Monday, June 30, 2008

FAREWELL TO A PRETTY GOOD GUY

Nobody Asked

No, it’s not a case of damning with faint praise. It’s how Winston Rand, author of nobody asked..., wanted to be remembered: as a Pretty Good Guy.

I was saddened today to hear of Winston’s unexpected passing after his having suffered a brief illness.

Winston was an occasional poet, an engineer, and a sharp-eyed observer of life. I had hoped to meet him on one of my soon-to-be-more-frequent trips to central Tennessee, but that opportunity will now forever be denied me.

A week ago Sunday, in one of those bizarre flashes of Cosmic Irony, Winston had written a post entitled “Fears Of My Demise...” But no, it was not a prescient vision of things to come; it was the story of a blog platform upgrade that (as it happens) proceeded without a hitch...a situation where any fear that might have manifested itself turned out to be unwarranted.

At the end of that post, Winston thanked his readers “...for giving me a reason to do this in the first place.”

It may be a little late, but we readers maybe ought to thank Winston for sharing that little part of himself that compelled him to keep his Online Journal, a journal that now must serve as a legacy. I hope Roomie and Winston’s other loved ones can take comfort in that legacy, along with the knowledge that he was a daily presence in the lives of so many of us.

Ave atque vale, Winston. Godspeed.

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