Send your remembrances to rememberingdavid@psc.edu
Remembrances from friends, colleagues and loved ones:
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Remembering David through photos
David filled his personal web page with his art, intellect and humor.
My interactions with David mostly happened at our management meetings. The infamous MI Space Meetings! Bob’s AD meetings. Special meetings on SCxx conference preparation, outreach and documentation… soul searching “what now?” meetings during our lean years 1997-2000.
Whatever the meeting, if David attended I knew it would be a lively one. He could be counted on to introduce a contrarian opinion “out of left field” whenever a consensus threatened to crystallize among the rest of us. Because of the way I am (I like consensus!) David’s stand would inevitably irritate me at first — only to realize, over the next few minutes, that he had a good point, that in fact he put his finger on something I was thinking myself, but suppressing or just phrasing differently. Or better yet, something I SHOULD have thought of but didn’t. Almost always, David succeeded in getting our team to achieve an outcome that was much better than the one we were drifting towards before his invigorating stir of the pot. In other words: he powerfully proved the power of democratic deliberation as the best problem solving tool available to humans.
My personal, tangible memento of David was created by him in the dark days after my son Emil was murdered in March 2000. Two days before the memorial service David showed up at my house with a beautifully framed photo of Emil and me standing before a waterfall in Vermont, which Emil’s brother had taken on our trip there a year earlier. I think this picture spoke to David as it speaks to me, a mysterious expression of the true meaning of human life: love, nature, and resilience.