I’ve decided to publish the eulogy I gave for my father. He’s was a wonderful influence on me, and I miss him dearly:
Growing up with dad was weird in ways I really didn’t realize for a while. I ended up having what turned out to be very strange ideas about the average amount of magic shows other people had seen. It turns out it’s actually not normal to join your dad to wind a town clock on a regular basis. And on those trips to wind the Reisterstown clock on top of the masonic temple, we started a tradition: before the clock, we would get coffee together.
Coffee is a good time to talk. He’d listen to what I was interested in. He was always extremely encouraging, he was someone that understood passion. From high school robotics to high school plays, he always backed me up. One thing I took from him over the years was the importance of craft. That craft was something you took seriously, it might be enjoyable but it wasn’t a joke. The magic talent represented in this room the last two days is a testament to that idea. And coffee was also a time for him to tell stories, one of the things he enjoyed the most.
The morning coffees took a pause when I went off to college. But after college, I moved back to Baltimore, and they resumed. Every Sunday morning we would meet up, usually at the Reister’s Daughter, and just talk. Usually for hours. One of the things I loved most about him was his curiosity. There really wasn’t a topic he wasn’t interested in either hearing about, or talking about. There wasn’t a subject that he didn’t think was worth knowing about.
These are two of the qualities that stand out the most in my mind: an incredible depth of passion and a breadth of curiosity. They are what made him such a wonderful person to be around. I’ll miss him, I’ll miss those coffees, and I’ll miss hearing his stories.