Most people would say they are indebted to their parents for giving them life; for that old seed and egg that made them. Me? I’ve always said I’m grateful to Geno Melander. I wasn’t yet born when Geno came into my life, so I can’t really tell you exactly how it happened. My father emigrated from Egypt in 1953 and became a “lousy half-time instructor” at the University of Minnesota. Geno, too, was a lousy half-time instructor at the University of Minnesota. One day, while passing in the hall or sharing an office or escaping a faculty meeting, they must have struck up a conversation that impressed them both because it lasted consistently until 2015 when my father passed away. 62 years. That’s a lot of talking. That’s what they did. And they loved it. My father referred to Geno as his “very best friend” and several people have told me that Geno consider my father his “very best friend”, a phrase I usually attribute to 12 year-old girls. A couple of years into this life-long conversation, Geno introduced my father to the woman who became my mother. My father’s very odd pick-up line was, “Oh, I see you have big eyes, too”. I can’t imagine that old seed and egg would have found one another if it hadn’t been for Geno Melander. And so, I credit him with my very existence. Geno was my father’s Best Man and Jackie was my mother’s Matron of Honor at their four-person courthouse wedding on October 4th 1957. Later on, Geno and his family moved to Pennsylvania. He and my father did the best they could to conduct a long distance love affair in an era when making phone calls across state lines came with a per-minute price tag that prohibited these two men who were raising young families on professors’ salaries from talking as much as they would have liked to. They wrote letters, a few of which I found in my father’s files after he died. I can’t decide if they were serious men who preferred being funny or funny men who preferred being serious. If they had been funny men who preferred being funny they could have given Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner a run for their money back in the days of early television. But if they had, then tens of thousands of college students in Minnesota and Pennsylvania would not have had their lives influenced so positively or profoundly by these two towering, confident, and curious academics. I have only a few vague impressions of the Melanders during my life. A trip to Sandwich, Cape Cod. A night at their home in State College during an Eastern road trip. Geno and Jackie made the long drive from their home to Philadelphia in 2005 to see a film festival screening of my film, Sweet Land. They traveled to Minnesota in 2015, just a few months before my dad died for one last big talk. My point is I probably spent a grand total of 20 hours with Geno in my entire life, yet he is with me always. Especially his wet index finger on my bare belly. It happened during a gathering at my parents house on Minnehaha Parkway. I know I was older than ten, because that’s when we moved into that house. And I was probably younger than 12 because I remember spending that evening in the basement with the younger kids playing board games, eating pizza rolls, and drinking Kool-Aid. I temporarily escaped upstairs, maybe in search of better food or a caramel-colored soda. Geno called me over. He was in a suit and tie, a yellow tie. He was sitting by the fireplace on my parents’ couch that was upholstered in bold red and blue, based on an early American floral pattern. He started to tell me a story and then, in front of the large gathering of professors and wives, he told me to lift up my shirt. I did, because it was Geno. He wet his index finger. Not licked it, but soaked it in his mouth. Then he used it to draw moist, saliva hieroglyphics and figurines on my skin to accompany his story. The face of a man - he had big eyes. A boat. Waves on the ocean. A lawn in need of trimming. A woman cooking. All in saliva. I have no exact recollection of what the story was about. Maybe there was a punchline at the end, making me think it actually might have been a joke Geno was telling me; a joke he’d told to countless others, to any kid would lift up their shirt. But in my memory it remains a kind of magical, illustrated biography; Geno’s interpretation of the events surrounding my parents and the family they made together. And I remember the feeling of those drawings on my belly as though Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was drawing the original images of The Little Prince by pressing his DNA into mine. I’m sure Jackie or one of her daughters can replace my memory with actual facts. But I hope they don’t. I like my memories of Geno. And while I know his family and friends will miss him terribly now that he’s gone, I can’t say that for myself. Not in those terms, at least. Geno is not missed; he is today what he has always been for me: essential and mystical and present.