In all the years I have participated in this on-line group, I've only met three of you face-to-face. I know what several of you look like from pictures posted to your web sites or your PBS bio pages. But the rest of you are pretty much a mystery. I never met Adam Fikso, but I would have said the same of him except that sometime at the end of 2010 we began a brief correspondence. Adam had mentioned a snake called massasauga, a small rattlesnake with a wide distribution across central North America. It turned out that Adam and I both had a childhood fascination with snakes. Although there was a twenty year difference in our ages, we read some of the same books as adolescents. At one point he sent me a brief sketch of his life as a young man: I was amazed at how similar my own circumstances had been, at how much we had had in common. There were differences of course, but in many ways we seem to have been cut from similar bolts of fabric. Just as I was beginning to really enjoy these exchanges and look forward to them, they abruptly stopped. There are so many things I would like to have explored with him. We seemed to speak the same language,and there seemed to be so much potential for an entertaining and insightful correspondence in the future. So when I say I'll miss Adam, it's with a lot more feeling than I might have had had I only known him from his PBS postings. Jim McKenney