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Paul and I have been friends for almost 25 years. I don’t remember our first meeting when he came to Bryn Mawr in ‘86, but I remember one of his first quirky tech questions. I was working at the computer center, which was almost unimaginably different than it is today.  There were only two full-time staff to support faculty computing at the College, there was no connection to the Internet, and it was the first year most people on campus had ever used email. Most tech questions were on the order of how to do footnotes in a word processing document, or how to use the stats package to do regressions. And Paul? Paul wanted to know how he could change his process name (nickname) on the VAX:

$ show users

Username            Process Name               Terminal
ann                      Lt. Uhura                 tty04
pgrobste            Biology = Life                 tty10

And then, years before instant messaging was going to hit popular culture, he wanted to know how to “talk” to other users on the VAX:

$ send pgrobste “see? it’s easy!”

Paul loved to play with computers, and so did I. He called it “fiddling,” unstructured exploration of what things could do, and we enjoyed showing off fun toys to each other in a sort of playful competition. We were still doing this in 1993 when I was at grad school at Penn, and after much discussion, we struck a deal that resulted in what you know as Serendip.

Serendip has been both a product and a source of our friendship in a loopy sort of way for the last 17 years. As an example, Paul was the first person I met at Bryn Mawr who thought and talked extensively about the “two culture” divide. Paul and I both had two-culture brains equally at home in the humanities and the sciences, and over the years, we had many conversations about boundaries, dichotomies, processes and methodologies of information processing. Serendip is intentionally a place of open-ended inquiry where interdisciplinarity is the norm. Calling Tim Burke: come play in Serendip’s habitat, created for like-minded people.

Paul loved games and liked to say that play was serious business, and Serendip’s essence, our habitat, is a playground. I enjoyed co-creating some of the games in the playground, and have enjoyed the many games Laura C. co-created with Paul there too. He would say, “that’s cute,” or “that’s very cute!” if he were pleased with something. If it were really over the top, he would say, “that’s a real gas!” Besides the playground, Paul played with all kinds of technology. Many of us heard about the greatest app (of the week) for the iPhone that he had found, and he followed the scuttlebutt on what Apple was likely to announce next. We were still playing with new technology (iPad apps) while waiting in doctor’s waiting rooms this year.

Playing with automotive tech, he loved driving “stick” in what we called “Paul’s flashy red car;” he loved the GPS; and he was gleeful about hooking up his iPhone to it. And he was one of the first to drive the Prius, an electric/gas hybrid car,  that I bought in 2003 (me, white knuckled in the passenger seat!).

I could always count on Paul finding and enjoying the new, new thing, so long as it were “generative.” He didn’t love novelty for its own sake, but for where it could take you.  I guess you could say the same was true of his relationships with people –he looked for ongoing generative results from relationships. This expectation could make it difficult to be his friend, as has been noted by others here. Arguing, for example, was not to be taken personally, but a means of creative destruction opening a path to something new (or not). Alice’s Breaking Project  intrigued him for many of these reasons.

One thing I can say for sure is that Paul loved kids, his own, mine and others, and he found them endlessly “generative” and fun.  My family enjoyed 300+ dinners with him, and over these years, we played a lot of games and read some favorite books. One of his favorite books (and our’s) is Dr. Seuss’s  McElligot's Pool:

"Young man," laughed the farmer, 
"You're sort of a fool! 
 You'll never catch fish 
 In McElligot's Pool!"

All sorts of imaginative possibilities are generated (we like the “cat fish” and the “cow fish,” of course), even in the face of adult skepticism.  Thematically, it’s similar to a favorite song from Paul, Suzy and the Alligator. He valued and sought out the wide-open possibilities of imagination and life, and intellectual and personal boxes were eschewed without regard for the consequences. He was definitely in the camp with the kids!

People have asked me frequently, “what will become of Serendip now?” You will find Paul’s influence all over Serendip, as I do, but Paul and I shared the belief that Serendip has been its own individual entity since Serendip was born.  Look around Serendip – you will also find plenty of things that Paul didn’t care about or even disagreed with. It’s part of letting Serendip be Serendip.

Its wellspring will always tap those imaginative possibilities of McElligot's Pool and Suzy and the Alligator. There is a very good reason why it is named “Serendip.” Serendip will evolve in unpredictable ways, as we all do.

Serendip is a gathering place for people who suspect that life's instructions are always ambiguous and incomplete. Originating in interactions among neurobiologists, computer scientists, business people, and educators, Serendip is both an expanding forum and a continually developing set of resources to explore and support intellectual and social change in education, in social organization... and in how one makes sense of life.  (Paul Grobstein, 1996)