My best friend died last night. He was 84. His body, which had never been much use to him other than carrying him around and allowing him to procreate, finally let him down for good.

He didn’t know he was my best friend. How could he? We never met. The closest we came was in the late ’90s when he gave a talk at the University of Illinois and I somehow got near the front of the line for an autographed copy of “Timequake.” Unfortunately, when I reached the table expecting to see and meet the incomparable Kurt Vonnegut, there was but a stack of books and a cashier. So it goes.

I can’t do justice to the man in this short space, so I’ll say no more, except that in pouring over the obits and the tributes to him this morning on the Web, I cringed at some of the people trying to write as if they knew him or his work, and I thought, “That’s not my friend.” Then I knew I was getting a little weird.

However, Andrew Leonard had a pretty cool piece on Salon.com. What I wouldn’t give to have been able to open a column as he did with this line: “When I was 12 years old I played chess with Kurt Vonnegut on a Thanksgiving Day in New York City.”

Damn.

There also was a poignant line in an otherwise standard Chicago Tribune piece, which said, “To Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness.”

Yep. It’s that simple.

His books are never far from my reach. Whenever my head gets so full of telecom architectural frameworks and software protocols and open interfaces that I want to scream, I reach for KV and remind myself what good reading, good writing, good humor and perspective are all about.

As you’ll see in the news below, there will always be telecommunications in one form or another. There will never be another Kurt Vonnegut. What would we do with two?

E-mail me at tmcelligott@telephonyonline.com.