Drawing lessons

We are, none of us, old. Not nearly as old as our parents when they were this old.

Parents shouldn't have to write their children's obituaries. — John Bingle

Forget regret, or life is yours to miss. — Jonathan Larson

Take care of yourself. Take … care … of yourself. People are counting on you.

Think how you've made someone else's life better. Appreciate that.

Greet people with a firm handshake — accept a firm handshake in return — and look them in the eye. — Richard Taniguchi

Grieve loss, of course. Of course. Plumb the fathoms of unfathomable sorrow — tethered, God help us, by someone who can draw you back up — for the loss of a child. I couldn't or wouldn't be so easily rescued at the loss of my own children; I can only imagine, but choose not to.

Grieve for young children who lose their parents, and lose the worlds built for them, and instructions for worlds yet unbuilt.

John and Greg visit a sick friend.

Soften your hearts and let the tears come for those who have come upon death, or whose loved ones have known horrible death. Comfort them as you will. Help them ease the image from their eyes, help them shake the real but unreasonable guilt that they could have averted death, as my mom found my dad, and as my sister found our mom, circumstance sparing me.

Grieve, of course. Then, laugh.

Laughter bubbled out of the chapel at the Starbuck-Lind mortuary in my hometown, the laughter of the heavy hearted, saying goodbye to our friend Greg Cox last weekend. I'm afraid I may have laughed too soon and loudly, intruding on Greg's family's need for space and peace and dignity, and I feel bad for that. But I couldn't help it, just as I couldn't help laughing after losing my parents. As vast and dark as their absence, their presence outshines.

People packed the chapel and the wings, people whom Greg touched, through many years (though we mourn it was not more). People came to honor him and his family, of course, but also to share what Greg brought to each of us. Many, many more, it was clear, were thinking of Greg from afar. We were there because of him; we were together again because of him; in ways many and various, we were going about our lives because of something Greg might have done, said, inspired.

Ageless Mr. Taniguchi, our biology teacher, shook our hands the way he had taught us, with knuckle-knocking firmness, and celebrated Greg and us. Greg's death shook him deeply, it was clear, but pride in Greg and the students he taught so long ago restored him, and laughter bubbled out with ours.

An inauspicious start: Greg's second from right in the middle row, I'm third
from right in the back row. The gentleman holding the sign, Bill Heath, spoke
heartfelt memories at Greg's memorial. Bill is a dentist in Vandenberg Village.

Some of us from elementary school through high school — some of us who had lost touch — were much like players in a stage production, having performed our act without knowing how the play ends. So when classmates and longtime friends from Stanford shared their memories, we learned the rest of the story.

Greg's role was consistent: Polite, gracious, with a gremlin's sense of disarming, sometimes disquieting, humor. Smart, yes, but hardworking, and somehow able to break off great chunks of achievement. Greg made me better by being able to hang around him, riding his coattails. Mr. Taniguchi reminded me math and science were not my strengths, but I tilted at windmills just the same. I give Greg credit for making me run to catch up.

His green Mercury Cougar with the velveteen upholstered seats and the opera windows in the back, we learn, conveyed him from our lives to the next.

Stanford friends reminded us of Greg's keen attention to others in conversation, and his ability to draw you out with thoughtful questions. Stanford friends also told what we couldn't know: His ease with talking and playing with their children, the same keen attention to what they had to say. 

At the reception, our friend John Bingle had the brave idea to seek more stories from the Stanford crowd, and I joined to listen. After, friends from long ago, friends brought in by the memory of Greg, spent the evening celebrating who we have become.

My sister, John and I spent the remainder of the weekend as tourists in our hometown, walking the beach at Surf, talking loudly over the unrelenting waves, then strolling La Purísima's mission grounds and up to the cross on the hill. The valley lay clear and crisp and gray-green on a mid-December morning.

Of my last six trips home, three have been to say final goodbyes, and at least one to help in the aftermath of a goodbye. Lompoc's grip on me is dwindling to gossamer, stretching thin.

Dawdling home, I dipped myself in the chill waters of Avila Beach, joining a group that swims every Sunday morning. We broke through the waves, then swam a mile arc out past the Avila Beach pier before trying our luck escaping heavy breakers to flop back onto shore. I had proven an amateur.

It was salve for a weekend strange and wonderful.

Put an X in the box for Cox

He was good at everything he did. Correction, he excelled.

He never lost an election, from junior high to high school, even winning office as chief justice of the supreme court at Boys State, in a short week winning the hearts and minds of some of the best and brightest among high school Californians. I imagined, right about now, he would be a U.S. Senator. He might even have employed the same mnemonic slogan he used every single time he ran, trumping complex and conniving political strategies: Put an X in the box for Cox.

My friend, Greg Cox, passed away Dec. 5. A life lived fully, and ended too early, is encapsulated here.

Regret sucks wind out of my chest. Greg and I hadn't spoken for more than 20 years. The last we met and talked was in Solvang, near our hometown of Lompoc. He joined my wife and me for Long Island iced teas — we felt so grown up — and I don't remember what we talked about. Life story stuff, probably. It was the first and only time he had met Nancy.

Greg had just finished law school, another in an amazing beaded string on his academic legacy: 4.0 grade point average (we came in advance of Advanced Placement courses) and valedictorian at Cabrillo High School, where he was also student body president; 4.0 GPA as a Stanford University undergraduate, earning degrees in political science and economics; 4.0 GPA, I'm told, at Stanford law school. And what I didn't know — among the many things I didn't know — an MBA from Stanford Business School.

Everyone who knew him would say of him, "It figures." He was our equivalent of a golden boy, the best at almost everything he did, almost entirely by his own hard work, but also by benefit of what Seneca said: "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."

President Greg with me as
everyone's favorite genocidal
mascot, Juan R. Cabrillo …

"Golden Boy" diminishes him. Though intelligent and gifted, he took almost nothing for granted, and harnessed his gifts with hard work. Many, many school mornings I found him already sitting at the trigonometry or physics teacher's desk, his textbook and homework laid out, going over in detail the concepts he didn't understand, until understanding ensued. It was a lesson I took with me, though I rarely applied it myself, misguidedly relying on my wits in hopes of understanding what I still don't understand.

I repeated Greg's example for my own children, with spotty success. Our teachers probably remember Greg most for his early-morning doggedness.

Besides excelling in school — and still being blamed for skewing the curve — he played varsity basketball and golf, lettering most of his high school career. In our junior year, with the addition of a talented kid who transferred from an overseas Air Force base, Greg played on one of the state championship basketball teams.

Greg just made it look easy.

He was so smart. In our introductory addresses in seventh-grade speech class, when everyone else said he or she lived at such-and-such an address, Greg said he "resided" at his "domicile." None of us knew "resided" or "domicile" or how to use them. He was an only child, his dad a judge, his mom kind and gracious; I imagine he got a lot of attention, but he also rose to high expectations. I remember even in elementary school he had a four-drawer file cabinet in his bedroom, where he kept his schoolwork organized.

Part of Greg Cox' high school legacy, courtesy of a Flickr
photographer. Trees obscure the whole phrase, "Cabrillo
Spirit Conquers All." Greg pushed for this as student body
president. I remember lengthy, sometimes bitter debates
about the wording — Cabrillo's motto is "Our Spirit
Conquers All," after all — and about whether to pay for
such a monument at all.

Wit lightning quick, he could also plant a barb deep, and mock without mercy, and box you in during an argument, smiling just before you realize you were doomed to lose. I imagine some classmates still remember with reddened faces some fierce debates during student body government meetings.

He was a Boy Scout, and had we another opportunity — one in which I likely did not badmouth Boy Scouts — I might have joined the Scouts and fulfilled my passion for backpacking way back then, rather than waiting more than 30 years when my son wanted to be a Boy Scout.

Greg as ASB president, leading
the sometimes sharp debate
over that same monument.
This and above, from
Tierra Royal, Cabrillo
High School's yearbook.

Where Greg went after Stanford, I wasn't sure, until his obituary filled in some gaps. South Dakota for a while, I heard. South Dakota? Something about venture capitalism. He was a principal for a Pacific Northwest investment firm, when he died, near Seattle. His obituary also says he worked for one of the Silicon Valley's premier law firms, in Palo Alto, before that. These are just some of a long list of achievements.

My memory of him, I'm sad to say, is stunted, locked somewhere in the late 20th Century.

In high school it was the three of us — Greg, John Bingle and me. Mr. Johnson, one of our math teachers, called us The Triumvirate; I'm not entirely sure it was a compliment.

When we had time and moments to break free from the various and sundry vagaries of high school life — girlfriends (John), jobs (Greg), term papers (all of us) — we went into default mode: Driving downtown, usually in Greg's green Mercury Cougar, just driving around town and talking, talking, talking, about things far away.

Almost always, we'd end up at Winchell's Donuts near the crosstown railroad tracks on H Street and East Laurel, each of us with a bag of doughnut holes and chocolate milk, talking more under the blanching fluorescent light until we went home.

Annoyingly taciturn now — jabbering instead with my fingers — I wonder how we could have talked so much.

Once in my senior year, I came home late (still before midnight), and my mom went into a fit and started clapping me hard on the shoulders. All the time she was punctuating her anger with her open hand, I found it funny that the worst we were doing, the worst we had ever done, was waste Greg Cox' gas and scarf doughnut holes and chocolate milk.

The stuff of legend, that was us.

On one final drive around town, our conversation comprised what I imagine so many longtime friends talk about on their last meeting: That this was not the end but the beginning, that we would always stay close, that whatever mysteries awaited us, whatever adventures, whatever families and jobs, we would enfold them into our friendship. Our future selves would radiate from this center, this foundation we had built. We wrote the same to each other in our yearbooks.

It was, in retrospect, a jinx. Greg went famously to Stanford, John to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology ("What?" we ragged him. "Where's that? An all-male university? What?"), and I stayed nearby, at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. John and Greg went on to amazing careers that early outpaced my capacity to imagine that such careers were possible.

But of course we were not the center of our forthcoming mysteries and adventures and lives. The center dissolved immediately, and off we went, rarely to reconnect.

(Now I remember that this was part of our conversation over drinks in Solvang! Greg mocked our conversation in his car that August night after our senior year; even though he was part of the treacly heart-felt conversation, his recollection almost made it sound like he was outside the car looking in, scoffing. But that was Greg as I knew him then, and I'm sure I had my snarky moments too; I also know I've changed in many ways, good and bad, over the last 20-plus years; I miss the opportunity to discover how we've changed.)

I have talked with John more often — unfortunately not much more often — the last time forgoing my high school reunion to attend John's family's memorial for his mom the summer before last.

John said later he talked with Greg during that memorial weekend. We should get together and celebrate our 50th birthdays together, Greg told John. It's been way too long.

Regret wracks me. I'm the absolute worst at doing something about catching up, looking back, revisiting, even though those impulses nag me on occasion. Facebook, thank goodness, enables effortless connections at those moments. I wonder how and when I would have learned of this bad news without it. 

How appropriate this week that I remembered our last adventure. The subject was hypothermia, because I was talking with a swimming friend who I join twice weekly on cold-water swims.

Somehow Greg, John and I talked our parents into letting us go on a week-long fishing trip in the eastern Sierra, to streams Greg fished with his dad since he was little. Somehow, I talked my parents into letting me take our truck with the camper shell where we'd bunk. Somehow, I talked myself into fishing.

For the early part of the week, we stood in jeans, waist deep in wildly rushing icy June streams, pulling out trout almost as soon as we had dropped our hooks. I know enough from having been a Scout leader that we were doing a really stupid thing.

Greg and John stayed in until sundown some days, long after I had gotten out to read or watch the landscape change. They gutted fish well into dark, stopping only when one of them realized aloud that they could easily have cut into their frozen hands and not known it with all the fish blood spilling over the rocks. It was one of several ways in which we could have gotten hurt or died on that trip, of self-inflicted knife wounds or hypothermia or car wreck or pneumonia.

Small wonder I would not have let my own kids take such a trip. I'm glad they never asked.

Before going home, we headed south out of the Sierra to Magic Mountain, talking about everything and nothing the entire way. On the homeward leg, we tired of one another for reasons that befall most people trying to have the time of their lives in close quarters, and spent long final stretches of the journey in crushing silence. Home again, we were fatigued but at peace. We were ready for wherever we would go. We were ready to move on.

That's what I choose to live on in my memory. I pray for Greg and his mom and dad.

Here's to the crazy ones*

Shawn, drawn on a Mac …

For my 100th blog post, it's fitting to thank Steve Jobs, who made this blog possible.

Co-creator of Apple Inc., Steve Jobs died last week of pancreatic cancer.

(I know, I'm the opposite of news.)

The best descriptor for Jobs is "visionary." He dreamed and imagined what might be. Of course, many people do this, but Jobs was able to marshal minds and hearts, collecting other dreamers to turn his and their dreams into tools. Without which, it turns out, we cannot function. Or think we can't, anyway. 

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford states Jobs' place in the world even more strongly: He effected change around the world, from the way products look to the way people work.

Without such dreams made real, I would not be using an Apple iMac right now to get on the Internet and fashion this blog post. Or attaching this art, which I drew on a Mac.

I don't really admire Jobs for these manna, though. I'm a reluctant consumer of the products he caused to be; though I've owned several Mac computers, each one came to me only after it was absolutely necessary to part grievously with my money for it, after this computer broke irreparably or that one couldn't handle the ever-changing operating system requirements.

The first Apple I got was a clone (geez, remember those? Jobs, deposed early from the company he created, eventually returned and almost immediately killed the clones) from a freelance graphic designer who was moving on to an agency job. I got the computer because all I had was an electric typewriter, which was an infeasible tool for the graphic designer clients with whom I supplied copywriting. Back then I dragged the massive text file onto a floppy disk (one file per disk, usually), and drove it over to the client. Ah, so late 20th Century.

Since the graphic designers used Macs — a direct result of Jobs taking a calligraphy course after dropping out of college and resolving that his computers should accommodate multiple fonts — I got a Mac too, so all of our computers would speak the same language without hassles. When I started drawing on the Mac, I already had the technology that my clients could use. I have loved the Mac mostly because I didn't have to know how it works (that would have spelled the end of me); I just had to know that it works.

That's the limit of my Apple connection, though. One of my children has an iPhone (and wants the newest one, released the day before Steve Jobs died) and an iPad; another has a form of iPod; both have Mac Workbooks; my wife has another form of iPod which I don't think she uses. I have just the iMac on my desk in my office. I have iTunes — I upgrade the software dutifully, as the computer directs me, lest the computer retaliate on its own to impede my work — but I don't buy any music. I'm the same with major software, extremely disinclined to upgrade, and doing so only when clients finally can't read the files I'm exchanging.

I've evolved a disheveled frugality: Unless I absolutely need it, I go without. So many of these Apple products offer wonderful capabilities, many of which I hadn't imagined were necessary — my son has shown me! Look! — but so far I've managed to get through the day without them. I don't even know where my cell phone is most of the time. What a terrible candidate for Apple discipleship I am.

Though I love his chutzpah, this is a side of Steve Jobs I didn't much care for: Engineering hunger in us to replace one shiny cool bauble with another before the first has worn out, and to desire the next shiny bauble and its promises, long before it is even conceived.

Instead, I admire Jobs for that most maddeningly elegant of slogans his company once used: Think different. 

Elegant because that spirit is so inspiring. See it here, an unaired commercial featuring Jobs' own voice (the one broadcast used Richard Dreyfuss' voice). Maddening because it's so often a gift, not a practiced skill, to think different, to see what others do not, to see ahead, to see the way.

{Beautiful copywriting, by the way (see below …)}

Already among the world's most prominent different thinkers, Steve Jobs in death is now among the most revered.

He's at the top of a great heap of different thinkers, whom I encounter every day. People constantly amaze me for what they are able to do, the jobs they have that I didn't know even could be jobs, the places they traveled, the thoughts they think. So different, so far ahead of what I do and think. As the owner of a couple of books on the art of Disney animation, I am flummoxed to see the work of dozens of artists, churning out thousands and thousands of gorgeous concept drawings that no one but the films' art directors, and a few readers of these books, will ever see. They are fantastically beyond my ability to draw, and yet they're often postage-stamp sketches of color and amazing form and depth. Breathtakingly depressing.

When I heard of Jobs' death, my first thought popped out before I could choke it down: My God, he's only seven years older! What have I done?

You're right to say, "Yeah, what have you done?" Of course, you'd be just as right in saying, "Measure different."

I agonize like everyone else — in ways that vary as much as each of us are different — about what I've accomplished, what good influence I've made on anything, and what to do about that deficit now.

My son says I'm too hard on myself, which is my nature. When I measure different, I realize my children are becoming more and many splendored than I imagined — and I imagined much splendor. I'm married to my best friend, who saves me from myself every day. Steve Jobs is reported to have wanted a biography so that his children to learn about him, because Apple and Pixar and everything else had taken him away from his kids. What price global influence?

As far as the other stuff, I still have time, though I take heed the much-played commencement address Jobs delivered to Stanford University's graduating class of 2005. He told the graduates they don't have that much time.

"Death is very likely the single best invention of life," he said. "It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life," he continued. "Don't be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

He admonished the graduates in Stewart Brand's words, from the Whole Earth Catalog: Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

*"Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. (Think different.)" Apple commercial.