Rod Gilman

 

This morning Kathy and I learned of the loss of a person very special to us. We are deeply saddened by the loss and the fact that we will not be able to attend his final services. Rod Gilman has been a fixture in our lives for almost forty years and we loved him dearly. That we are traveling will take a bit of the sting away because Rod was the consummate traveler and was the person we always wanted to emulate when we started our globe trotting ways. At some point in every trip we took, we would always talk about how Rod was there before us and that he probably had a black and white slide of what we were looking at.

Rod impacted us in so many ways. Whether it was refining our love for food and finding little, out of the way, ethnic places in Chicago; listening to jazz, especially the old greats on scratchy recordings; running in the Chicago Marathon and Indy 500 Half-Marathon; spending many hours at Denny's Den listening to Greek Music and drinking ouzo, bringing Carol into his life and ours, and most importantly, witnessing the true meaning of friendship. I have never known anyone who embraced people so readily and kept them embraced through thick, thin and time than Rod.

Rod loved to keep lists on yellow pads and he would never cease to amaze us when he showed us how far they went back. Our own list of in how many ways he was special to us and the memories we made together would be of considerable length. The most enduring and important one, however, can be summed up in one word: friend.

Rod we love you and will miss you, but we will never forget you.

 

 

 

 

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