I met Sherman on my first day of college, Fall Quarter, 1963. We were in Humanities 101, an introduction to Literature taught by Eric LaGuardia, son of the famous New York Governor. I was missing my Hawaiian high school friends as I looked around the class. And there he was, a serious looking, Chinese American, the only non-White face in the room. I introduced myself and we quickly hit it off by exchanging titles of plays and novels we had read recently. We soon became fast friends and bridge partners among others in the student union, a partnership in which we psyched out an unorthodox bidding procedure, one that usually got us into doubled and sometimes redoubled contracts we won. We were literature classmates of course and competitors at pool, where Sherman always won. He had great hand to eye coordination and a fine sense of angles on the table. An accomplished tennis player, his speed and finesse on the court were impressive. He was a good athlete, although he never learned to drive. I think once during a lesson he somehow crashed at low speed into a car full of nuns. Or maybe I dreamed that.

In college, philosophy and English literature were Sherman’s main areas of study, when he wasn’t working at Moon Temple or successfully courting a blonde, blues-loving Russian history major.  I commuted from Richmond Beach but Sherman had an apartment in the University District, which became a social place for cooking, writing – papers on literature for me, often one-act, vaguely irreligious plays for Sherman – and playing Jeopardy when we weren’t discussing Milton’s great argument justifying the ways of God to man or arguing the merits of literature over history. Having an apartment of course also simplified courting.

One day I claimed the best moments of classical music were captured in the popular music of Mantovani and others. Sherman looked pained and then led me to a campus studio where he played out Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata on the piano, an instrument I didn’t know Sherman could play so well. That was doubly revelatory. From then on I began really listening to vinyl of the great composers, from Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to the Russian romantics. One afternoon I went to the family house on Beacon Hill and we listened to Beethoven’s 7^th, 8^th, and 9^th symphonies in sequence while sipping scotch. That was the most intense musical evening I had ever experienced. It definitively rearranged the musical furniture of my brain and enhanced Sherman’s already well-informed one. When the 9^th symphony’s chorale ended we just sat in the darkness for half an hour or so, awed, and then, very hungry for some reason, hurried to the kitchen and cooked up a pound or two of ground beef, keeping it rare and wolfing it down. Who knew great music could be so stimulating.

When Sherman went into the army I was in graduate school at the University of Washington, simply moving from undergraduate status between 1966 and 1967. I sent him books as part of our fairly regular correspondence. In one package I included Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward and First Circle –fine novels just translated at the time into English. Sherman wrote back saying they so absorbed him that he stayed up all night to finish them, not sure he wouldn’t be blown up the next day. That’s the power of great literature for some of us, something we need even more than food, although there is nothing wrong with food. After his stint in Vietnam, Sherman returned to Seattle to finish his undergraduate studies and perhaps go on to graduate school. The summer of 1970 was a time when Barbara and I, whom I married in June 1969, were reading ourselves for a move to Massachusetts. Sherman would have been best man had he not been busy staying alive in Vietnam. I had a teaching job awaiting me at Smith College but with weeks of summer in Seattle still ahead. Sherman gave us tennis lessons, which were ingenious but not always successful. Neither I nor Barbara were meant to be good on the court, however much we tried. Barbara liked staying in the shade and attacking the ball from there. But the lessons were fun and continued in Northampton when Sherman came out with Julie to visit Wally and Winnie in Amherst, and in whose house, which bordered a field of dairy cows, they married. Eventually they drove back to Seattle in Julie’s Mustang.

We visited Sherman and Julie a number of times in the 1970s and early 80’s. We admired their handsome children, Rosten and Megan. And not just because Sherman and Julie had honored me years before by naming me Rosten’s godfather. We also admired the craftsman bungalow Sherman and Julie expanded, in which over good food, a late harvest riesling, and much talk, with Ella singing low in the background, we spent several happy evenings. Then we lost touch somewhat when Barbara began an administrative career in higher education. She moved around in the mid-eighties to early nineties from New York to Ohio and then to Sweet Briar, Virginia, where Sherman and Julie came one summer for a tennis camp. Somewhere along the way after that they divorced and Sherman moved permanently to Denver, to where his work with Bell West had often taken him. He was an innovative manager, urging his computer-savvy, programming group to hurry up and fail so they could find the right solution before funding ran out.

When Sherman retired we visited him in Denver in the early 2000s and then lost touch again for a few years. After resuming regular interaction, courtesy of skype, I found Sherman always interested at a high level in the structure and order of almost everything, from cosmological math and quantum physics, to time and parallel universes, artificial intelligence, gene splicing, the bio-chemistry of memory, the new science of cause and effect, European novels, poetry—he was writing for his grand daughters, doting poppa that he was—art and perception, music, and even playing the violin with different lengths of bow. He loved being intellectually and artistically alive. He laughed easily over whatever struck him as unreflective or simply ludicrous. Deeply he embodied Plato’s and Keats’ fundamental insight. Beauty and truth matter; beauty is truth and truth, beauty. And maybe that is all we need to know on earth.

He recommended books I had not seen on many subjects – and I have thousands of books– again across the spectrum of the liberal arts and sciences. We laughed over how little we really understood about Reality when we were in high school and college and about the many truly gifted, really smart people there were now. One couldn’t possibly read them all. We also enjoyed Korean movies Sherman recommended.  And Sherman had become a co-owner of Brody, his first dog, which led to reflections on the sentience of non-human creatures. We wondered over the political strife and poisonous craziness of our time, over the increasingly devastating effects of global warming, and the more immediate business of getting on with our lives when even some apparently sane neighbors were packing side arms. There was never any lack of subjects in our skype conversations. We even wondered over conversation itself, how it is that we manage to communicate sometimes with each other. We hoped that Americans who seem hopelessly divided might eventually find a common good, might come out of their bubbles and siloes. That was Sherman. He never lived in a bubble. He was intensely curious about how to live extensively in his time and even in a near future. How does one live in one’s eighties?

Should he walk among us again, especially with his hearing aids, he would be amazed all over again at the semi-empty noise most of us make most of the time in our casual interactions. Could we really believe what we were saying? How did we know? That too was Sherman. I would really, really love to have him walk and talk among us again and this time maybe see him master the art of baking cakes at high altitude, which he was serious about shortly before he died. We could resume our morning talks and our morning laughter, talk and laughter that Barbara also misses dearly, which she could always hear from several rooms away.

– John Hill