His name was John Davis, he was my neighbor, and he was a peculiar person. Don’t get me wrong. I liked him but even his wife said John was an “acquired taste.” I sometimes think that, had he been born thirty or forty years later, he would have been correctly diagnosed as having Asperger’s Syndrome or some other condition associated with the higher functioning end of the Autism spectrum.

He was a gifted man, to be sure, a tool designer and metallurgist who worked for a big corporation, very smart and very detail oriented. He loved machines and discovering how they worked. He invited me, one time, to accompany him to hydroplane races on the Ohio River and he spent the day down on the dock talking to the mechanics and the drivers about the boats, their design, the engines, and any other tech…