The “Gene in You”

We love you, Gene. You are to me as unambiguously and unassumingly fine a person as Hardy’s description of a character in “The Woodlanders”: “He was a good man, and he done good things.” You’re as close to a living, breathing saint as I’ve in sixty years known—as many of us have ever known. And even better than the saintliness in you, I like the Gene in you. The world is just so much a better place with you in it.

—Steven C. Walker
from Irreantum 3.3 (Autumn 2001): 27