Peter, we only got to know you well in your last few years at UIC, but during those years you we found a true friend and brother in you. I knew you best as a founder, fierce activist, and ingenious propagandist for our union, ready to speak up and raise hell when management tyranny and stupidity reached a level, as it somehow never failed to do, that demanded nothing less. There’s still plenty to raise hell about back in Chicago, much need of late-night plotting over a bottle of bourbon, and we will keep missing you, in solidarity forever,

Jennifer Ashton Chief Steward, UIC United Faculty

Ah, Peter. I was Looking at America just now. Something’s missing out there. Same place, but different. It’s all still there, the things you wrote about; highways and cityscapes and patches of the great land; stretches and corners and vistas and facts and faces rendered poetic by the genial, sharp edge of your mind. In all of your writing I could hear music where only the written word played – where the word danced, sure and precise; graceful and powerful. I haven’t heard your voice since we were kids, all those long years ago. But, I heard you, when I read you. Thanks for sharing your view, and your brilliance. And, your soul. It was always a great ride. America is out there, still. But, someone is missing.

I wanted to say Rest In Peace, and I certainly hope that you are at peace, but I can’t imagine you resting for very long. Be Restless In Peace, Peter. Be up and about, writing and talking and teaching and riding and laughing and guitaring and singing and loving and sharing and thinking and wondering – In Peace.

Your old friend,

Tom

A Parting Thought

"When we left the tumult and compression of the city for this place, it seemed we were moving from communality to solitude. But we'd had it backwards. Now even the dead commune with us, in dreams, in the wind, in the moon's travel, in fragments of words to be crafted into song, or work, or wine, in the talk of those we work beside or those who listen to us, as we work, while they, too, make the small adjustments, move rhythmically down the rows, lay things out in order, stopping, now and then, to hear the music swell from the old barn, cross the creek, and rise up the hillside to the vineyard." - Peter Bacon Hales