In 1996, Deep Blue beat Kasparov, The Unabomber was arrested, and I was preparing to graduate high school and go on to Texas A&M when I received a phone call at three in the afternoon as my school was letting out. In the school office, my father told me what, at the time, was the worst news I had received in my young life: Jerry Carson had died.
Jerry Carson was my oldest friend. To this day, I have no idea where he and my father met, only that they did and that one of my earliest memories was of Jerry Carson and myself watching some old Western movie on the couch on the fuzzy old TV in 1981. He'd drift in and out of my memories for the next