Farewell, Mike

We lost a family friend last weekend.  Mike Clark -- May he rest in peace.

This is from a March day in 2004 at Cherokee Marsh, one of my all-time favorite places in the world.
Mike and Caroline liked it, too.  Mike wanted to go there for his birthday that year.  And we got to go along.

Mike and Caroline were the adults who watched over me when I lived in Madison during my college years and after.  I am still grateful for their friendship, and gentle guidance.  Such kind and interesting people, reading great books, and traveling the world.  And their kids were really interesting people, too!

I met Caroline when I worked at the Cancer Prevention Clinic on the UW campus.  When Dr Love lost interest and moved on to other projects, Caroline told me to go down to the Health Science Library, that they'd give me a job.  They did ...  and every time I needed a job, they hired me in the ILL Dept.  After I got my Masters in Library & Info Studies, they hired me as a professional Librarian.  That's when I got to work with Mike.  He took care of the computers there -- back when Medline was updated with a dozen CD-Roms that had to be installed on a tower.  Mike would load them to a test server, and he wanted me to search on it, try to break it, and figure out if things were working as it should before he made it live.  Although he knew the computer end of it, he wasn't a searcher.   It was the best of both worlds.  I liked working with Mike -- It was a tempo thing.  He was quiet, but content, and a much calmer pace than the usual fray.

Farewell, Mike.