#87 My husband talks about Eric

Recently my husband mentioned wanting to contribute to the blog. Here is his take on Eric.


When I met Eric, I had no idea what to expect. I had heard about his sense of humor and I knew he went to Harvard. Mental images ranged from the stuffy, full-of-himself Harvard elite to some sort of absent-minded professor type. Over the years that I knew him, I came to realize that he had all of those traits – endearingly so.

I don’t explicitly remember our first meeting, which is a little troubling at the moment, but I know we clicked very quickly. He’s a tough guy not to like and his quick wit could change your mood in the blink of an eye. Despite being a man who seemed to aspire to pretension, he was man without pretense. He was always Eric – the son, the brother, the uncle, the friend, a sounding board and the only person I could beat at golf.

I have a thousand memories of Eric, but I think the best came from a week spent on a boat in the Caribbean. My wife and I took a trip with Eric and their parents before we had kids. We hired a boat (with a Captain and his girlfriend/cook) to cruise through the Virgin Islands. The trip was incredible – we went scuba diving, snorkeling, deep-sea fishing. We went diving in some of the most beautiful water on Earth, fled in near panic from a toothless nurse shark and drank way too much of the rum Eric won in an island conch shell blowing contest (and shared the seasick hangover that followed). For all the action and adventure, though, some of the quieter times really stand out.

Eric was always the first person up on deck. I would almost always be the 2nd, so I’d make my way up on deck and enjoy the sea and shoot the breeze with Eric. One of my favorite things about Eric is that you can talk to him forever without really ever having to have a topic. We’d talk career, vacation, tech, business, whatever (almost anything but baseball!). We both geeked out to some long discussions of the Isaac Asimov book, “I, Robot”, which I had borrowed from him at the beginning of the trip. Eric was nothing if not forever curious and we both loved all the impossibility that was becoming possible with the rapid-fire developments of technology in the early 2000s, a long-standing topic of discussion between us.

That trip to the Caribbean was fresh in my mind when we got together for Thanksgiving last year. A month prior, I bought a new laptop with a Blu-Ray player and I bought “I, Robot” as my first Blu-Ray movie. I figured I’d bring it to Thanksgiving and maybe watch it with Eric once the festivities had subsided one night. We didn’t get around to it, so it’s still in my house, unwatched. I’ll watch the movie at some point and think about him, but for now it too will sit, unfinished.