I first became aware of C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen through Yuri Rubinsky, who held Michael and his Text Encoding Initiative work in the highest esteem. I didn’t know who this guy was, but he was important to Yuri, so he was important to me. Eventually, I met Michael at a conference and so began an early acquaintance that evolved into a professional friendship. Among his many roles, Michael co-chaired the XML Schema Working Group in which I also played a small role. When the whole thing seemed like it might fall apart due to political infighting, Michael and his co-chair David Harrison played their roles with judicious grace and style, thereby saving the world from the dark side. I feel grateful for the time that I spent with Michael, in locations all over the world… on a beach near Nice, driving the streets of Montreal, basking in the California sun, in my living room.

My fondest memory is a dinner with Micheal, Jon Bosak, and my family in suburban Pickering. Michael was a wonderful dinner companion, as many of you know, and he engaged with each and every person at the table with earnest sincerity. Michael took a keen interest in what everyone had to say, and he was delightfully engaging. He flattered me with some of his comments, and my parents later commented that they hadn’t realized that I worked with such intelligent and worldly people. He was a man of endless wit and charm. As dinner was drawing towards an end and the others were thinking about desert, Michael and Jon and I were eying the bar list for a selection of single malt whiskey. If I remember right, Jon had a MacAllan, Michael had a Lagavulin, and I had a Laphroaig. Michael has whiled away his evening hours over a glass (or three) of single malt whiskey many times over the years.

Just a few of the many traits that I admired about the man... Michael was a charmingly light-hearted, thoughtfully kind, articulately eloquent, artistically expressive, bear of a man. in my mind’s eye I can see Michael’s smile, and those silly expressions he would adopt, shaping that beast of a mustache this way or that. His intellectual capacity was enormous, as was the head perched upon his shoulders. What kind of extra neural pathways must he have had up there to be able to think the way he did? He enriched our lives and his absence from our world is a terrible loss.

In memory of Michael, my son and I just raised a glass of Lagavulin.

Cheers, Michael. You’re in your element now.