Harold Ramis died yesterday, and, well, I’m not usually one to comment on celebrity deaths, especially not in a blog form.
But the thing about Egon was that he lived in Skokie during the years when I was at Northwestern, and he even sometimes came to campus and gave fireside chats.
Now, the caption in that .pdf says that he was at Shepard, and I guess that’s possible, but I seem to remember him visiting the dorm that I lived in. [1]
And I also feel like the two people sitting nearest him in that photo are my freshman year girlfriend my freshman year roommate, so there’s that. I was definitely there! And I am definitely bad at timelines (which at least one of you will point out if, in fact, you were actually there).
I remember him being so funny. But also very genuine, and really nice, and real. I might have even asked him a question. That night decided I had missed out on seeing Stripes (still have, though I might watch it now). He signed an autograph for me on a piece of steno paper, and that was that.
These events are lenses into personal history, aren’t they? I never knew that tonight I’d be crawling through the pub.acns.nwu.edu archives to see if I could find my dorm site, or my own site, or the site of the bandI used to play in. Heck, I got excited just thinking of “pub.acns.nwu.edu” again.[2]
There are traces of us all over the place. There are things to remember, and people to celebrate. Tonight it was Ramis, and a little bit of a professor I knew back then, too, yet another accidental discovery.
P.S. Archives, man. Archives.