There are people in your life that are pivotal to how you perceive the world, even if you don't know their full story, even if it was a fragment of your existence.
Desmond O'Grady was one of those people for me. I met him when I was about six years old. I had no idea how old he was beyond "adult" and didn't learn until last year when he died that he was an internationally known poet. I knew he had some measure of fame from how my family visited him in Boston when he was doing a reading, but I saw my Desmond with little understanding of the bigger picture.
So while his bios and tributes talk about what schools he taught at, the places he'd been and who he met, I'm going to talk about the adult who didn't care about age, who wasn't perfect, had some bizarre quirks, and created strong communities of fascinating people.
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