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A tragic event has fallen in the midst of all the happiness that Diane and I have been experiencing with the baby. About 2 months ago, my closest friend here in the Bay Area died of rapidly growing brain tumor. Everything happened very quickly - headaches for a couple of weeks, diagnosed on a Thursday, surgery the next Tuesday, and then the next day, gone.
Lou was a fascinating guy - born in San Francisco, a teenage/early 20's life that was a cross between Haight-Ashbury and Hell's Angels, and spending years working on Japanese freighters traveling between San Francisco and Japan. It was very difficult to pull much of his past out of him - he was always much more interested in the present and what that meant to him. His life revolved around his family - his wife and 5 year old son.
Among other things, Lou and I shared a passion for chocolate and basketball. He would buy 10 pound blocks of Ghiradelli chocolate and make wonderful things with it. He and his wife, Rachel, were wonderful cooks (he was a chef at one of the more exclusive clubs in San Francisco). Golden State Warriors basketball games were another diversion - we were just getting set to buy a mini season's ticket package. It's funny, but my memories of Lou are the strongest when I see advertisements for these ticket packages in the sports page of the newspaper.
Lou and Rachel had just purchased a Mac - in fact the last time I saw him before he was in the hospital was the day I had gone over to their house to help set up the Mac and give them some quick lessons on some of the software packages (and games - Lou and his son loved Shuffle puck cafe).
I thought that after he had become comfortable with the Mac, I would introduce him to Archipelago - Lou would have been an interesting addition.
But now I introduce Lou to Archipelago in a way that I had never considered.
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