There was one thing that caught me short.  Bob's son Jason read a short-short story entitled "Beside Still Water."

I had forgotten that this story existed, but as Jason read it, I found that like an old Beatle's song or a nursery rhyme, that I could almost sing along with him.  That's how deeply this story had imprinted in my mind way back when I was a teenager and had never met Bob and had no idea what he looked like, sounded like acted like.  I knew only those stories.  It was a total surprise to me, but I still knew this one.

Not only that, but I had, well, "cribbed" some of the elements of this story for one of the first science fiction stories that I ever wrote.  It was about a man, alone on an asteroid because he had so much trouble dealing with people and civilization that it was easier for him to be alone and he spent all of his money to be rocket-shipped up into the void to avoid humanity.  Mine had none of the resonance or subtlety of Bob's, but there was no doubt as I listened to Jason read that story that it was the one, the very one, that had moved me to try to write my own.