was not struck by lightning, yet again. See here for context.]

One weekend afternoon in the mid-eighties, when most of my siblings and I still lived in the area, my brother(-in-law) Bob called my brother Pat from my parents’ house to ask if Pat was going to be there for dinner.

Pat asked, “why?” - not to be rude, but to set Bob up for the punch line.

Bob replied, “because Mom wants to know whether to make too much food or WAY too much food.”

My parents’ house on Pitcher Hill was named the Momcat Inn because of this hospitality. My mother was born there in 1935 when it and the surrounding area were her grandparents’ farm. After Mom grew up, the farm was sold, subdivided and developed. My mother went to secretarial school, worked at Carrier, got married, had children and moved to Taiwan and back only to return to that house with her young family and husband in 1973. She started a small garden, stocked the kitchen and settled there for 42 years.

Whenever you visited her you found my mother in either of those two places. If she was in the kitchen, she was doing anything from canning tomatoes to peeling fruit to shelling walnuts to baking pies to making spring rolls to stirring fried rice - whatever culinary opportunity the seasons and the market afforded her.

This time of year, it was cookies. Boxes and boxes of Christmas cookies. Way too much cookies. The inventory would tower in the back room, tall as a man stands, seemingly inexhaustible. The cookies were as varied as they were uncountable. They weren’t just delicious, they were elegantly crafted and visually pleasing. She would wrap them up in decorative trays or tins and give them to me to run next door and give to the neighbors - even the family that hated us. To her, it was the right thing to do; our bounty - however meager at times - was meant to be shared. There was always a plate for a stranger, and there was always room for seconds. It taught us all about giving something real of oneself for the benefit and delight of others. If you want to hear another funny story, ask my friend Ken what happens if you refused seconds.

If Mom was in the garden, she was hard at work weeding, culling, planting, harvesting - doing the neverending, regular, necessary chores to keep the garden verdant and productive. It was more a genuine passion than a vanity, yet it is no stretch to say the garden grew famous. When explaining where we lived, I only had to say, “The house on Bailey Road with all the flowers”. One time at school in Oswego I was watching the evening news when I noticed the background for the weather report looked familiar - it was a video of my mother’s garden - tulips swaying in the April wind. Something called her to grow things. It bred in us the sense that good things come from hard work and patience and require constant upkeep - things like gardens, children, home. Love.

Mom had many other talents as well. She could draw, paint, and sew. Her portfolio from a high school design class lives to this day and is full of flawlessly executed assignments on proportion and aesthetics. Paintings she did in Taiwan show her ability in Chinese style brushwork. The clothes she made for us looked finely tailored.

She loved to read. At the lake, where we rented a cabin for a week or two, you would find her underneath a tree on the patio burning through a romance novel or some nonfiction work like Mary, Queen of Scots.

She loved to spend cool summer evenings with her family and friends around the kitchen table sharing laughs and stories and sipping drinks. To this day, if I catch the scent of certain cocktails I am transported back to scenes like this. It is the feeling of being secure within the bosom of a large extended family.

After we grew up and some of us moved away, Mom spent the 90s babysitting grandkids and visiting her far-flung children, who are now transplanted elsewhere from Skaneateles to California. At the turn of the century my parents slowed down and traveled less.

If you visited them in the last ten years you’d swear Mom wanted to kill my father. The tension was palpable but the threat was empty. Rummaging through the house recently I stumbled across a card from Mom to Dad. Inside it read, “I can’t live without you; you mean everything to me.” And so this year, a little over 16 months from my father’s passing, she left this world, mere yards from where she entered it. She joins people that she missed dearly in her final years - Ella Mae, Tootsie, Cookie, Rocky, Ed, her parents. My father.

We all take a part of Mom with us.  In many of our yards something grows that came from her, and just about everyone here is sporting a few pounds courtesy of her.

Reeling In The Years (indeed!)

I was about ten years old, maybe nine, walking across the patio at Lake Ontario. It was a burning, golden summer day with a buttery, steady breeze. As I made it to the railing to stare at the light winking at me off the waters of a late July day, I was thunderstruck. The AM radio was playing something that stopped me as clear, crystalline drops of guitar fell all around me. It was Steely Dan’s Reeling In The Years.

I lost touch with it for awhile. I got to high school, and could not recall the title or the artist, and I was walking across the RIT campus, watching students play Frisbee outside as my brother and his fellow students unloaded their dorms to go home for the summer. And there it was, and I was transported back to being a careless young boy, and the feeling that day and the perfectly tolerable heat and the breeze and the light show came back. I asked some guy who it was and he re-educated me. I bought the LP with my allowance a few days later and played the track repeatedly for days. I could not grow tired of living on that cloud.

Steely Dan disappeared for awhile and came back in the 1990s. I was lucky to go see them at SPAC in 1994. It was a cool, August evening – one of those ones where you still don’t need a jacket and you laugh at those who wear one anyway. Yeah, I could see my breath – but I am from Syracuse, damnit! I walked to class at Oswego in shorts in a lake effect blizzard! I bond with Steve Dittmar over this!

They introduced the song with a bouncy piano intro and carried into the sweet melody with horns that washed over like a warm, ocean wave. Bath water in the cold of Saratoga.

We were walking out from under the amphitheater because a friend told me I had to hear how it sounded outside. When we crossed the threshold, the background singers added campfire smoke to the air and it instantly intoxicated me. There, in the cool Adirondack evening, shivering and denying it, I stopped and instantly felt the wind ripping through my unkempt hair, as clean as the star that smiled on me that day as a child. It never fails.

They changed the chorus a little with the girls who sang it, they bent up from some diminished chord – a half step? A whole step? I don’t know that detail, I just know am tied into the magic of that sweet, lilting tension hanging in the air like an aural June bug, and for that amount of time, and as magical as that appears to the child when he first sees it.

These moments are burned in me and come back to life in sharper relief than my eyes ever saw.

Yeah, I like the song. I can think of a handful of others that get me iike this. Watermelon In Easter hay is one of them. I’ll tell you about that, later : )