I am more sober today than yesterday. Last night Leslee sent me an email informing me that a good friend, Dan, and his wife Stephanie, had both been on TWA Flight 800 that exploded off of Long Island a few days ago. At one point, Friday, I had begun reading the list of passengers in the New York Times, but quit, not wanting to consume the tragedy. And thus find out the news directly from a friend: email brings it home. Somehow I am happy that I find out about it in this way, direct, and not by reading the Times. Dan and I were in grad school together in Boulder where I found him to have an insightful and critical viewpoint which was tempered with a brilliant sense of humor. He understood the ways of the System, and deLighted in tweaking its nose! He was a highly intelligent artist, as was Stephanie, although I did not know her as well as I did Dan. It is like winning the lottery, but in the negative. Impossibly long odds, but it does happen to someone. Talking to Linda, a fellow grad student and friend of mine from those days, it turns out that they were on their first trip to Europe, to visit and explore the gardens of France. Dan had been working as a landscape designer for some years, and I wondered if my frequent exhortations to him that they should visit Europe someday ended up as an influence on this terrible event.