There's not a whole lot I can do but sit and hope and wait for news, and think about my memories of him. It's important to hold on to the memories, to tell them, write them down, pass them on, because to a large extent we exist in and through other people's memories. But we organize our memories, wrong or right, into a sensible whole, a picture that matches our idea of who we are, and who others are as we have known them. These are the stuff of which history is made. You see, we all are part of history, no matter how insignificant we seem, pieces of a puzzle whose grand picture we won't ever see.
Small history is about remembering, about every detail counting.
And the nice thing about big history is that one person's puzzle pieces can fit into so many corners of the grand design. Bob's pieces can fit a lot of places. He's part of the history of Iowa City, and bound into the history of the University of Iowa's school of music, for over twenty years a player of recorders, krumhorns, cornettos and other medieval instruments for the Collegium Musicum. Because he never managed to get into any pre-med courses, and took music courses instead, Bob never became a psychiatrist as he'd planned to be, but he was a counselor nonetheless, part of the history of many shy,awkward young people who blossomed into confident adults because he listened to them, believed in them, found value in them that others had missed. I hold his small history for him, at least large chunks of it.