Henry Banister

Henry Banister was a friend, a co-worker and co-conspiritor in a number of shady enterprises, like that 3D printer I still intend to build.  Now I’ll have to write the code for it myself. 

He taught me to make an excellent martini, a skill which every adult should have mastered by my age. 

He taught me by example to never be an early adopter and to keep all my packing materials from Amazon.com (sorry, honey).

More seriously, he never purposely hurt another even verbally, and was appalled by those who could even consider it.

Near the end of his life he had really undergone personal transformation, having shed most of his material possesions and his acquisitive habit.  He had built up a frankly frightening collection of books, CDs, DVDs and Renaissance Fair acoutrements, shed them by necessity and finally embraced the freedom of the freedom from possesions.

My Buddhist advisor tells me this was perhaps his reason for being this cycle, his lesson to learn this incarnation, and I know he was actually happy to have finally learned it.  I saw this coming, but in the words of Heinlein, "Being right too soon is socially unacceptable."  I never said anything to him about it…and I’m glad.  There’s no lesson learned except by personal experience and I am happy to tell you he learned his.

I’m sorry I didn’t have any pictures of Henry with his two cats because quoting Heinlein again, “If you would know a man, observe how he treats a cat.” 

His cats were the oldest cats in Alameda; he wept when they died, and never replaced them.

So, I propose a toast to Henry Banister, a friend to me and mine.  May he in his next incarnation have an easier lesson, and so may we all.