I like to google people from my past. I never know what I’ll find.

Once I googled Mr. Tavis, my elementary school principal, a huge man with a booming voice, and discovered that he had sung on Broadway in the late 40s. A month ago I googled Nancy, a producer with whom I had worked extensively at Channel 2 in Oakland in the late 70s. I located her working as a teacher and journalist in Denmark and soon initiated a flurry of emails.

That same week, I googled Kevin, a former marketing manager for Sony and Ampex whom I hadn’t seen for 15 years. I found him living in Beijing, selling broadcast equipment, and about to hop a plane to an industry convention in Las Vegas I was planning to attend. We conspired to meet for lunch.

Last week, I googled David Sigelman ‘68, my Dartmouth roommate. I found his name on websites for his pediatric practice, teaching awards, a community music center, a book group he started, an article he wrote on prescription drugs and the FDA, and an ominous three-day-old link from a newspaper that included the words, “he was working in a clinic in Peru and became ill. I adored David Sigelman…” I followed the link and was horrified to learn that David had died suddenly, less than a week before, during an altruistic health care trip to the remote Andes.

Until just recently, I hadn’t seen David in decades.

He grew up in one of a handful of Jewish families in Watertown, South Dakota (“15,000 Friendly Folks!”), viewed our surroundings at Dartmouth with a sense of awe, and projected a charming, self-effacing sweetness. He approached his studies with determination and worked his butt off, eventually graduating with honors.

I was a suburban New York Bar Mitzvah boy who viewed the Ivy League, a bit arrogantly, with a sense of entitlement. Indeed, I had been groomed for years for Princeton by my cousin Ted, an avid alum. Ultimately Princeton didn’t admit me, but Dartmouth beckoned. I’d coasted through high school with A’s, and I drifted through college with C’s, as the Vietnam War roared by outside.

David and I pledged to different fraternities—Tau Epsilon Phi for him and Foley House for me—but we lived together for two years. Freshman year we lived in South Wigwam Hall, later renamed French. Our sophomore year, we shared a large room in Cutter Hall with a visiting Swedish student named Tomas Bertelman, an accomplished linguist. We made plans to move into a spacious room in Russell Sage for junior year, but I was offered a rare, coveted single room in a suite in Little Hall with another group, so I changed plans. David and I remained friends, but unfortunately we saw each other much less.

Towards the end of our senior year in 1968, my parents offered to send me on a summer trip to Europe. David and Tomas had been planning a road trip across the Continent and graciously let me tag along. David had previously done community work in Mexico, but I had never left the country before, except for a two-day family trip to Quebec when I was ten. My two roommates met in Sweden and drove through Eastern Europe in Tomas’s mother’s red Austin Mini Mark II. They particularly enjoyed visiting Prague during the Czech Summer, a short-lived flourishing of art, freedom of expression, and culture during a thaw in Soviet domination that ended tragically later that summer. I flew to London for a few days, then on to Vienna, where we rendezvoused.

The three of us crammed into the red Mini and burned up the road across southern Europe, staying mostly in small, fleabag hotels. We dallied three weeks in Spain, as Tomas was studying for a Spanish exam at the end of the summer. We gaped at Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, and mellowed at the Alhambra in Granada.

On a beautiful Andalusian road in southern Spain one day, we passed an imposing figure, an officer of the feared Guardia Civil in dark glasses, triangular hat, and black hip boots, standing next to his motorcycle and glaring at traffic.

A few miles later, after pulling over for a picnic lunch, we were startled to hear the motorcycle of the Guardia officer. He stopped across the road to watch the cars, then noticed us, hopped back on his bike, and squirted across traffic. As David and I watched openmouthed, he strode over to Tomas, pulled out a knife, extended his hand, and said a few words. The Swede, who had been peeling an orange with difficulty, handed it over, and the officer demonstrated how to remove the peel in one continuous, spiraling cut.

He soon roared away to intimidate more drivers.

“What did he say to you?” I asked Tomas later.

“He said it’s much easier to cut in one piece if you use a sharp knife."

He described his volunteer trips to Peru as a reaction to the emptiness after his kids were gone. He was planning a third journey to the remote Altiplano region of the Andes, to small, impoverished villages at 11,000 feet and higher, where he worked with other doctors from Bay State Medical Center to provide pediatric care and train health care workers. In addition, he had established a program, Project INCA, to help the villagers build simple greenhouses to combat severe malnutrition in the area.

I told him about my travels and my writing, described seeing Miller at Chartres again, and promised to send the picture book I’d bought for him five years before. Remarkably, we spent the evening catching up on our histories and passions, not reminiscing about college. Later we went to a club in the Mission District to meet his son Ben, recently hired on at Google, the search engine company in Silicon Valley. We hung there for an hour or so, then hugged goodbye. We hoped to see each other more, since he’d be coming out regularly to visit his son.

I wrote to him the next day, noting that we still seemed to know each other well, no doubt from bonding during an ordeal “driving the porcelain bus,” after a near-fatal overdose of vodka and grapefruit juice in the fall of our freshman year. “I was touched by your pointing out that our parents were the ones to whom we could puff out our chests with pride re: our own accomplishments or the accomplishments of our offspring…

“And yet, there we were last night, puffing out our chests and extolling our various kids to each other,” I wrote. “So maybe it’s okay to do that with old friends as well…”

* * *

Ironically, the day David died, I was celebrating life with my wife and children at my mother’s 90th birthday party near Phoenix. It had already stacked up as a momentous and heartbreaking day: my kids had to choose between coming to Arizona for my mom’s party and attending the funeral of their friend—a young man who had just died of leukemia—in the Bay Area. To discover that David had died on the same day was terribly sad.

Preliminary indications suggested his death was caused by a pulmonary edema brought on when David and a companion climbed to 15,000 feet in the Andes. I was shocked and upset at the news and refused to believe it, until I found a memorial page for David and an article from a newspaper in Springfield, Mass.: “Beloved Doctor Dies…”

“He was the rare type of doctor, one that you just do not find today,” wrote one reader to the newspaper. “He had a passion for what he did and he did it well. He was a class act and will be missed by so many children and parents.”

A memorial fund to continue David’s community work locally and globally has been established in his name withthe Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts. In a hall packed to overflowing on the Smith College campus, nearly 1000 friends, neighbors, colleagues, patients, students, and musicians paid tribute to David at a moving memorial service. He was 58, and leaves his wife Pat McDonagh, daughter Katie, and son Ben.

I never know what I’ll find when I google someone from my past. I’m grateful I had the opportunity to reconnect with David, however briefly, that I was able to see him in his prime, to see how the modest South Dakotan had turned out, to tell him a bit about my world. After three decades apart, we had three or four splendid, rewarding hours together. It felt like a bonus at the time.

I thought that we might have more dinners and get to know each other’s families, that our friendship had more of a future. But the Chartres book is still in my bookcase. I thought we had plenty of time.

David checks out election posters on a wall in Spain

Tomas cools off in a fountain at the Alhambra in Granada, Spain

Tomas poses before a mosaic wall, somewhere in Spain

Tomas and David in Venice