I've instructed my wife that on my gravestone is to be engraved, "A GENTLEMAN AND A SCHOLAR.....AND A LOVER."

A gentleman: One who, in the words of Oscar Wilde, never hurts anyone else's feelings--unintentionally.

A scholar: I'm an inveterate reader, an inquirer after how the world and human beings work. I read history and philosophy and biographies and autobiographies and novels and cereal boxes (almost anything I lay my hands on) with a desire to correlate it all.

A lover???? Not in the bedroom-athlete sense (only), and CERTAINLY not in the Don Juan sense, but in the sense of daily habitual tenderness and consideration and so forth. After thirty-seven years of marriage I think my Beautiful Wife will indeed put that third description on the stone.

Being a folksong singer and banjo and guitar player are important to me, but those three things on the stone are really who I hope I am.

Dave Oesterreich