One of the regular commenters on this site, who we know as “Fred”, passed away. His obituary is at Neo-neocon’s, where his handle was FredHjr. One commenter at Neo-neocon‘s says, “I feel like I lost someone that I knew personally.” What does it mean to know someone personally? Perhaps its true meaning is to “see within”; to gain insight; to look past external appearances and gain a glimpse into the person inside. Fred told us what he felt; what he feared; what he rejoiced in; what he hoped for. And that is more than we can say about so many people who we meet ‘personally’ in our daily lives. So maybe we can, with justification, say that we lost not just a commenter, but a friend.
One novel whose title I can’t remember begins with a scene describing an old woman, who, suddenly reacting to a greeting from behind, turns and momentarily forgets her age. For an instant the observer can see in her fleeting smile the girl inside the aged body; the spontaneity which she allows herself to show in a careless moment. And it raises the question of whether, deep inside of each of us, there isn’t something unchanging under our mutable circumstances. Perhaps the greatest miracle the blogosphere has wrought was in allowing us to meet those who snobbery, reticence, and lack of opportunity would have kept us from knowing. We knew you Fred, but a little and for a while.
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
But when that which is perfect is come,
then that which is in part shall be done away.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face:
now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
Until then.
Update: Neo-neocon embeds a link to Leonard Cohen’s “If it be your will”. The lyrics are on the page. As a child, Cohen bore a peculiar burden. “I was told I was a descendant of Aaron, the high priest,” he said. I had never heard it before, though I knew Suzanne and Hallelujah and regret the gap in my education, but I know it now, as is Your Will.
“And it raises the question of whether, deep inside of each of us, there isn’t something unchanging under our mutable circumstances.”
I’ve always thought so. I often gaze at elderly folks, understanding that they are not seeing themselves as we see them. I’ve even forgotten my own name upon awakening and so I know that there is a kernel of our purest selves under all the business of our development.
He will be missed and in fact already is.
Wow, I’ll thank you for Fred, what a poetic eulogy:
And it raises the question of whether, deep inside of each of us, there isn’t something unchanging under our mutable circumstances.
And the answer is, Of course.
At Fletc they have on one wall a famous set of booking photographs that were taken by the NYPD. They show the deterioration of drug users over time. There are a few sets of them also in binders but the most striking is of a beautiful girl who over about three years turns into a horrible old woman. You can literally see her wither month by month. We were told that they were also displayed where those arrested are processed at The Tombs and that when she was brought in she would point proudly at them and say “That’s me.”
Horrified I asked how could she? The Instructor of the drugs class, who is also a Law Enforcement Officer with about 30 years experience and a Minister, shook his head and said “She doesn’t see, no one sees. When they look in the mirror they only see the beautiful girl in the first photograph.”
It may be a gift that enables us to endure pain or compete against youth that lays us vulnerable to the temptations of life but in a real sense at some point we stop seeing ourselves change. In the addict the change is just more dramatic.
This has little to do with Fred who was a good man and a shrewd observer. He will be missed.
Tom says it better than I:
I cherished his righteous honesty, his inability to mince words, his clear and likely clairvoiant vision.
May God bless and keep him.
One of the nicest compliments I ever received was a couple years ago, when I returned to Pittsburgh after 15 years in The Insanity Experiment Also Known as Los Angeles, I ran into one of my former professors and we got to talking, at the end of which conversation he said, “You know, you haven’t changed a bit.”
I knew what he meant, and at the same time I started to silently tick off in my mind all the ways in which I *had* changed, and all the ways in which I *should* have changed but alas was still stuck. But I knew what he meant, and it was an exceedingly kind thing for him to say.
That anyone at all can hold onto what is good and wrap it in the core of themselves (or is it vice versa? wrapping the core of themselves up in what is good?) and withstand the battering of life day after day, year after year, decade after decade, is to me a wondrous miracle.
“But one thing I do, forgetting that which is behind and straining toward what is ahead …”
Thanks for a great blog, Wretchard. You are an extraordinary person whose cyber-pad is a welcome respite for many. Fred’s voice fit right in, in such good surroundings.
I commented on one of Neo-neocon’s threads last night:
That is one of the good things about blogging. We can develop relationships of sorts with all kinds of people from all walks of life that we never meet. It’s even more decentralized and democratic than talk radio in that respect.
In other words, blogs are like talk radio with a party line. The host throws out a topic and the callers discuss it between themselves.
I guess if anything good can come out of this, it’s that some Belmont Clubbers will discover Neo-neocon and vice versa. For instance, buddy larsen left a comment in the obituary thread. I haven’t seen him there before.
For my part, these are two of my favorite blogs and I read them both regularly and comment when I have something to add. Of course, there are gazillions of good blogs and only so many hours in the day. I do the best I can.
Forgetting your age for a moment. That impish fire of the person that lives inside the body we see. My mother says you are as old as you feel and she doesn’t feel old. I got her a new bicycle for her 81st birthday last month and we rode on the beach.
“Well she used to have a carefree mind of her own
And a delicate look in her eye
These days I’m afraid she’s not even sure
If her name is Veronica” Elvis Costello
I think that we need to make a conscious effort to live because it is too easy to die. People who live to spite others seem to live as long as those who are more lustful of living every day. This opaque illusion is impenetrable in the lives we live for ourselves, how wholly hollow our concerns are when we our taken from the picture.
I turned the big 5-o this year and probably spent more time pondering my own mortality than is healthy the last several years. Last week with MJ and Billy Mays dieing it is a bit upsetting, don’t know.
I remember reading Fred’s comments and always thought that he was a pleasant chap. I wonder how many have come and gone whose passing we would just not know.
Some day I’ll become one with all
we must all heed the call
but I’d stay
an independent observer
my life to call my own
to experience with senses
my view though foggy lenses
and I will collect each day
memories that I intend to keep
too many that I can’t recall
or possibly correlate them all
so if I pass on to God’s throne
what will be the part I own?
does a soul remember?
memories are the only thing you
have to call your own
But in the end,
they are what you give to others
To greener pastures Fred. For the club, you made a pleasant and valuable contribution to our life and you will be missed in death.
Goodby Fred, I expect to someday meet you on the other side. I believe we were able to see a part of your soul, and it was (is) good.
It is nice to be remembered.
rest in peace
“But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God,
and no torment will ever touch them.
In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died,
and their departure was thought to be a disaster,
and their going from us to be their destruction;
but they are at peace.
For though in the sight of others they were punished,
their hope is full of immortality.
Having been disciplined a little, they will receive great good,
because God tested them and found them worthy of himself.”
Wisdom 3: 1-5 [Apocrypha]
Rest in peace, good and faithful servant.
Vaya con Dios.
It was nice to see a face and learn of a place and family and flesh out the history of brother Fred a little bit.
It is interesting that people deride the anonymity of the blogosphere. While obviously it gives occasion to corrosive speech, it also gives freedom to people to expose their hearts maybe more than they would in a more open forum. It’s pleasant when you learn more of a good guy like Fred Hunt that you already know much of who he was. Vaya con Dios, Amigo.
I’ve been a regular here for less than a year, and so did not get to know Fred as well as some others. We are not dead so long as there is one person who remembers us, and blogs like Belmont Club allow us to meet many whom we would not ordinarily come to know. I know that to the day I die I will remember Wretchard’s elegant, even lyrical prose, every time I hear the word “women” I’ll think “Whiskey”, will remember Buddy Larsen’s goofy jokes, Cannoneer’s always right on comments, and many others too numerous to mention. I only hope that when I’m not physically here someone will occasionally remember something I wrote, for we live so long as we are remembered.
Walt Erickson
rickl, one of my favorites, ‘maggie’s farm’, links to neoneocon from time to time –they get off into psychologist-to-psychologist talk and such.
Eulogies, one that always gets me, and i suppose writer Larry McMurtry would be proud to re-dedicate to old Fred, especially more so had he been reading his writing, is from a western film “Broken Trails”. The Robert Duvall character, cowboy Prentiss Ritter, is at a rough & dusty outdoor funeral burying a Chinese woman friend who had had nothing in her short life but bad luck and hard times. Ritter is unprepared to speak but is called upon anyways. He thinks a moment and then quietly says:
“We are all travelers in this world. From the sweet grass to the packing house, birth till death, we travel between the eternities.”
“we travel between the eternities” –that’s the truth, the bare & lonesome truth.
Buddy, thanks for that. I can imagine a Duvall character saying that, and it would sound exactly right.
Fred will be missed.
I will miss Fred’s voice, and his insights. I’m sure I am not alone in that. Thank you, Fred, for your contributions. Thank you Wretchard for writing such a blog that attracts such people as Fred.
I am truly saddened to hear of Fred’s death. The Belmont Club will be poorer without him.
Wow. Sorry to hear about Fred.
“And it raises the question of whether, deep inside of each of us, there isn’t something unchanging under our mutable circumstances.”
Yes, and to thine own self be true.
One of my Great-Aunts turned 95 two weeks ago. She is still there, trapped in that body which today is transported by a wheelchair, supported by her children and a loving caretaker who help her in the bathroom, etc…yet she is still hilarious, asking me how the hell the wife and I have time for sex with our busy schedules…
She cries sometimes when we talk, cries because life is so short and she can’t believe she’s already 95 and in that wheelchair, with so many loved ones long gone…
She’s still young, for cryin’ out loud!!!
She knows who she is.
I always liked reading Fred’s comments and will miss seeing him here. I thought he was an interesting person. I find fascinating the phenomenon of people of our generation – Fred was the same age as I am – who live for years with the requisite and expected leftist mindset and then, either gradually or at a certain definable point, radically change that worldview – and perhaps in the process, apprehending a bit of that “something unchanging under our mutable circumstances.” Because, so many seem not to change at all; they reach middle age with essentially the same outlook and beliefs, all still intact, that they had in high school or college.
It’s interesting to ponder what kinds of things might account for the difference between the two groups. Fred openly and candidly shared with us parts of the narrative of his own journey and I thank him for that.
I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.
He finished his race and, I daresay, in good standing.
I always respected Fred’s post at the Belmont Club. He will indeed be missed.
Is this the Fred with the small “f”, the former seminarian?
I am at a loss for words. If there is company even better than the Belmont Club (and I believe there is), then Fred is in that company now.
I rather imagine he was a fine soldier. We all know that he was a Christian Gentleman.
Catch you a bit later Fred. And would you put in a good word for me? Lord knows I am gonna need it. Thank you kindly, partner.
Fred struck me as an interested man who studied in depth what drew his curiosity and who thought about and lived by what he learned. I respected him for that intellectual fortitude. I enjoyed and learned from his comments; he will be missed. May he rest in peace.
I thought I had nothing nearly in common with Fred, having never been a Marxist, and only briefly enamored (at fourteen) of the ideology of the left. His path and mine were little alike. Yet I found his posts here a particular challenge to my thinking and definitely enriching to my spirit. I always looked forward to reading his point of view and learning how much of this human experience we really have all shared. Such a grounding has no substitute.
God speed Fred.
PJM needs an improved Search feature. It should be easier to pull up Fred’s posts and review them.
mongoose, yep, the same.
Oh, this is terrible. How i will miss him. Though he often misunderstood what i was saying to him about Catholic doctrine, I always was on his side.
One hopes that as the boomers age, they will make some part of his moral transit in their lives.
It was wonderful to hear the foundations of is thought, and to hear beliefs based in deep things and true things, and hear this buttressed by real knowledge and intellectually honest reflection.
Yes, that search feature wold be great.
Not really OT, I saw this this AM, and I thought of people like fred.
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3992
I think that he would approve.
The country has lost a strong and patriotic soul, the kind of person so sorely needed these days. God speed Fred. We miss you.
Fred has escaped! To where we do not yet know, but only from where. Perhaps we should envy him him and mourn for ourselves if we knew more. Fred now knows but cannot tell us till we join him. But do not worry, our turn for escape will also come. Or does that amount to deserting our duties? We should wait patiently, neither reluctant nor eager.
My niece got a part as an extra at a Kennedy Center Ballet. So my sister brought her family & my mother to the Kennedy Center on Saturday night where I met them.
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a ballet before. There were three– twenty minute sets –followed by two — twenty five minute — intermissions.
Numerous women in tights were doing the splits pointed every which way. The action on stage made it easy and natural for for well dressed lean and voluptuous women to neck with their dates. Their elders were just as healthy.
I was struck by the pure well dressed good health of the crowd because my mother at 86 did not have the good sense to wear a long sleeve shirt to cover up the black and blue marks up and down the sticks she has for arms where the doctors had stuck her with needles during a recent operation for a broken wrist.
The place was too cold for her. She had to get up and walk around. I loaded her up with decaf.
She only has a couple more years.
I never trusted Leonard Cohen’s lyrics. They always struck me as too smart by half.
I’m sorry to hear that Fred passed on. Sounds like he went to glory.
I knew a “fred”, not a “Fred”, of which one are you talking ?
Who ever Fred is, Rest in peace
I’ll miss his comments.
It was strange to see his picture in the obituary. I didn’t realize until I saw it that I had matched his name with an identity, but had never matched it to a face or body. His ideas will be alive alot longer than any of our bodies.
Annoy Mouse (#8) (and others):
Long ago from my work in medicine and psychiatry, and from the experience of raising four children, I concluded that each of us deep inside is, as it were, “stuck” at a certain age; not in a negative sense, but that our outlook and attitude — and even our worldview — is characterized (to a large extent) by the way we were at a certain fairly specific age. In my own case it is eight years of age. My wife says she “is” five.
I am very sorry to hear of Fred’s death. I will miss him both here and over at Neo’s.
Jamie Irons
Sorry to log in and read this news this morning. I shed not a single tear for M. Jackson but a few for fred when learning of his passing. I always appreciated his directly to the point comments. He will be missed here at the club and I am sure elsewhere. I am glad to have crossed his path in this ether.
I, too, feel like I knew fred well. I am somewhat ashamed that I never gave him any chance to know me. I’ve been reading the Belmont Club for well over three years now, and I have maybe posted all of three times. I especially enjoyed fred’s commentary, his perspective, and his introspective analysis of anything and everything.
Farewell, Frederick Hunt, wherever you fare. I’ll pray for you and yours. I know you’ll be doing the same for us still here.
As far as farewell songs go, my favorite has to be Into the West. I’d like it played at my funeral.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxdvvMveV4w
Fred was one of my favorites of those who comment here. I’ll miss him. His insights, based obviously on years of research and education were a just joy to read.
I think he would approve of this, also, Mongoose:
Free Our Health Care Now Online Petition
and this:
How health care ‘reforms’ will mess with your coverage–Dr Betsy McCaughey
Sen. Edward Kennedy’s health proposal, the Affordable Health Choices Act, is now being marked up in committee, a first step toward a vote. Critics are mounting a battle against the bill’s public insurance option.
What is a “qualified” health plan?
…Doctors will be paid with “incentives” or hit with penalties to encourage cost-effective care.
One such method is capitation, which means doctors get paid a flat fee per month per patient.
With capitation, the fewer tests and referrals you’re allowed, the more your doctor makes (sec. 2707).
Federales and Illegals are exempt, of course.
Mr. Hunt’s obituary lists a lot of relatives. From my own experience of losing family, it can be a comfort to hear from people whose lives were touched.
There’s a couple of websites mentioned in Fred Hunt’s obituary: a site for private condolence messages, and just a guestbook.
The links are embedded in the obituary.
I too have gotten to know a lot of people I would not otherwise know. Al-Doug, for instance, and many others.
People I consider friends, though I’ve never met them.
My wife is wrong when she says, “Bob, you don’t know any of those folks, they might be murderers.”
Well, they might, I quess, but I doubt Al-Doug, and, say, Buddy Larsen, have a criminal history.
I really do enjoy it, this trading of ideas as we do.
Jamie, you got to get this old truth in your mind and being.
To transcend this mortal coil, you got to actually die away from it.
Horrifying, but true.
How else you gonna get outta here?
Sparagmos
There is some deep meaning in this.
Or, our Lady From Las Angeles, LA, the City of the Angels, who feels the barbarians encroaching, and protests, but doesn’t know what to really do about it.
I’ve gotten to know her too, though I will never meet her.
She is a good lady. I wish her well.
To Fred, a wise man of good heart:
No one leaves you
When you live in their heart and mind
And no one dies
They just move to the other side
When we’re gone
Watch the world simply carry on
We live on laughing and in no pain
We’ll stay and be happy
With those who have loved us today
— Marillion excerpt from Estonia
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XRAelaovxc
Fred is one of the good guys.
He sometimes wrestled with despair and looked down some dark passages, but he never, ever took the black livery. His postings were always animated with a sweet, innocent spirit lacking in duplicity or artifice.
When push came to shove he would invoke his hockey training – shove back if necessary, but never take the cheap shot. That was fred the seminarian, patriot and relic of a more civilized world.
bob/42; nossir, not yet, but there’s always tomorrow.
Konyok/46; “…patriot and relic of a more civilized world” –good capture & well said.
It ain’t murder if he deserved it, is it?
—
Sing her this, al-Bob:
On the blue side of the evenin’
When the darkness takes control
You start lookin’ for a reason
To take your lonesome on down the road
Cause the night is filled with strangers
All you need is one you know
If she ain’t the one your after
Keep on lookin’ on down the road
Though the miles lay long behind you
You have still got miles to go
How’s love ever gonna find you
If it ain’t here it’s down the road
Though the miles lay long behind you
You have still got miles to go
How’s love ever gonna find you
If it ain’t here it’s down the road
Keep on lookin’ on down the road
On the blue side of the evenin’
When the darkness takes control
183. fred:
I firmly believe that if our nation’s citizenry had not been so successfully plied with bullshit from the MSM about our “defeat” in the “illegal Iraq war for oil” our people would be more resolute. And that resolution would have translated into a different calculus by Moscow and Tehran. Both consider us weak and lacking the political will to stand up to them. Our President, I believe, was fatally wounded by the refusal of his government to confront Russia with the truth about their removal/cleanup in Iraq prior to the invasion, and then to spill the beans to our public. The nation would have understood two things better:
1. That we did not lie about the WMD thing.
2. That Russia and other nations had been an integral part of the weapons’ programs and the coverup.
The State Department and the President, so we are told, did not want to risk alienating Russia by publicly embarrassing it. We thought that maybe Russia would help us with Iran.
So, now we are stuck, and we are in a bad place, because of a poor calculation. State and the White House (and also the CIA) misread Russia and Putin very badly. There were so many bad effects that resulted from this it would take a voluminous position paper to expose and explain it all.
We should now do our own HONEST information war against Russia and finally spill the beans as to how evil and doublecrossing they are. The government should apologize to the people for withholding the truth about Operation Sarindar. We should expose it all and ram it up the Russians arses as far up as it will go.
Aug 10, 2008 – 7:15 pm
fred had much to say about the Russo-Georgian War.
18. fred:
Most people I know who voted for Oobonga and were against prosecuting this war from pretty much not long after 9/11 are generally not informed about the nature of this enemy and how vulnerable our entire civilization is. They get their news and perspective from the MSM. They are generally isolationists and pacifists. They think if we withdraw from the Middle East and let the wolves devour Israel that dar al Islam will leave us alone. Overwhelmingly, they think our two fronts in Iraq and Afghanistan are a waste of blood and treasure. They are GREEDY for those funds to be here at home funding goodies from da guvmint.
I don’t think Oobonga would retaliate if we were hit hard by Islamic terrorists, and he is going to completely avoid confronting China and Russia. Anyone who thinks that Joe Biden’s description of Oobonga as having “a spine of steel” has done zero homework about the man’s background and thinking.
But I don’t think this is a permanent state of being in our country, because the nation is deeply polarized over this and other issues. There are two opposing camps with totally opposite worldviews and I don’t see either side giving in. So, in order for the nation and our civilization to survive, well, you know what I’m about to write next…
Nov 15, 2008 – 9:18 pm
Long ago from my work in medicine and psychiatry, and from the experience of raising four children, I concluded that each of us deep inside is, as it were, “stuck” at a certain age; not in a negative sense, but that our outlook and attitude — and even our worldview — is characterized (to a large extent) by the way we were at a certain fairly specific age.
Jamie -
Glad you mentioned this. We got into a discussion last week at work (started with Michael Jackson, moved to topic of Mark Sanford) about whether anyone really radically changes (as in the 180), or whether what appears to be radical change is just something heretofore latent coming to the surface.
When you talk about people becoming “stuck” at a certain age, have you found “stuckness” to be universal, or just the great majority with exceptions of change at either end of the bell curve (people who have previously led genuinely good lives going shockingly bad, and vice versa)?
Semi-related is an article from a recent Atlantic Monthly called “What Makes Us Happy?” by Joshua Wolf Shenk. (Sorry, just worked 14-hour day and too lazy to embed the link. But the article is easily found on the mag’s website.)
The article takes an in-depth look at a seven-decade longitudinal study of Harvard men (including JFK before all that) and how they changed, or didn’t, over the course of their lives. I think the main lesson I drew from the piece was that real life is messy, and that rather makes art, when your subject is people, at any rate, difficult. A lot of these guys in the study didn’t have just one “character arc” (as you would give a character in fiction or drama), but several. How the heck is an artist supposed to capture that? Compared to the longitudinal study or the seven-decade real live life, even an epic like “War and Peace” comes across as a snapshot, it seems.
BTW, my oldest sister once declared to me (and proudly) that she vividly remembers coming to the firm conclusion, at age 6, that there was no God. She has not changed her mind since. I was kind of the opposite. For as far back as I can remember, I have always believed, though I did go through a questioning/investigative phase in my 20s that necessitated a leap into the apologetics pond. And then there’s CS Lewis, who writes about being “dragged, kicking and screaming,” to belief at age 29.
Russia is running “large-scale war games” right on Georgia’s borders, land and sea, as we speak. These games are scheduled to end on the day Obama shows up in Moscow to treat with Putin and Medvedyev over the two nations’ ICBM and nuclear weapons forces.
Note that O will be leaving an America fully embroiled in a full-time bet-the-farm high-stakes for-the-future full-volume all-parties-on-deck debate over pending legislation on climate-change, health-care, unemployment, housing, the Dollar and the economy –and thus unlikely to be paying much attention to the technicalities of whatever Russian spider web has been long and artfully prepared for us to get (at best) our all-important peacekeeping nuclear defense messed up in.
Why do i have that disneyland thrill-ride sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach?
Apologies –shouldn’t've allowed self rant on fred’s thread –sorry, fred. but better than almost anyone, you’ll understand, i know –
52. buddy larsen
Yes, I’m quite sure he would. And he’s probably rooting you on.
Our best tribute to him is to keep on doing what we’ve been doing. That’s what attracted him here in the first place.
Thot so:
“psychiatry”
What was that comment about not getting into medical school, Jamie, if I may be so rude?
Did you practice with a printout from one of those diploma mills?
“ climate-change, health-care, unemployment, housing, the Dollar and the economy”
Is that all?
Not to worry, no one has to read that stuff.
Cohen a descendant of Aaron? Of course! Every Jew is a descendant of Aaron, Moses, Abraham, etc etc etc And we were all slaves at least once.
A Leonard Cohen story. I once dated a Montrealer. There is a modest sized Jewish community in Montreal. At the time I flew into Montreal and dated this woman the Jewish community of a certain taste tended to hang out at a handful of bars. Leonard Cohen, being a descendant of Aaron, also hung out at one or more of these bars on occasion.
One night my woman friend was leaving one of said bars. Leonard Cohen walked by. Groping for a pickup line to use on my friend Cohen came up with “Have we ever slept together?”
She answered “I don’t remember.”
Leonard Cohen is also a descendant of slaves.
nyd/56; …and she is how you got free. Moses gets the credit, but somewhere behind him, hands on hips, was her 150 generations-removed forebearess, firing at will!
When I grow up, I want to be more like Fred. To have his patience and calmness, to be able to marshall facts and quotations, and then to explain a point of view simply to those less knowledgeable without using knowledge as a bludgeon or a nuclear bomb.
I first became aware of him some years ago on a site called “FuckFrance.com” where he actually fit in pretty well while never descending into ranting hate-filled hysteria. He hasn’t been posting as much lately here (or maybe he found a new place to talk to), but I always slowed down the scroll to read his thoughts carefully when he did post.
It was always comforting to me that someone of Fred’s caliber agreed with me on pretty much everything. He would have been a good warrior in whatever we end up doing as a result of Obama’s depredations, so God must have other more important plans for him now.
To you, Fred. Fuck France!
Buddy Larson #51, 52;
Agree with you sir. I think Fred is rooting for you too!
Fred may have left us physically but he, in my eyes, earned peace in a better place and lives well in the presence of The Most High. Fred’s cogent posts on this site enhanced my thinking.
I shall miss him.
Salaam Fred!