If Dale Denny were a blogger

My friend Dale Denny died yesterday after a long illness.  He spent the last couple of years in a nursing home, not quite connected to the world.  But if he had been his regular self and had heard about blogging, he would have had one of the funniest, most creative blogs around.

Dale was always writing.  I think that's why he stayed with the graduate school job at UMSL's Writing Lab for so long, and eventually became the director of it.  When he was not helping students find their inner writer, he was sitting at one of the computers snickering and writing short stories about quirky people and their odd lives.

His blog definitely would have focused on people–real and ficticious, or some combination of the two.  Dale had a talent for discovering what was interesting about a person.  And I think flaws were what interested him most.  But he had a real appreciation of all kinds of people.  If he would poke fun at someone, it was always with affection.  

Dale's incredibly fertile mind was always coming up with fun ideas and crazy notions.  It was such a blast to work with him in the writing lab because during slow times he would get whoever was there to collaborate with him on a story, a silly song, or making up an elaborate game. 

Here's a game we made up over the course of about a week, inspired by a summer session of Nan Sweet's Romantic Period Literature class (it's long–and elaborate):  http://www.umsl.edu/~sweet/swetball.htm

If Dale Denny were a blogger, there might have been a lot of silly posts on his blog.  But he probably would have come out with some pretty profound observations as well.  He probably would have posted several entries a day.  He would have given his dedicated following of readers goofy writing assignments to post in the comments. 

He would have made a lot of people laugh.  I'm still laughing, even through the tears.