As someone who stood slightly apart from the markup language community, being "only a businessman" as I would usually say, I took Michael to be one of my "bookends" for situating and understanding the role and use of open, descriptive, validating, and interchangeable markup. Yuri Rubinsky was one of those bookmarks, and he stood as the "best self" of the business interest in this technology. Michael was the other one. For me, the sonorous voice of Michael embodied its grounding in the humanities, in the expressions of what people feel and understand. Now that Michael has passed, our community has lost our one remaining bookend. Like Yuri, Michael was always warmly generous and patient with my diversions. I recall him looking skyward, gently shaking his head, and smiling when he heard me talking about how I had reused components of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), an initiative he had co-founded, within military applications for NATO. As a businessperson who would appear at the SGML conferences in the early 1990s, I recall how Yuri would do the opening remarks and Michael would do the closing ones. And the two of them gave everything in those events an orientation and momentum, and every year they would inspire me to venture out and do something outrageous. The impetus that Michael gave us, like that provided by Yuri, can go on inspiring us if we, as a community, choose to recall their words, and their examples, and carry their mission forward.