Thank you Wizard. It is still a very sad thing. I woke up this morning and immediately started to cry at the very thought that Michael is no longer with us. I still can't bring myself to believe it and when I do, it is just not something I want to be true. I'm familiar with Michael through the many years spent in this community started by Kevin and Scott and faithfully and in the right manner carried on by Hudson and others.
I thought this morning as I shed some tears for a friend (community) that if I feel this badly about the loss, how much more can his immediate family feel the loss. And that saddened me even more, I can never feel the depth of grief that they feel. So my grief is now for his family and I want so much to have them know what an honor it was to be associated with Michael in this small circle of life. I had the privilege of spending time with Melvin and David in Washington last week, my first time meeting David even though we've known each other through this place for many years. When I stepped into his car to ride over to Melvin's house twenty minutes away, it was as if I was catching up with a longtime friend and not at all as if I was meeting someone for the first time.
I know the experiences of many on social communities on the internet are not pleasant, and some would dare say our community is one of those. People like Michael speak loudly how wrong and ill informed people are about SnS, OWA and the old BFT. To honor Michael the best way here is to continue the legacy all of you, me included, have started. We are a community, a group of people who generally like each other, who can find substance here beyond the trivial, pomposity and me-oriented internet communities that inhabit the web spaces out there.
While David and I rode together to Melvin's house, the stories we shared, the time we had only put an accent mark on what both of us proclaimed to be the honesty, depth and good community you all have built and have striven to maintain and protect so dearly. That sort of protective nature we all have for such a valued community is what is generally misunderstood. As David said to me "People just don't get it". We both went on to share how real life experiences have been shaped for the better because of the care, the desire, the investments you all have made here. I'm sure we can all share with each how much good, truly beyond talking baseball and sharing many a laugh or three, this place has done for our individual lives. Heck, even if it was superficial fun at the expense of a botched play by Hunter Pence, that served a purpose as well. But we all went beyond that... why?
I don't know exactly. It is as if we all stepped one toe in the water to see if we had something that was beyond the superficial. As we built credibility with one another, we built trust. From that trust came real desires to share when needs arose, and often they did. Whether it was a need shared about the best places to eat in Chicago or San Francisco, or where one can find a romantic place in San Antonio for that all important first anniversary, to what smart phone to choose, to what one should wear when helping people clean up after Hurricane Katrina, to what one would feed a turtle that was rescued from a small suburban ditch, all of those things happen because community is alive and well.
So it is with sadness that we've loss a dear member of this community built on trust and honesty and integrity... good people reaching out to other good people to help in some small way. We are not strangers doing good deeds for others on occasion, we are a community shaped by the solid foundation of trust and we would all step in to help or share what we can to make life just that tad much better for others. There is nothing accidental about that, it is intentional because many of you made it so. Thank you all. There is, however, a special place in our hearts for those who give perhaps more than others. Those we know we can always count on. Like Michael.
SnS, we lost the best one of them all in that regard.
