THIS KEEPS HAPPENING TO ME:  You can file this under the category of unsolicited advice.  I bring it up because it keeps happening to me.  If there’s somebody on the older side out there that you know only slightly or perhaps you don’t know at all, but you’ve always wanted to sit down with him or her and talk, try to do it sooner rather than later.  Much sooner if possible.  You never know when they will be gone for good.

I won’t mention any names–but let me give two examples (out of a half dozen so).  A few years ago, I kept telling myself that I needed to drive up to Los Angeles and have coffee with a friendly acquaintance of mine who had lived an interesting life.  LA isn’t that far from here.  It would have been easy.  As a young man, this friendly acquaintance of mine had been a pro-Castro communist.  Somehow by old age he’d become a remarkably thoughtful conservative.  I really liked him and wanted to know just how the transformation had occurred.  On the rare occasions that we had been together at conferences there just hadn’t been time to talk about that sort of thing.  Then suddenly it was too late.

Today something similar happened. For the last fifteen years or so, I’ve been wondering whether I could locate a certain lawyer who had been working at the Department of Justice during the period when Congress was working on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  He had worked with Hubert Humphrey on how to word the Act.  Then he’d been in the General Counsel’s office at the EEOC during the early years and had clashed with the most aggressively leftist attorney there on how to interpret Title VII.  I’ve cited his work many times in the past, and when I do I’ve always wondered if he is still alive and if there was any part of his experience that he would feel comfortable telling me about.  But because his name is somewhat common, I worried it might be hard to find him.

Today, I was citing him again in connection with a lawsuit I’m working on. (If all goes well, I’ll tell you about my new lawsuit soon.  I hope will be a big deal.)  I decided to put a little effort into finding him.  I figured the chance that he was alive 62 years later wasn’t all that great, and I turned out to be right about that.  But here’s the kicker:  He died only a few weeks ago.  If he was of sound mind at any point over the last decade or so, I missed my chance.

Don’t miss yours.

Yes, it goes without saying that the same applies to the older people you do know well.