He was the warm center of our group. He had an infectious laugh and was kind. His kindness he'd learned from his father, his laughter was wholly his own. He was friends with everyone. He did not have acquaintances, not the way normal people do, for everyone was a friend to him. He remembered every face he had ever seen. He was not brilliant, was not particularly smart. But he was good, he was that type of good you will remember for the rest of your life, as something, if not to aspire to, then at least to center your soul, that here in this world was a man who was good and kind and to be friends with him was to recover from the world, to share those deliriously beautiful moments of laughter worth its name. I hold still the jaded hope that I will find another friend like him. But I know the truth. Not in this life. The reel of memory, the paucity of frames, how little I have of him. I cannot remember the sound of his laugh though I remember the joy. In our small group of seven people it seemed as if he was best friends with all six. He bound us together, tenoned us tightly. All of us who loved him. Our friend we thought for life. And though we knew our relationships with the other five would fade, it would not with him. Never. There are some people in this world you meet once, befriend, and know they will stay in mind forever. Though you may never see them or talk to them again, they somehow linger as if by their own living evanescence they had carved out some beloved space in your mind, easily recalled and full of all the warm recurring emotion that brings the best memories into mind again and again until they are recapitulated into sheer caricatures of what they once were, but somehow all the more vivid for that, memories of childhood still shining as bright and clear as they ever have and will always. This I know.