I remember Don

Like many people posting here, I knew Don at Michigan. I remember well his sense of humor, his kindness, his vital intelligence, and his wonderful ability to have an animated, engaged conversation on any topic. If you were going to be attending an obscure lecture somewhere on campus and wondered if anybody else you knew was going to be there, the odds were very high that the one person you knew would be Don, who would always manage to ask a smart, thoughtful question. If you found yourself, say, at a party on North Campus with a bunch of engineers, it would more than likely turn out that the one person they knew on the "other campus" was Don.

He was one of those people you'd imagine running into unexpectedly at the airport. But, it wouldn't be just any airport. It would be an obscure, tiny airport where your plane had been diverted for mechanical reasons, and you would enter the sparsely populated waiting area expecting to be bored for the next several hours, and instead, run into Don, who would, with his conversation, make the time pass in a flash.

I thought of him when I was getting ready to go out today--how he always wore the layers of t-shirts, and how, it seemed, you could judge the weather by the number/type of t-shirts he wore. If I'd had the opportunity to see that this morning, I would have know exactly what jacket to wear. -- Margaret Foley