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Thanks for everyone who has contributed to this!
| * More sweet, funny, and/or bitter memories will be welcome. If you have something to share with us, please send the materials to: myuki@let.hokudai.ac.jp (maximum mail size = 1MB), or Masaki Yuki , Department of Behavioral Science, Hokkaido University, N10 W7 Kita-ku, Sapporo, Hokkaido 060-0810 Japan. |
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From Alan's mother, Thelma Miller: We are in deep sorrow losing our loving son Alan. He was always a joy to us and our family. Everyone who knew him felt close to him. He had a lovely wife and three wonderful children who he was very proud of. Alan once said to me that he thought his dad and I were good parents. He loved his family. Alan was very close to his two brothers, Mic and Rich. They were always a threesome. We were very proud of that and went on many trips together. As a child he said he wanted to be a doctor. We bought him a small play kit and told him he would take care of us when we got sick. Later, when he was in high school, he said he couldn't be a doctor because he couldn't stand to see blood. I told him there are all different kinds of doctors. He thought that over and he did get a doctorate degree later. We were so proud of him. He became a sociology professor. Alan had a great sense of humor, even in the face of odds. He had many talents other than teaching. It seems that he was meant to be a teacher, as he began teaching gymnastics, etc. to younger boys. My mother taught him to play the piano, which he loved to do and began teaching his children to play. Alan dearly loved his grandma, Nana, and came to see her in the hospital when she had an operation. He was also very close to my sister Marilyn and her husband Edgar. They were always in touch with each other up until the end. We appreciate that. I could go on, but all I can say is "we love you, Alan." March 24, 2003 From Mic Elvenstar Alan was more than a brother to me. When we were young, it was closer to a father-son relationship. As adults we also became very close friends. We shared a unique connection that only friends who are also brothers can have. Through the hard times of our lives, wit and humor always saw us through. When Alan was an undergraduate, I brought him into work with me in a sports program I was running for learning disabled teenagers. That was the first time we ever worked together. And I remember it as a lot of fun. Several years later, when my first marriage broke up, Alan got me a job helping him on an environmental project he was working on. The fun we had working together helped me get through a very difficult time in my life. We were going to work together again. As Alan struggled with his illness, he again turned to humor. We decided that we would write a humorous book together. When he visited me last year, we came up with several prospective ideas. We were still discussing them when his e-mails stopped in December. My trip to Japan in January was the hardest thing I've ever done, but it was the most incredible experience of my life. It was all about Alan, yet essentially he wasn't there. It was connecting with his, and my, family, and his wonderful friends and colleagues. It was seeing his adopted country. We had been planning a trip that I would make to Japan, and he eagerly anticipated sharing his life of the past few years with me. I went to Japan, though not under the circumstances I had envisioned, and I am so glad I did. Al, I miss working with you. I miss playing with you. I miss talking with you. I miss laughing with you. I'll never stop loving you. Mic March 24, 2003 From Paul Stapleton In memory of Alan Having read several of the tributes to Alan on this site, I wanted to add my own. In fact, as I just met Alan about four years ago, there was much that I did not know about him that I have learned from this website. I would like to thank the other contributors for filling me in. I first met Alan when I needed some help doing some statistics for a study I was doing. He was recommended as a whiz who would guide me through the numbers quickly. Indeed, that was the case and I asked him out to lunch to compensate. Somehow, we began talking about books and it was there that our friendship really began. We went out to lunch on a fairly regular basis from that point onward and invariably talked about only two things: Japan and books/publishing. It was nice to have someone to commiserate with about our long meetings at the university. In fact, I thought my committee and meeting duties were onerous until I talked with Alan. Then I realized that I wasn稚 too badly off. But Alan never complained, and I slowly recognized this as one of his gifts. He had a remarkable malleability. He was quick to see the positive aspects of a foreigner living outside his own land, and he had a love of Japanese culture, although that痴 not to say he was without his criticisms. The other thing we always talked about was our latest readings. Alan was a true skeptic, and I say that in the kindest sense of the word. He was able to read books, often about evolutionary psychology, and distinguish the insightful from the trash in a way that I envied. This ability to synthesize and extend knowledge is no idle comment as two of his papers with ground breaking ideas are appearing in top journals this year. The last time I saw Alan was early Dec. 2002. I visited him in the hospital and it happened to be one of his good days. After discussing his future course of treatments, we began talking about books as usual. I could hardly get a word in. He was lost in a world of ideas as if the ideas in recently read books mattered much more than his pesky little health problem. I sat almost in awe of how the power of these ideas could absorb him and take him into another world. In the end, I will remember Alan as a person of ideas, a believer in and practitioner of the quest for knowledge. I will miss him. Paul Stapleton March 15, 2003 From Darren Sherkat Dear Miyoko, Tadashi, Mina, and Tadato, I was one of Alan's friends for many years, although we never met. We struggled with many of the same problems in our careers and in our lives, and people who met both of us always remark that we are very similar. We both feared that we'd meet each other and find out that we were both geeks..."Everyone says I look and act like you...but, you're a geek!!" was our common refrain. Alan and I began corresponding when he moved to Florida State, but we somehow missed one another at meetings, and then he moved to Japan. Every time we were expecting to go to the same meetings, something would come up. Despite our long and close friendship, I never saw him or talked to him-we corresponded almost entirely by e-mail. Alan was one of the top scholars in my field, his work was some of the most innovative done on the connection between religion and culture, and he always made important contributions to theory while backing up his arguments with cutting edge empirical analysis. All that is sociologese for "Alan was really good, really, really good." Alan and I both shared enormous contempt for most sociologists. Most scholars in our field received considerable recognition (more than Alan and I ever got) for doing very little, and doing it poorly. It never helped us to point this out, but we often did anyway. Being right meant more to us than being popular. After all, there were a small group of scholars who really were good, who we really respected, and we all knew who we were. Alan and I used to throw fits about Satoshi Kanazawa's difficulties in the American sociology job market! We railed about the career success of inferior scholars and lamented the tribulations of the talented few. Alan really cared a lot about scholarship, but he didn't care about his career. If Alan was some careerist, he would have produced cookie cutter crap, and tried to move to UNC or Texas or Arizona from Florida State. He cared about his work, but he cared much more about his family. You. We knew people who didn't have kids because it would hurt their careers, who didn't get married because they were worried about moving up the ladder. We knew even more people who made their spouses move all over the place so they could get better jobs. From the perspective of American sociology-where Alan came from and I am---going off to Japan was a big step down from Florida State. Career suicide. Not to mention he'd be unable to leave since nobody would even try to interview him if he applied (Iowa isn't going to fly a job candidate in from Japan...). Alan was well aware of this, and made many jokes about it-particularly claiming that his submission to a journal I edited, "Going to Hell in Asia" was his autobiography. Of course, the paper was a real article, and was published in Review of Religious Research. Though I have to admit, when I first got the e-mail submission, I was hoping it was really one of his spoof articles (he wrote many, including some that got published in serious outlets for humorous takes on science). Alan didn't really mind being in Japan, he loved it. He loved taking the kids to the mountains for skiing. And, he loved that his wife and kids were safe, comfortable, and well integrated. Alan didn't really think Asia was hell, but he knew he had given up a lot to go there. And he did it for you and had no regrets. Love, Darren Sherkat March 13, 2003 |
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From Edgar and Marilyn Simon These are some of our thoughts: |
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From Yoshinori Kamo (in Japanese) アレンのことを思い出そうとして、いつでも一番最初に浮かぶのはあの、「ニコニコ」という形容がぴったりの優しい笑いである。ひとと話をする時にいつも笑っているのが日本人、真剣な顔をしているのがアメリカ人、という区分けをすれば、アレンはまるで日本人みたいだった。だから日本に住んだんじゃないか、と思うほどである。時に美代子さんが「まあまあそこまで言わなくても...」というくらいのきつーい冗談や皮肉を言っても「のれんに腕押し」「柳に風」のようににこにこ笑ってたっけ。「雨にも負ケズ」のように「決して怒らず、いつもしずかにわらっている」ところはアメリカ人版宮沢賢治だったのかも。 February 24, 2003 |
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From Yohsuke Ohtsubo In the Memory of Alan S. Miller My first vivid memory of Alan-on a way home from a part-time job, it was perhaps around ten at night, I saw a foreign guy wandering around the vending machine of subway ticket at the Sapporo Station. I thought, "he looks like a new faculty member of our department." Yes, he was! He was Alan. I said "hi" to him and noticed he was completely lost. He was on a way back to his new home from a short business trip. Although short, that business trip was long enough for Alan to scratch off his memory of the unfamiliar foreign station names. It was lucky for him to see me there. I somehow knew where he should take off his train. This happened about a few weeks after he settled in Sapporo. After about four years from then, when I came back to Sapporo as a joshu ("instructor" if officially translated, but "assistant" if literally translated) of the department, he still remembered that. He said to me: "at that moment, I was sure that you are gonna be a perfect joshu for me." I am not sure whether he was right or not-he only knows whether he found me as the perfect joshu. Anyway, he was always like this-tried to make us happy with warm jokes. I remember that Alan always tired to make us happy, and most of the time he was successful. But he made one very big mistake-he past away too early. That made all of us very sad. I am quite sure that the heaven is now a much much happier place than ever before. I hope he did not take a short business trip this time after his settlement in the heaven. Yohsuke Ohtsubo February 2003 |
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From Satoshi Kanazawa I knew Alan for 17 years, even though I never had a chance to see him in person in the last 10 years of his life, during which we wrote and published one book together and completed another book manuscript, entirely through electronic communication. He is the closest and dearest friend that I have yet lost in my life, and I am not certain whether I can ever recover from the loss. I'm almost certain that I never will. What made our long-time collaboration both so easy and so rewarding was that Alan and I were very much alike. He and I agreed on virtually everything, not only scientific opinions and perspectives, but also political, moral, and social issues. He and I were both an exact mixture of "liberal" and "conservative" views. I cannot recall a single political issue on which he and I disagreed. One of the many things that he and I shared in common was how we felt about our respective upbringing. Alan felt exactly the same way about being Jewish as I did (and do) about being Japanese. For the most part, he rejected and did not embrace his Jewish heritage, but knew, to his chagrin, that, deep down, he was Jewish, which he had a hard time fully accepting. During our collaboration on the first book, Alan and I played our respective ethnic stereotypes to the hilt when we dealt with, and wanted something from, our largely recalcitrant publisher. I played the obsequious, apologetic, and polite Jap, and he played the arrogant, obnoxious, and aggressive Jew, even though anyone who knows both of us knows that, in reality, I am much, much more arrogant and obnoxious than Alan could ever even dream of becoming on his worst day, and there was nobody nicer and more polite than Alan. That was our own private joke, and this was our own good cop/bad cop routine. When we wanted something from our publisher, I would send an email message to our editor, politely and obsequiously making the request. When she predictably did not respond to our request, Alan would then send an angry fax to her. We got most of what we wanted this way. Another thing Alan and I had in common was our experience of marrying someone for whom English was not the first language, and with whom we had some initial difficulty communicating. When I was contemplating marrying Irina, I asked Alan about his experiences with Miyoko before their marriage. He told me that Miyoko's English was quite limited when they first met, so it took him a long time to discover that Miyoko was actually very intelligent and deep. Every time I am impressed with Irina's knowledge of and insight into Russian history, politics and society, despite her limited English and recent arrival to New Zealand, I recall my conversation with Alan. He told me that there was no guarantee that his marriage to Miyoko was going to be successful. given the language gap, and their future was uncertain when they decided to get married. But he told me that, against all odds, their marriage turned out to be absolutely wonderful, and encouraged me to take the plunge as well. So I did. I am deeply saddened (and extremely angry with God that both Alan and I knew for sure didn't exist) that he never had a chance to meet Irina, or see me in a satisfactory academic position that he never for a single moment doubted that I deserved. Satoshi Kanazawa Department of Psychology University of Canterbury February 28, 2003 |
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From Michael Orensztein Here are just a few memories and experiences that Alan and I shared for the 39 years that I had known him. Alan and I met when we were both 7 years of age in second grade. We went to Crescent Heights Elementary School, Louis Pasteur Junior High school, Hamilton High School, and UCLA. We were very close great friends. Friendships like ours do not happen often but when they do, there is a certain bond that exists like no other. We had many great experiences through our lives. In elementary school before school started in the morning, we would race around the baseball diamond to see who was the fastest. I was so mad that he always won but even at that young age, you could see that Alan was very athletic. We were ballroom monitors that gave the other children balls to play with during recess. In the 5th grade, we were milk monitors and sold individual small milk cartons to other children at lunchtime. He and I would always play "Tetherball" at recess as well as four square and dodge ball. One thing I do remember vividly is that he was always swinging on the rings in the playground and was a great climber. This was probably a prelude to his great gymnastic ability that he developed further as he grew. As a side note, everyone who knew Alan knew that he was very forgetful and this was even evident even in elementary and junior high. But that was just the way Alan was. As we ate lunch together everyday, I would always see him eating a cheese sandwich which he loved and his mother would always give him these fantastic homemade chocolate chip cookies. Needless to say, he would always give me a cookie to eat. I would go to his house to play a board game which one of his uncle's invented. It was called "Perimutual" and if I remember correctly, it was a game involving a horse race. As we moved onto junior high and high schools, our friendship grew stronger and we both loved baseball. He and I and his brother Richard would go to the park and play a baseball game called "Over-the-Line". Alan's athleticism continued to develop. During our years in college we didn't have too many classes together. He was a religion major and I was mathematics major. I do remember that Alan would always do well on multiple choice tests. He had this great ability to reason which was the correct answer while I did not always have this ability. We both were in an Astronomy class and even though there was some math needed, Alan somehow always did better than me on the multiple choice section of the test. We also took a class called Engineering 11 consisting of logic and reasoning material (i.e. truth tables, If-Then statements etc.). Alan had a very logical mind and in that class, he and I teamed up and wrote a paper basically saying why some college professors do not instruct as well as high school teachers. Our reasoning was that college professors basically do not have to go through any "teacher" training. Needless to say, we cited examples from our own college experience and we got an A minus on the paper. It's ironic that we wrote about a profession that Alan ultimately became part of. However, from talking with Alan I do believe he was very liked by his students and he definitely knew the material very well. During college we both worked at a Baskin Robbins Ice Cream store where on slow nights, I would use a lid of an ice cream tub as a "Frisbee" and throw it to Alan as he made like a wide receiver in a football game. It was actually quite fun. I remember that at that time, Alan was a slight diabetic and while I would eat any kind of ice cream I wanted, Alan could only eat orange sherbet. On days when we had no classes at UCLA which was usually Tuesday's, he would pick me up at 6am and we would go to Venice beach and fish on the pier. We always looked forward to those fishing days. During class breaks we would go the "Coop" as it was called and played pool and pinball games. Alan was very good at both and most times he would beat me at pool. I believe the year was 1981 and Alan and I decided to go to Las Vegas. At that time, Alan was a vegetarian and did not eat any kind of beef. I don't know how and why, but I seemed to have the ability to talk Alan into doing certain things. So, while driving to Las Vegas we stopped to buy gas and I also bought a bag of "Beef Jerky". I somehow convinced Alan to eat a small piece and ever since that day, he was not a vegetarian anymore. We also tried "Chewing Tobacco" for the first time together. That really tasted bad. At the time, Alan did not have a girlfriend. My future wife came to the United States in 1985 from Singapore and while she was taking classes to learn English she met Miyoko in that class. I believe Miyoko was here on a school permit and she was living with an American family. My wife and her became friends and we decided to play matchmakers and introduced Alan to Miyoko. On their first date, we all went to see the movie "E.T. the Extraterrestrial". Needles to say sparks flew and they fell in love. In fact, when they got married my future wife was Miyoko's "Maid of Honor". After Alan moved with Miyoko to Washington State to earn his Ph.D., it was more difficult for us to see each other. In 1989, my wife and I did go to visit them in Washington for about 10 days. Tadashi was just recently born and still sleeping in a crib. It was a wonderful trip and the connection and history that I always had with Alan was still there. After they moved to Japan, we kept in touch by letters and occasional phone calls. On a few occasions, he and his family would take a vacation and fly back to the States. They would stay at my house and with their three children and my two, you can imagine the noise. But they were happy sounds and wonderful to see their children and mine playing together. It reminded me of our own childhood and the games Alan and I used to play. Alan had a great impact and touched many many people. He was a lovable human being and never had a bad word to say about anybody. I rarely saw him get angry and when he did, he didn't even look mad. I was very fortunate to have grown up with Alan and to have been part of his life for so many years that I will cherish. I am glad for the years I had with him and angry for the years lost. His life ended way too soon and my heart has a void that was once filled by Alan. I will dearly miss his laughter, his voice, his smile, and most of all, his love. I apologize for such a long letter but this is only a small piece of my history with Alan. I hope it gives you an insight of our close relationship and friendship that Alan and I once had. February 28, 2003 |
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From Rosemary L. Hopcroft Remembering Alan Alan and I were in graduate school together at the University of Washington. He came the year after I did. I don't remember ever meeting Alan, he was just someone everyone seemed to know. He also lived in the same complex of university housing (Sand Point) that I did, so that helped. Anyway, I knew him and Miyoko quite well. I remember Miyoko was the star of his life. Miyoko and I used to go swimming together. Alan was very gregarious and very easy to talk to. I was talking to Alan one day about my interests (at that time) of pursuing a Master's degree in statistics and he suggested I talk to his friend Joe Whitmeyer, who had a degree in Math with a specialty in statistics. I remember Alan saying such positive things about Joe, as he did about everyone I think. Anyway, I am sure that piqued my interest in Joe. I did go and talk to him, in fact I ended up marrying him (and I never did get that Master's in statistics). So Alan really helped change my life, although I am sure he never intended to! At the University of Washington we had an informal sociology seminar with Herb Costner as host and presider that Alan attended from the beginning. Even then, Alan was interested in comparative sociology, which I was too. In fact, not only did Alan introduce me to Joe, but, many years later, he introduced me to Japanese society, which I also came to love. When Joe and I got married, Alan was a groomsman. He also got to do one of the Bible readings, which was from the New Testament, which he thought was pretty funny, given that he was Jewish. Alan always saw the lighter, humorous side to everything, and he always made me smile. I don't think I ever heard him say anything negative about anyone. Even throughout his illness, he always managed to transcend all his problems with whimsy and humor. Not a touch of self pity, not one complaint. He did it so well, that for those of us who only were in touch with him by e-mail, it was hard to believe how seriously ill he was. Not only will I miss Alan as a person, but I will miss him terribly as a colleague in sociology. Whatever it was in the water in Savery Hall, he and I had very similar approaches to sociology. Alan and I argued about a variety of things in sociology, but there was a fundamental basis of agreement. This served as the beginning of a research collaboration between us that was cut short by his death. Alan was a good friend to me and Joe for many years, in fact, our longest and best friend. On various occasions he has helped us move, found us a place to live, let us stay with him, found us a car, even jobs. He was a warm, generous, sweet, funny person. We loved him very much, and his absence makes our world a little greyer, a little less bright. If there is an afterlife in which spirits go, which I am sure there is, I am sure that even now his spirit has perked up the place. But it is a great loss for us. Rosemary L. Hopcroft Associate Professor Department of Sociology University of North Carolina at Charlotte |
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From Nagi Basta Alan and I first met in high school, Alexander Hamilton High School (Hami), in 1973, in Los Angeles, California. We were on the Gymnastics team together. Alan was the number one man on the Rings. I learned most of my moves on the Rings from him. Alan also competed in most of the other Men's events, and he especially excelled in Vaulting, the Parallel Bars and the Floor Exercise. In addition to gymnastics practice at school, we regularly went to practice with other team members during the weekends on the equipment at the beach in Santa Monica and/or in Venice. Although Hami was a very rough (i.e. gangs were beginning to take root) school at that time, Alan always kept his cool and never got into any serious conflicts with anyone. He was always cheerful and good-natured, eternally having a very contagious smile on his face. While we were in high school, Alan and I also worked at Baskin Robbins (ice cream store) on La Cienega Boulevard, although he quit before I did, and we didn't work may shifts together. Alan and I attended the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) together. At that time, we continued practicing our gymnastics together every weekend in the gym at UCLA and at the beach. After college, from around 1981 to 1983, Alan and I shared an apartment together in Santa Monica, California [443 Bay Street, Santa Monica]. We were both working full time, but still had ample free time to enjoy many activities such as cycling, skiing and playing music. Alan enjoyed cycling, and we regularly bicycled on the bike path from Santa Monica, through Venice and Marina del Rey, to Manhattan Beach and Redondo Beach, and back, often stopping for food or drinks, swimming and sunning. Alan was always so easy going. One day in 1981, I asked him if he wanted to try snow skiing [I had been skiing since I was 16, and he had never tried it]. He said "sure". We loaded the car and drove up the mountain to Snow Summit (ski area) in Big Bear (town of Big Bear Lake). We walked half-way up the bunny hill. Put on our skis. I briefly showed him how to turn and stop. With difficulty he skied down. I told him he was ready to take the lift up. Cheerfully, he agreed, later realizing what a mistake it was. But that was Alan's good nature: always happily willing to try new things. He should have gotten very upset at me for taking him up to the top of the mountain. But he was cheerful and had a good attitude throughout the whole day. Being a natural athlete and in good shape, Alan learned very quickly. I was able to talk him down just about any ski run. He was hooked. He absolutely loved skiing then. Every free day we had during the winter, we would go skiing. Regularly, we would start early at 4-5-6 a.m., drive 3-4 hours to go skiing, drive back another 3-4 hours, get back late, and start early again the next day to go skiing and do it all over again. When he felt confident enough skiing, we started going to Mammoth Mountain in the Eastern Sierra Mountains. This was Alan's favorite place to ski in California, and we went to ski there regularly. More often than not, we would be the first persons skiing in the morning, and in the afternoon, we would wait at the top of the mountain until most people had skied down before heading down ourselves. Alan tremendously enjoyed the freedom of skiing on an empty mountain. Alan always used to say he had a "score to settle with Sliver" (Sliver is a very difficult advanced run at Mammoth) because the first time he skied it, he wiped out badly. He did get a lot better at skiing, and he did go back to Sliver, and he did settle his score with it, skiing it with ease. Dragon's Back (another very difficult run) however was a different story. Alan wanted to try something more challenging. I took him on a very narrow cat trail, less than one meter wide, with a wall of ice on the right, and a sheer cliff drop on the left. It opened up to Dragon's Back. Just getting to it was a challenge, and when we arrived, I turned to see Alan laughing very hard. He was thrilled to be there doing this. We decided he would ski down first. He made one turn, fell down, and due to the steepness, slid down half way, eventually hitting a bump and stopping. I skied down to him and got him his skis and again found him happily laughing. He was really enjoying himself. He put on his skis, took one more turn, fell down, and this time slid all the way down. Covered in fresh powder, he said it was great. Alan often talked about skiing Dragon's Back again, but unfortunately, we never did get the opportunity to do it again. Still, he always mentioned it as a memorable skiing experience. Back in Santa Monica, Alan played the piano and the guitar. I sang. We spent countless hours playing music and singing: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Eagles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Seger, and hundred of songs by other artists. Alan was particularly fond of The Rolling Stones. He used to say that the lyrics sung by Mic Jagger had something to say about any situation. It became a routine that whenever were in an applicable situation, we would quote the lyric from The Stones' song that applied to it. Until his very last e-mails to me, he would still quote The Rolling Stones. Alan also enjoyed playing board games. He and I and my girl friend (now wife) Lila, and sometimes other friends, played Boggle, Uno, Yatzee (those were his favorite 3), and many other card and board games. We spent a lot of time playing these games and just casually hanging out and talking. Those were very comfortable special times that we spent together and some of the best memories I have. When we weren't skiing, bicycling, going to the beach, playing music or board game, or just hanging out and partying with friends, we often got into (very light) philosophical discussions. It was a lot of fun as we were both educated and well-read. Alan expressed an interest in teaching and writing. I arranged for him to have a meeting with another good friend of mine, Dr. Berky Nelson, former History professor at Dartmouth, then (and now) working as the Director of Organizational Relations at UCLA. Berky talked to Alan about what it would be like to obtain a doctorate degree and teach. Again, Alan was hooked. About that time, Alan met and married Miyoko. I married my girl friend Lila. Although Lila and I moved to Texas, and Alan and Miyoko also moved. We remained friends and in touch by mail, phone and then e-mail. As far back as I can remember, Alan always had a wonderful sense of humor, and rarely got seriously angry. He had a very happy love of life. When my wife and I moved to Texas, Alan bought my wife's car, a 1977 Toyota Celica, from her. Although it wasn't new, it was a great car and ran very well. Alan practically drove that car into the ground, putting on it more than double the miles my wife had driven it. Then one day, many years later, Alan called to tell me very seriously that he thinks we sold him a lemon (a bad car). "Why?" I asked. "Did the engine go out?", "no" he replied. "Did the muffler go out? Did the carburetor go out?", again "no" he said. "Well, what happened?" He said that it just "stopped". "What, why?" I asked again totally bewildered. He answered: "it ran out of gas." I could go on and on with other wonderful stories and memories, but suffice it to say that Alan had a dream. He pursued it, and achieved it. While we were living in Santa Monica, he had gone to live in Taiwan for 6 months and had traveled around Asia. Upon his return, he said he really enjoyed it and wanted to return. Then, it seemed he knew what he wanted, and he set out to get it. And he did. He liked to ski and said he wanted to live where it would be convenient to ski whenever he wanted: He ended up living in Sapporo where he could ski often. He wanted to teach and write: He obtained a doctorate degree and published. He wanted to live in Asia: He lived in Sapporo. I am now very proud of all that my friend accomplished during his life, and very happy that he lived life to the fullest. For that I am very grateful. February 28, 2003 |