My Good Friend Paul Anacker is Dead
My good friend Paul Anacker is dead. I just got the news today in a letter from his mother. I am incredulous. Even though Paul had suffered for many years with a diseased pancreas and even though everyone who knew him knew he would inevitably die younger than he should after having lived far more painfully than anyone should have to, still news of his passing came as a shock.
Paul was the consummate gentleman, a great raconteur, a magician of the first rank, a technologist, a writer and a wonderful human being. And he was a great and true and loving friend.
He and I worked on numerous projects over the years, ranging from collaborating on books and magazine articles to poring over legal briefs as he defended the rights of medical patients to have access to certain classes of drugs that the FDA, in its Big-Pharma-Protecting wisdom, had deemed unsuitable for human consumption despite massive mountains of evidence. We disagreed -- sometimes loudly but always good-naturedly -- about whether software emulation could ever become a mainstream solution to many computing problems (he was right; I was wrong).
Last time I saw Paul, he was looking pretty good, dressed in a suit and tie as he escorted me and my wife and two other couples on a personal tour of the Magic Castle in SoCal. He made the tour as magical as the place and the magicians who inhabited it, most of whom he knew by first name. That was nearly four years ago; I remember because it was on the drive home from that visit that six of us sat in a car and listened in stunned as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove stole the White House for a second time.
Since then, one of the other men on that trip, my best friend Rev. Rory Elder, has also passed away.
The bad thing about getting older, my lovely father-in-law used to say, was you got to watch too many of your friends die.
I loved you, Paul. Still do. I'm glad you're free of pain. And I know you're happy. But one thing, buddy: don't try to pull any magic tricks where you are now. I think they know how they all work.
Peace
