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May 28, 2007

Say Hello, Wave Goodbye

One of the things I'm most grateful for in my life is that - somehow - I've managed to retain great, strong friendships with people from just about every stage of my adulthood. I'm still in touch with people from high school (and junior high!), college, jobs, startups, graduate school. The planet is full of great people, and I'm humbled by how many of them I get to call my friends.

I mention this because, this weekend, Kim and Steve flew up from San Francisco to join me and a handful of fellow Woodinville High grads (Amy, Mike, and Guy) on a Saturday-morning hike up Wallace Falls. We've all known one another for the better part of two decades, and have become closer as adults than we ever were as kids. (In fact, we really didn't hang together back in the day. As honors brats, we all knew one another and had classes together, but we weren't friends. Raw randomness brought us all back together over the intervening years, and now, frankly, I can't imagine life without them.)

Amy, Guy, Mike and I go on hikes together from time to time - we've done Rattlesnake Lake, among other things - but Saturday's hike was special. In addition to the usual reasons to go up the mountain (camaraderie, exercise, stunningly beautiful scenery), we had something more personal, and a little more somber.

We wanted to honor one of our teachers, Don Cain, who died earlier this year.

Don taught Honors History to the lot of us during our Junior year. He was smart as hell, funny, loved his subject and loved teaching. He looked a little bit like Santa Claus - bushy white beard and eyebrows, sweater vest, glasses - and brought a huge amount of creativity to the job. He was one of those teachers you remember, and one of those teachers that makes a difference in your life.

And so, at the summit of the Upper Falls, the group of us stepped back from the trail, slid into a clearing, opened a bottle of good champagne, and toasted to the memory of a great man.

We swapped stories, like how Mr. Cain had a habit of repeating facts during lecture that were likely to appear on the test ("The name of the shooter was Lee Harvey Oswald. The name of the shooter was Lee Harvey Oswald. The name of the shooter was Lee Harvey Oswald."); how he'd open a lecture with, "For those of you who wallow in your ignorance"; how he'd rattle us during tests by saying, "For those of you who cannot see the clock, you have ___ minutes left ... plenty of time" - which he would utter, with the same soothing intonaton, every few minutes from 50 minutes down to 5.

He was quirky, interesting. He cared. He ran Knowledge Bowl and History Club, made time for students who needed help (or who wanted to go farther than the basics), and brought a sense of authority to the class.

And now he's gone.

I'm not a terribly morbid person. I think about death from time to time, often in the same context that Steve Jobs referred to during his (amazing) 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech:

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

And yet, as we walked down the Falls to our cars, it struck me - hard - that time is going fast. I've known Amy, Guy, Mike and Kim for more than half my life - and, as of this year, I've spent more of my life after high school than before it. Surrounded by old friends, raising a glass to a respected elder that had passed on - that's the right way to live. And at the same time, it just reminded me that time is really, really, really fleeting.

You can't choose when you go, so do the stuff you need to do now.

Thanks a lot, Don. You'll be missed.

(If you're interested, my Flickr photostream is available.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer at May 28, 2007 9:14 PM. Posted to Misc.

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