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Another Casualty, Another Day to Grieve It
His personality was much too big for any room, and yet no one was ever smothered by it. You could enter a space blindfolded and backwards and still be able to tell that he was in it. His body was too large for barstools and yet he balanced there with such precision that he could turn and pivot and rotate around enough to be the life of several conversations at once.
And this man, too, would have to die. Did die, in fact, just this month
It is a tricky thing to write about the death of someone you didn’t know so well. To gather up the impressions of a complete outsider and somehow do justice to a human life — it’s near impossible. And so here I am giving it a try.
He lived in Evanston, Illinois, just across the street from the Chicago city line. He had a little white dog that he loved, sailed every chance he could, and he drank regularly at the neighborhood cocktail spot, Ward 8.
By the time I knew him, he knew every bartender in Ward 8, and most of the patrons. He was the classic extrovert. He never ran out of things to say, or the energy to laugh and nod enthusiastically when he listened. As such, I watched him the way marine biologists watch dolphins or whales. His ways were completely foreign to me. I found him both fascinating and exhausting.