I am playing with time. I am engaging with the past that creates the future or is it the present that recreates the past in order to devise a future of collected lives. Has the internet become the ultimate documentarian? Yet, its perspective is not clear - its POV is not objective, but random through subjective businesses that interact not because they see a united vision for the future, but because they must and in this way our culture is documented. I am playing with scraps, but they are the embodiment of actual events, designs, objects that my father, a designer created. I am playing, and thinking, dreaming while awake, of a man whom I only know through pieces of memory, stories, and documents. If I collect them all here will he seem more coherent to me?

He taught me the song I THOUGHT I SAW JOE HILL LAST NIGHT. Not until I went to graduate school did I learn that this was a Labor Song, an activist song. For me it was a lullaby.

No word yet from the mysterious email address.
I wonder if it is like writing to Santa Clause and all the email to dead relatives goes to a certain place in cyberspace? Ha! It is probably sitting on their server waiting for a Robert Caigan to show up so that they can tell him to subscribe to something because he has email waiting for him.

On another note...
My father's business is now coming up in the search engines. It states that it is inactive, but not closed. I wonder if the incorporation was ever officially shut down? The way the law is set I think corporations basically need their own death certificate.
Interesting to ponder.

Here's the data - and it's accurate - for 1978.

ROBERT CAIGAN ASSOCIATES INC.
DOMESTIC BUSINESS CORPORATION ROBERT CAIGAN ASSOCIATES INC. 400 E. 59TH ST. NEW YORK, NEW YORK, 10022
Initial DOS Filing Date: APRIL 26, 1967
County: NEW YORK
Jurisdiction: NEW YORK
Entity Type: DOMESTIC BUSINESS CORPORATION
Current Entity Status: INACTIVE

Selected Entity Address Information DOS Process (Address to which DOS will mail process if accepted on behalf of the entity)
ROBERT CAIGAN ASSOCIATES INC. 400 E. 59TH ST. NEW YORK, NEW YORK, 10022
Registered Agent
NONE

I did it...now I wait and wonder

To: robertcaig5238f

Hi Dad!
This is harder than I thought it would be.
Not entirely a joke.
I wish it were true.
You have one year old twin grand- daughters born 30 years after your death.
Ghost in the machine...
I miss you.
Love always,
Emily

Research Before Emailing

I decided to do a search. Something I have done before with no results - until now.

House Beautiful 1968

11 groovy kitchens from the 1960s
City kitchen, country bloom

This Manhattan apartment kitchen, designed by Robert Caigan Associates, was the epitome of sophisticated living in 1968. “The strong solids of white, walnut, sun yellows are given buoyancy and a delicate linkage by the wallpaper, its flowers colored to order,” according to House Beautiful. “A room in praise of the fact that city dwellers need not sacrifice space and sunniness in the happy pursuit of sophisticated life.”







and a social security death date. Hmm...

This is the beginning of an adventure. Somewhere between play, curiosity, possibility, outrage and a daughter's thought of 'what if?'

Last night MyLife.com popped up and asked me if I would like to reconnect with Robert Caigan. It says that I can send him an email. I don't know what their source is, but my father died in 1978. Sick, twisted, funny...the beginning of a play?

Perhaps the internet is the new immortality and my father, I thought died before he could enter it. Apparently not so. I had just stated to my husband, "I think something new is coming", a shift.

Now I am going to send an email to my father...