IT NEVER FAILS: When you're in a hurry, you do dumb things.

I was three hours late starting out in the old green Saab from Prescott, Ariz., bound for Charlottesville last week.

Out the front door I raced with the last item--the box of food to eat while driving.

Fire up, check my watch and start up Route 89.

Five minutes into a 2,202-mile trip, I reached for my cell phone.

And I reached. No cell phone.

How could such a carefully planned and scheduled operation get off to such a rocky start?

Make a U-turn and head back.

Run up the stairs. Look where I'd left the danged phone 10 minutes ago. No cell phone.

I find the phone between canned beans and granola bars in the food box--it was in the car all along!

While I did not find the cell phone in house, I did find--hanging from the front-door lock--all the keys in my key case! Aarrgghhh!

(Actually, that is not quite the utterance that sprang forth from my lips.)

Such is life.

There is nothing funny about this story, however. It began on Sept. 11 with the killing of my nephew, Peter Haskell, 51, at his Los Angeles apartment. This has shaken and continues to sadden his entire family, deeply.

I will say nothing more about his death, for many reasons that might be guessed.

This is not the place to describe adequately a man whose depth and creative talents were simply brilliant.

I was quite fond of Peter, and from his early childhood it was apparent that he marched to a different drummer. At no more than 6 years old, he ran up to me with a napkin, on which he had done a pen-and-ink caricature of my dad.

"Hey! Uncle B!" he shouted to me, "Is this what Santa Claus looks like?"

I was dumbfounded. It looked too adult, too professional. Yet I had seen him knock it out in a couple of minutes on the kitchen table.

That was Peter. Always curious. Always exploring. He wasn't the kind of guy to go out and make a million bucks. He got bored too easily for that.