I didn’t know Alan Holsenbeck as well as I wanted to. He was older than I was, even though I hung out with guys his age, Stuart Lane and Gary Ivey. I thought of him as either “Alan Holsenbeck,” or “Fast Al,” a name one of us came up with because he was supernatural in the Gold Mine and the Boogie Barn, the places we went back then to play foosball and pinball, never as just “Alan.”
I’m here because Alan Holsenbeck has never left my mind, and I have often remembered him over the years. I was talking about him a few days ago and googled him and learned that he had been gone for seventeen years.
We called him “Fast Al” because he was unbeatable. I know that I never beat him at foosball, which I won a tournament playing, and don’t recall ever seeing anyone else win against him. He could play any machine in the arcade all day long if he wanted to, for a quarter.
All of this in some ways is beside the point. These are my too few reminiscences. They are not the reason I remember him. Some people give off a quiet light that seems like the culmination of what, in our best hours, we strive for. In their presence we recognize our common humanity and our ambitions to be gentle and kind. Alan was such a person. I cannot remember him without seeing him, looking sideways at me, smiling.