Generation Gap

Uncle Vern died at the end of May in a motorcycle accident while returning from a music festival in Missouri. This trip was in addition to perhaps 750,000 miles of other cycle trips in which he and his wife Eileen visited all lower forty eight states. Devastated by Eileen's death several years ago, partial therapy for him was the purchase of a more powerful motorcycle to hit the road again. Linda, his daughter, said in the eulogy that her dad was the last of the farmer-cowboys.

Vern was an incredible person in many ways, but perhaps singular in one. He was in his mid-eighties and lived to the end T.S. Eliot's notion that old men should be explorers. His youthful spirit will be forever missed.