Gerry Swetsky writes: After reading all the eulogies to Rob, I can only say I wish I'd been as fortunate as those who knew him personally. I read his posts, even sent him mail a time or two, but that's all.
Sometimes that's all it takes to make the connection.
I'm not trying to "correct" what Gerry is saying here; I'm taking his remark as a point of departure for something that's been on my mind.
The other night I mentioned to my father that one of my network friends had died. Dad's immediate question was whether he was someone I'd met, or "just" someone I'd sent mail to. The fact that I'd managed to meet Rob validated the friendship in my father's eyes.
Now, I happen to like getting together with the people whose articles and mail pique my interest, but there are some (too many, of course) people I've never had a chance of meeting face to face whose loss would cause me more grief than some of the people I have met.
And that's not to diminish a single one of the meetings, either. We all mean different things to each other and ranking the nature of our various connections would be a very tricky business. I can't even do a meaningful partial ordering on the basis of how much time I've spent actually conversing with some of the people I've met, and there's no correlation that I can tell between the amount of correspondence I have with someone and the way the conversation flows in person.
There are even a couple of people I've never reached in email, and probably never followed up to on motss, who are nonetheless very much part of my sense of who's here, and whose absence I would feel in some "disproportionate" degree.
Maybe this sort of thing doesn't happen to everyone. (This is a
question, masquerading as a statement. I invite comments.)
