November 10, 2014:  So I guess writing about basketball has led to some “deeper stuff”:

With all that I have written lately about my dad, it is notable to me that it took so long for me to bring up memories of my “second father”, my scientific mentor Dr. Walle Nauta, a noted neuroanatomist who ran a laboratory at MIT.  In 1974 I took his course in the Harvard-MIT HST (Health sciences and technology) program, and I fell in love with first the man and then the field.  I invited myself into his lab (and he accepted me there) where I worked for seven years until my graduation in 1981.

In most outward ways Nauta and my father were opposites.  My dad was short and stout, Nauta tall and thin.  My dad had black hair and wore a black coat and hat; Nauta had white hair and wore a long white lab coat.  My dad was bursting with energy all the time.  Nauta purred with a quiet fire, smoking a pipe from which he seemed to be inseparable.  What they had in common was underneath the surface: they both had the highest expectations of themselves and the people they worked with.  Those expectations were contagious, and led to consequences which were both positive and “not-so-positive”.

That last reference is to an example of Nauta’s dry wit.  When lecturing to us about homeostasis, he said “There are actually two types of homeostasis.  There is homeostasis, and there is homeo-not-so-stasis.”  Not everyone appreciated the joke immediately, but the gleam in his eye (shining out through his pipe smoke) made everyone laugh.

My idolization of Nauta was shared with a post-doctoral fellow from Brazil named Juarez Ricardo.  We became inseparable like brothers for two years (could it have been such a short time?), and dubbed ourselves “children of Nauta”, studying the man, his writings and achievements, and putting his psyche under the microscope along with our experimental slides.  No goal seemed nobler than to “be like Nauta” (to borrow a phrase from Michael Jordan and the NBA).

I have more reminiscences of each of these men than I can fit into one blog, so I am going to divide them into three streams: “Nauta”, “Juarez”, and “Juarez & Nauta”.  I am beginning to feel like my Facebook friend Officer Bob Meyerholz, (ret) New Haven Police, who has tapped into a seemingly endless lode of stories from his experience.  He is compiling his into a book.  I’m not sure if I’ll make it that far.

I need to rest a bit.  What was I saying about watching the second half of the Hornets game?