After my first year teaching at UBC, Diet found out I had taken a class in stage fighting. He instantly developed this mad idea to choreograph a scene that we would play out in the first of our classes in September. I was never fully clear on the details, but I think it involved me being an unruly (older) student, and him setting me straight by punching me out or cracking a board across my head. In exchange, he promised he would come in and disrupt my classes.
We never did it, of course. But for a few years every September he would begin to describe the scheme to someone else, the familiar glint in his smiling eyes, explaining what we were going to do. I'm sorry now he never got the chance to beat me up in front of his students.
Instead, we had many wonderful lunches, or quick coffee runs, where we would talk about the department, sure, but also about his family, his love of cycling, his favourite whiskeys, or whatever else came to mind. I'm grateful for a lot that he has given me. He will be missed.