Donald Booth and his daughter, Amanda, left their house in the Milwaukee suburb of Brookfield at 7:15 Monday morning.

His wife of 23 years, Dawn, kissed him goodbye, a routine kiss, and said, "Have a good time."

Booth and Amanda drove to the train station, parked, then boarded the 8 a.m. Amtrak for the hour and 32 minute ride to Chicago. This was to be a special trip.

Booth had always been concerned about the education of his three children: Nate, who is 19, Eric, who is 12, and his only daughter, Amanda.

Now, at 16, his daughter was ready to apply to college, and to help her determine her interests and abilities, he had arranged for her to take a series of psychological tests at the Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation on Erie Street.

He had even taken the day off to accompany her-he was a distribution center manager for Briggs & Stratton Corp. in Milwaukee-though he hadn't been able to resist bringing a briefcase full of paperwork.

At 10 a.m., Booth dropped his daughter off at the testing center. He'd be back in a while, he promised, to take her to lunch. No one in his family ever saw him alive again.

There are many things in the big, bad city that might kill a man. Knives, guns, cars, all manner of familiar terrors. No one would dream the weapon would be ice.

Ice, after all, is only water. Ice is just proof of winter, like snow and road salt. Chunks of ice don't fall from the sky.

There's probably no way to know for sure exactly how Donald Booth spent the last two hours of his life, though he apparently did a little work then decided to take a walk.

He must have gone unnoticed strolling the streets of downtown Chicago. He looked like so many other men, 48 years old and bespectacled, 5 feet 7 inches, 145 pounds, touches of gray in his dark hair.

At 11:45 a.m., he passed Neiman Marcus on North Michigan Avenue, one of hundreds, thousands of people who walk by the building every hour. But by some fluke of fate he was the one walking by when a block of ice-"the size of a microwave (oven)," one police officer said-slipped from a 45-foot ledge and hurtled toward the ground. It knocked him in the head. He was dead on arrival at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

A five-minute walk away, Amanda Booth was waiting for her father to come take her to lunch. Lunch in the big city. Just the two of them. She waited. And waited. Lunchtime came and went.

The afternoon testing session began. A concerned employee at the center phoned the police and the hospital.

The hospital chaplain told Amanda Booth about her father's death.

Dawn Booth was at her job as an office assistant when she learned that her husband-a man she had known since they were both young employees for Motorola in the Chicago area-was dead.

"I couldn't believe it," Mrs. Booth said Tuesday. "I thought I was watching a movie."

One of the remarkable things about death is how many of the survivors manage to display grace in grief. Dawn Booth is one.

"He was very much of a family man," she said. "Education was very important to him. That's why this trip meant a lot to him. He worked very hard at his job, but he was always home every night for dinner. On the weekends he was there for us. He was very involved in the church. He liked to water ski, downhill ski."

She paused.

"He was your everyday kind of guy who gets looked over. He never did anything outstanding, but he was just a pillar of strength all the time."

It's impossible not to play the game of "what if?" when thinking about the way Booth died. What if he'd walked a little slower? Or faster? Or stepped aside to let someone pass? What if he'd come to town tomorrow, or yesterday?

And then there's the big `what if'. The `what if' that everyone who walks past tall buildings in snowy winters asks, the `what if' that makes the death of this stranger so stunning and so personal to so many people: What if it had been me?

On Monday night, one of the local TV stations repeatedly trumpeted the news of Booth's death this way: "Ice falls from a building and kills a man! Who's liable?"

The search for liability is part of the search to explain the inexplicable. Looking for someone to blame is what we do when we're trying to convince ourselves that randomness can be tamed, risks avoided, nature conquered, fate outfoxed.

By Tuesday afternoon, two plastic orange cones, three sawhorses and two hand-lettered signs were the only reminders outside Neiman Marcus that an ordinary thing called ice had brought a man to an extraordinary death.

"Caution," said the signs, "Falling Ice." High above, snow still roosted on the ledges. Only a few passersby looked up or stepped out of the way.

Before long, Chicago's temperatures will rise. The ice will vanish. Winter will pass, and so will its treachery.

But for a little while at least, some of us will hang on to the memory of a 48-year-old man who took time off work to bring his daughter to the city on a cold day warm enough to melt ice.

Of a 16-year-old girl who waited in vain for a lunch date with her father.

Of a wife who said, "He was your everyday kind of guy who gets looked over. He never did anything outstanding, but he was just a pillar of strength all the time."