Damn.  I thought he'd live to be 90.  Or like a modern Enoch just disappear fully alive into the sky. I've never met anyone with a greater appetite for life or a greater capacity for milking every moment. He had aches and pains, and he would say, "It's hell to get old, but it beats the boys in the back yard."  Every day was a great day to be alive. Every meal a banquet.  He ate those meals in God's restaurant with his Queen, and he kissed the ground on which she walked.  He laughed easily, blew his stack easily, wept easily.  He had music in every room of the house - in the john, on the porch, in the "bus stop" in the yard, and even in the garage, where he once had his shop.  The music he fell in love with as a boy warmed his heart until the day he died.  He didn't just swim, he luxuriated in the buoyancy of his own R-32 body and his total ease in the water.  Maybe because he lived his whole life in the same house, he remained wonderfully connected with the whole of his life and all his memories and his boyhood.  He re-lived all of it every Christmas, and he celebrated the holiday with the enthusiasm of a little child.  His on-line resurrection of The Palmerton Press was his last great enterprise.  The man who relished not working worked his ass off at it.  It was often as cluttered, chaotic, and idiosyncratic as its editor-in-chief.  You had to marvel.  It was Bob.

Lovingly,
his friend and son-in-law
Fritz

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