This last weekend (the weekend before Thanksgiving) my bride’s step-grandfather passed away.  While I could share a few funny stories about Herb, I’ll share two: the silliest and most valuable interchanges I had with Herb.

Story 1:

Jessica and I often visited Indiana for holidays and important events like Jessica’s sister’s graduations.  One such event brought me face to face with Herb, who loved computers and electronic communication, where he insisted on showing me this new search engine.  I was not interested because I believe at that point in time I was using Alta Vista or Yahoo! or some such thing.  Herb insisted that I check out this new engine Google.  He loaded up what was probably IE4 or 5.5 and typed in Google.com.  Up popped this primary colored logo with the simplest of layouts: a search field, and a button to search.  Good golly this thing was stupid looking and didn’t give me a homepage with news and other garbage.  I was pretty sure that this Google site was going to be gone before too long.  I was wrong, Herb was right 🙂

Story 2:

Herb was an outspoken Democrat from Southern Illinois.  He and his wife, Jessica’s grandmother, Babe, were very active at the time in the Democratic party in their hometown and the Southern  Illinois region.  I was registered independent in Texas and have generally found myself what would be labeled conservative.  I am, however, not a Republican (or a tea partier).  I found myself somewhat frustrated on one such trip to Indiana where we met and Herb and I had a really good talk.  What we talked about was how parties got rather involved in sides, party lines, and ‘winning’ rather than taking care of people and the problems that the people were facing.  We concluded together that it didn’t matter much which party was on your voter registration, but instead more importantly that the people be enabled to exercise their rights, the problems be resolved in a fruitful way, and that the political system not get bogged down in fighting of various sorts.  It was the first time (out of multiple discussions with various folks) I had had such a great discussion with someone who on the surface didn’t see eye-to-eye with me politically.  It was encouraging.

We’ll miss Herb at family gatherings.  And I won’t forget one of the most important things he ever said to me, “Take care of Jessica, she’s a good girl.”  I’ll be taking care of Jessica, and not just because he told me to.  Good-bye, Herb.