After the
travesty
skit was over, I attended the panel “An Hour With the Rigneys”, which was Harriet, Wilson, Tom, Alan, and Maria talking about Robert Jordan aka Jim Rigney, trading anecdotes about what it was like to live and work with him (consensus: completely awesome).
Before the panel started Wilson had come up to me to introduce himself and tell me how much he liked the blog (he’d commented on it before, even), and then surprised me by telling me that he had actually hunted up the story on my LiveJournal about the time I had met Harriet and Jim in California, which I had dubbed the Great Purple California Trip of 2004 , and posted after I heard of his passing. Wilson had given it to Harriet to read (since she didn’t remember it herself). Overhearing this, Harriet laughingly chimed in to confirm this, and to claim that Jim had never owned a purple suit and she had no idea what I was talking about in my story.
I told her I could be wrong, and would check with my sister Liz, but I could swear that’s what color he had been wearing that day. And lo, I just got off the phone with my sister and she says… she can’t really remember.
DAMMIT. I still proclaim my rightness on this! It could have been burgundy! Or, or eggplant .
Purplish-brown? Maybe?
(“I remember the hat!” Liz says. Heh.)
Oh well. The panel was lovely, full of warm and often funny remembrances of Mr. Rigney, and it was clear throughout how much his family life and his professional life were meshed together, in a way that very few people get to do, I think, and how much this was to the mutual benefit and enjoyment of everyone involved. Wilson in particular had many hilarious and touching stories about his “cousin-brother”, whom he obviously adored and admired greatly. It was so cool to hear about things like the Office of Extreme Danger (as Jason put it, “if you sneezed in there you would end up in the hospital, because six hundred pointy things would fall on you”), and Mr. Rigney’s failed scheme to save Harriet’s goldfish pond from a predatory heron (it turns out that herons are not afraid of crocodile urine), and many other sweet and funny stories.
(You may have noticed I’ve been wavering back and forth between “Jim” and “Mr. Rigney”, because everyone was calling him “Jim”, and it’s definitely a lot faster to type, but I was raised in the South, yo, and have a lingering uncomfortableness with calling a man I only met once by his first name. Ergo, waver. I don’t have a point here, I’m just, er, pointing it out.)
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