It is a tradition of this column that every year, with tongue in cheek and heart in pocket, we dispense a collection of ersatz awards called The Noble Prizes. They are given to people in this region whose workaday lives, some very public, some verging on anonymity, make the place better if only by being lives well lived in the vast meanings of that idea.

This year there will be only one award, and it will be given posthumously, a reminder not only that life is tentative, but illusory. Some people live so vividly they create the illusion they will be here forever, especially the ones like Thom Hickling, who left everyone he met with the sense that somehow they had always known him.

Thom was several things, none of them conventional and all of them contradictory. He published a newspaper most of us hadn't heard of, called Expression. He was a born-again Christian in a ponytail who could match me pint-for-pint at a favorite bar. He was proof that not all missionary work is done with a dry tongue.

Thom created "His Place," the first television program that blended the formats of talk show and sitcom. It was set in a make-believe diner in which evangelical Christians mixed with visitors from the secular world, be they politicians, journalists, even the occasional agnostic, and managed to share views without shouting. Just as the format unnerved some traditionalists, it drew in people who would consider a religious perspective if the preaching could be avoided. By the time its run ended, the show was syndicated.

Looking back, it seems an idyll -- people on television disagreeing about things as fundamental as religion and politics and leaving the set better friends than they came in.

It is a strange thing, but one of my clearest memories of Thom was the night more than 10 years ago I was a guest on "His Place." The camera shot would break from booth to booth in this fictional diner where real people talked about faith. He had just ordered a salad, a terrible breach of etiquette in a diner that, because it was fictional, was lucky to scrounge up a cup of coffee and a donut. Andrea Hopkins, who played both the role of waitress and a penetrating questioner of guests, was flitting about when Thom noticed the pack of cigarettes in my shirt pocket and began a dare.

"I dare you to light up," he said.

"On Christian TV?" I said.

"That'd be a first here," he said.

We wondered just what would happen. I predicted a clap of thunder and a bolt of lightning. We got it in the form of Andrea, who wheeled around in astonishment.

"Sir, this is a non-smoking diner," she declared. She leaned back and added that, while smoking wouldn't send me to hell, it would make my breath smell like it.

"At least you'd have a light handy," Thom giggled as I shrank into the booth.

That was Thom. He was a tester of limits and a guy who liked to shake things up. He did this in the same spirit a game-player shakes the dice so many times in search of interesting combinations, and he was neither afraid nor ashamed to test the resilience of a belief system he was confident was both correct in its core and applicable to everything from a Sunday morning in a church in suburbia, or a Tuesday evening at a bar in Carnegie. He carried the thing with him.

Thom carried it to Africa in the late months of the year just gone. His daughter, Holly, is a missionary in Zambia. When the call came last week that his car had crashed there, the one thing I could think of was how I'd always intended to reconnect and tell him all his strange mischief and odd humor had meant to me. I suspect a few others had the same feeling.

So the prize this year goes to Thom Hickling. It has no clear category because he fit none by fitting them all. Religion, politics, media, the arts, charity, faith, even pure mischief -- all these were realms he inhabited, bounding from one project to the next with the simple faith that the world could be made, if not right, better, a little closer to being His Place.