I’ve never been rattled by human death.  I’d probably be a better grief counselor for those who have lost pets, since that has always affected me far more deeply. Even the event of losing my most brilliant engineer – which I’ve written about at some length – didn’t really shake me for a few days.

But I bring up death as a segue to sharing a tale I’ve been meaning to share for many years. It is about the death of a friend when I was 18 years old, and his name was Kurt McFall.

As a thirteen-year old, I moved out with my family to the little town of Moraga, a suburb of San Francisco which was described as a “bedroom community” (which was a polite way of saying a solidly upper-middle class town; not as well-to-do or high-strung as Palo Alto, but close). About fifteen miles northeast was a city called Concord, which was larger, more lower-middle class, and pretty much a place most Moraga kids would have no reason to visit.