Contagion can sometimes be a good fault, a good disease:  The contagion of enthusiasm.  That's the one that leads me to write all of this down about Bob Sheckley where I might not bother to write it about anyone else or even about myself.  Sheckley single-mindedly and sometimes cruelly carried that disease that infected his wild and loving dreams of literary art and those of his readers who shared in his stories a caring and intimacy that few who were physically close to him ever received.

So now we are in Era Three.  The last incorporeal Sheckley era.  We are, after all, still in that contagion or I wouldn't be sending this to Portland and you, whoever you are, would not be sitting and reading or listening to this.  This is the era that will last until the end of time.

I attended Bob's funeral near Rhinebeck.  A small, quiet group of friends and relatives and otherwise dispersed families ringed around his closed coffin.  Fine people (Swanwich and Malzburg and Kwitney and Anya Sheckley got up and said very personal things that I will skip over with due acknowledgment of their appropriateness and the care and candor with which they were conveyed.)