Remember a while ago when I referenced my Describing the Imagination Professor?
“Under the gentle guidance of a universally-beloved 80-year-old British professor, we studied theory of children’s imagination and discovery and examined children’s stories an artwork as we would have a literary classic. He allowed us the freedom to make our final product a creative endeavor,” and then I wrote about the screen play I had wrote this past summer.
This is him reading Calvino to us around the campfire:
This is the two of us at the end of term celebration. 
He asked me to send me my screenplay so that he could read it again at more leisure when he got back to England. I was planning to clean it up and revise it for a film festival that fall, before sending it to him. Then life got nuts, and I put it off for another time. Except that I got word in March he had passed away suddenly.
It didn’t seem real at first, but as the weeks past, I found myself increasingly unsettled. Times in the past that I have left a beloved professor or teacher, I have often been able to get in touch with them for questions or guidance, or returned for a visit or a chat. The fact that Michael is gone still seems like an impossibility. His influence and inspiration permeated so much more of my own than I ever could have imagined, including the trickle-down effect to my students. In making sense of my own grief I wrote a song for him, which I have (roughly) recorded and linked below. The lyrics are linked in the song description on YouTube. In the absence of a better title, I have simply titled it “For Michael.”
Pencil & Uke 