Michael had a way of including everyone in his table, his conversation, his life. He gave us all a chance of being with him. He truly enjoyed us and we truly enjoyed him. He kept expanding our worlds.
We had the best of times at Angeles and Michael’s wedding, dancing in the mud, with Siobah and Tania...
He went to my first conference when I had just finished graduate school and asked me in front of the audience if I spoke Zapotec, a fundamental question to my so called identity regarding my first paper, there was no way for me to be inauthentic in his presence. I once told Matthew Gutman when he was teasing Michael of having retired, I said “once an anthropologist, forever an anthropologist”. Michael really appreciated that.
When I was making a mess out of my life, he said, “In my experience, the 20’s are a bitch”.
Even during the most difficult times being around him and Angeles made everything a little better for us.
We asked them to be godparents of our first child. They picked us up from the clinic on the craziest day of the swine flu after our son Francisco was born. And we toasted when we arrived. In one of his e-mails from Brazil, he mispelled “comadre” as comrade.
Recently, we were celebrating Lupe’s birthday, and Don, Jane and us were thinking of him and his way of keeping everyone on their toes.
He found something interesting about everyone he met. He took us on some unusual tours of the night life in the city, he took Peter and I along to visit his old friends from his research on the newly urban Oaxaca of the 70’s, and they told us stories about him, as a young PhD student, we enjoyed them so much.
He was so funny, so clever, so generous and so loving. There is so much left unsaid...I will miss him very much.
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