Don T. Resio

Only a Dream Don T. Resio

Don Resio has published many journal articles in oceanography, meteorology, and coastal hazard assessment and has received several national and international awards for his work in this field. He is currently a professor of ocean engineering at the University of North Florida, where he stays busy teaching the next generation of coastal scientists and engineers, while remaining very active in his research. To understand why he is publishing this book of poetry, one has to know that Don had an identical twin brother, Ron, who was an avid artist, painter, and poet. Unfortunately, Ron was one of earliest victims of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. It turned out these brothers were the first identical twins where one twin had AIDS and the other did not. This made them ideal participants in the initial study of AIDS at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and contributed significantly to the determination that AIDS was due to a virus and to the isolation of this virus. In spite of Don's many trips to NIH to donate blood cells and bone marrow, and to participate in many medical experiments, Ron still passed away. Some years later Don awoke during the night, got out of bed, and began to write poetry that came from his dreams, which had always been inseparable from Ron's. In this poetry he found a way for Ron to live on. The closeness they shared spans time and space and has made this book a labor of love.