Article 1: Gerard Aaron Cowan

My father, Gerard Aaron Cowan ("Jerry"), was born in New York City in 1908 and was raised in a Jewish New York family with money.  His father was a tailor, and his mother was a dress designer.  They owned and lived in a five-story brownstone building on the upper west side of Manhattan, and a 1920 census documents that my father, his parents, two sisters, two cousins and a maid lived in the building.  It appears that my grandparents separated sometime in the 1920's, when my grandfather moved to San Francisco to manage a clothing store.  Both of them died in the 1930's.

In the 1990's, I was very fortunate to find over 2,000 family letters in old boxes saved by one of my aunts.  Although the exact reasons are not ever mentioned in those letters, I surmise that the Great Depression and poor investments were the primary causes of the loss of wealth in my father's family.  Prior to 1930, there were many references to vacations, including extended trips to Europe, and purchases of gifts.  Beginning in the early 1930's, all of that disappeared and was replaced by frequent requests for small loans and references to good deals on small purchases.  Such was probably the case for millions of families in the United States at that time.

I have several pictures of my father as a young man.  In all of them he was well-dressed and "dapper."  He looked very much like Humphrey Bogart, with the same self-assurance and carriage.  One early picture shows him in riding togs atop a handsome horse.  He was always the cosmopolitan man-about-town.

I know my father did not attend college, and there's some question about whether he even finished high school.  He was, however, really intelligent and an entrepreneur at heart.  All of what he did in his life was self-taught, for he was a voracious reader and resourceful dreamer.  During his life he chose to work in building supplies and kitchen designing, and at least three times he built his own small company.  He was an incredible draftsman and could design an entire kitchen in under ten minutes.  As a young kid, I saw him do that many times, and I still have his drafting board, which he built for himself in the late 1950's.  He was also a born salesman; he could sell ice to an Inuit.

My father was 60 years old when he died of colon cancer.  I was 19 years old and a sophomore in college.  All my summer jobs were spent doing work at his little building supply company, where he taught me accounting, inventory, draftsmanship, sales and hard, physical labor.  Those were great summers, except for the last one, when I ran the business and visited him in the hospital twice a day.  My father insisted that I return to college at the end of that summer for my sophomore year; another person he hired would step in to run the company for a few months.

I really had one purpose in mind when I returned to college.  I wanted to be able to tell my father, before he died, what I would be doing for the rest of my life.  I had been a math major, but was tiring of that, so I was taking my first computer science course and continuing with my English literature studies.  I would either pursue a career in computers or become an English professor.  Although I loved reading, I fell in love with computer programming, and I told him of my decision a couple weeks before he died, on December 4, 1968.

I could list dozens of things he taught me, and they would probably be very similar to what other boys learned from their fathers.  My great love of sports, especially golf and baseball, came from him.  But beyond the normal things a father teaches a kid, he taught me, by example, how to conduct oneself in life.  I wanted to be like him, so I constantly observed him.  I would say that he was the greatest influence on my life, and thus, the most remarkable person.

My father pushed me to think analytically.  He never told me I had to be anything, but he gave me the analytical tools to succeed in whatever I chose to do.  He taught my sister and me to play chess when I was 6 years old (and my sister was 5 years old).  He began teaching me math shortcuts and puzzles when I was 8 years old, such as how to multiply two numbers in the teens (e.g., 19 x 17) "in my head," without the use of paper and pencil.  He was equally good at both deductive and inductive reasoning, and, by his example, I became good at both.  He constantly challenged me to be analytical.

My father pushed me to work hard.  No one in my life ever pushed me to work as hard as my father did.  When kids were working 20 hours a week at summer jobs, I was working 50 hours and getting paid for 40 hours, at $2 an hour.  Most of it was physical labor, like unloading a semi-truck filled with boxed kitchen cabinets.  He didn't have to tell me twice to do things, because he worked harder and longer than I did.  Instead, he would bring me a soda pop (temperatures were often in the 90's) and tell me to rest for a while, then get back to work.

It was natural that my discipline for physical labor carried over into my schoolwork.  Working three or four hours on homework was nothing compared with unloading a hot truck for eight hours.  School was a vacation from summers in that respect.

My father pushed me to take on responsibilities.  Where my mother wanted to do things for me, my father wanted me to do things for myself or for others.  When given a task by my father, I was never asked whether it was done yet.  He knew I was focused on finishing the task, so he gave me greater and greater responsibilities.  On the day I returned home from my freshman year of college, I was told that he was dying of cancer and that I would have to run the family business for the summer.  He gave me his car and asked me to drive him to the hospital.

Because of his great push, both direct and subtle, for me to take on increased responsibilities, I never thought that I couldn't do something when I was growing up.  I learned that from him, too.  There was no room for self-doubt or excuses, because I didn't see either in him.  (I did go through years of self-doubt after his death, and I was pushed by other remarkable people to get past that, as I address in other essays.)

My father pushed me to be organized.  My friends know me as someone who is organized to a fault.  I get that from my father.  In running a small kitchen business, he knew where every piece of paper was, and he pushed me to be equally as organized.  Since every kitchen sale was a project, from initial design to delivery of the cabinets and appliances for installation, he pushed me to be project oriented.  I am that way to this day.  He typically had 20 projects going at once, so he pushed me to multi-task like he did.

My father pushed me to practice kindness and be respectful.  As a young man, my father probably faced much more anti-Semitism than I ever did.  He changed the spelling of the family name from "Cowen" to "Cowan," to make it appear more Irish.  (His father had changed the spelling from "Cohen" to "Cowen.")  He believed, in business and in one's daily life, that you should practice kindness and respect all people.  I remember distinctly and was surprised at how highly he spoke of Dr. Martin Luther King, as he first made me aware of the civil rights problems in this country in the 1960's.

He was described by people as a "gentleman," but that really came down to treating people in an honorable, fair and caring way.  His deals were sealed by handshakes, and he taught me to address all people properly and with respect.  If I ever forgot to do that, I heard about it.

Although there were many times I saw his kindness and respect of others, no episode stays with me more than the time that he and I delivered a few kitchen cabinets to a retirement home.  He had donated the cabinets and could easily have dropped them off at the back of the building, but we parked and walked through the building from the front entrance.  He intentionally got several steps ahead of me and forced me to walk through the hallways alone, gazing at all the seniors sitting in wheelchairs or using walkers.  It was an overwhelming experience.  When we were done delivering the cabinets, he said only, "I hope you were paying attention."  His intent, I'm sure, was to show me that seniors should not be put somewhere and forgotten.

And Finally.... It's easy to over-emphasize the influence that my father had in my life, but if anything, I have under-estimated in this essay what he did for me.  My mother did a lot of things for us kids also--she taught us to read, got us to schools and took care of us--but she never pushed me the way my father did.  He changed the course of my life more than any other person has.

Article 2: Paul Dale Anderson

I met Paul Dale Anderson in early summer of 1967.  Paul had opened a used bookstore on Main Street in Rockford, Illinois, and a friend told me I had to check it out.  The store was called "The A," which stood for "The Arts."  It was filled with old books and comic books, most (if not all) of which were originally owned by Paul.  He simply didn't have enough space to store his thousands of old books, so he decided to open a bookstore and sell them.

But the store was more than just a bookstore and comic book shop.  It was also a "head" shop, with black light posters, incense, pipes, beads and an assortment of things that would appeal to Love Generation youth.  When you entered the front door, you left Rockford behind and entered an environment straight out of Chicago's Old Town or New York's Greenwich Village of the 1960's.  There was no discernible organization to the place.  Books were everywhere, posters were on the walls and ceiling, Paul's oil paintings were tucked here and there in nooks, and one or two chess boards were always set up, ready for use.  Music (mostly classical and folk) played constantly on the 8-track cassette, and the smell of pipe tobacco and incense engulfed you as you entered the front door.  The whole place was a challenge to all your senses, and I loved it.

For the next couple of years, my sister and I spent a lot of time with Paul in that store.  We kept the coffee fresh, waited on customers, worked the cash register, put posters on the walls and organized bookshelves (to the extent they could be organized).  We helped Paul set up a coffeehouse in the basement of the store, where several of the area folksingers would perform.  We loved the atmosphere of the place, where there was always stimulating conversation, on-going chess games, music and books, books, books.

Paul grew up in Rockford and majored in journalism and philosophy at the University of Illinois.  Five years older than I, he worked with Roger Ebert on the Daily Illini, the school's award-winning newspaper. He is the first Renaissance man I ever knew.  In the years I spent with him, he was an accomplished actor, painter, writer and general bon vivant, with his habitual two-day beard, sly grin and hands that looked like he'd just cleaned and packed his pipe (which he probably had).

Paul Anderson pushed me to appreciate the arts.  Paul was the first person to shove a book into my hands and say, "You have to read this."  His tastes in art and literature defined "eclectic."  He turned me on to the stories of Wolfe and Hemingway and Vonnegut and Salinger, the poems of T.S. Eliot, Gwendolyn Brooks and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the plays of Shakespeare and Shaw.  He was the first to introduce me to fine art, especially the paintings of Edward Hopper and Winslow Homer.

On any given day we might be sitting in his shop, sipping coffee, and awaiting the presence of customers, and he would grab some book off a shelf and read a passage aloud to whomever was there.  You might get a poem by Emily Dickinson or a few pages from Kerouac or Heinlein.

That was one thing that was so great about knowing Paul: you never knew what you'd hear next from him, but it was likely to push you in a direction you hadn't expected.  The sheer volume and breadth of his knowledge was astounding, and he shared it, kindly and thoughtfully, with others.  His generosity changed the course of my life.

Paul Anderson pushed me to be a critical thinker.  Paul was also the first person to highly encourage me to think critically about a subject.  He started a series of drop-in discussions in his bookstore, and an evening's topic could be on anything--a work of art, a movie, politics, a person, a philosophy of life.  It was called the Penny University.  If you paid a penny to partake in the discussion, you could sit in and say as much or as little as you wished over the course of a couple hours.

It was typical for the Penny University to attract a number of bright people who were not shy in voicing their opinions and thoughts.  Paul always encouraged me to jump into the conversations, although I was initially shy and unsure of myself in front of such an intellectual group.  His respect for my opinions really pushed me to think critically about art, events, and issues for the first time in my life.  It is a habit and facility that I carry with me to this day.
 
And Finally....  Paul Dale Anderson has become a very well-known writer in the "horror, fantasy, science fiction, and suspense-thriller genres," as his website states.  He's written, as of the website's last update, 27 novels and hundreds of short stories.  He's taught creative writing and been an editor for several publications, a hotel manager, a librarian, and a board-certified hypnotist.  That's just the beginning of what Paul has accomplished in his lifetime, but we'll err on the side of modesty here.

More than anyone else, Paul helped me and my family when my father was gravely ill and after my father died.  (Ironically, his father died only three weeks after my father died, in December of 1968.)  He was there for us throughout that ordeal, and I will always be grateful to him for his love and guidance during that time.

Periodically, I reread a short story of Paul's called "The Understanding."  In it, he describes the two bronze lions outside the Art Institute of Chicago.  It was the first I knew of those lions, guarding the gateway to some of the greatest art in the world.  Paul, you opened the gates to all of art for me.  Thank you, my friend.

[Paul Dale Anderson passed away on December 13, 2018, after a short illness.  After reading this essay about himself, Paul said this in an email to me in 2015, "You write well, my friend.  I've always known you had a bit of the writer in you.  We are alike in many ways."  He will be very much missed and always remembered.]

Article 12: Gail Montgomery

I met Gail Montgomery on March 8, 1988, when I went to her home to attend my first counseling session with her.  We went into her very crowded office and sat across from each other--she in a big chair and I on a sofa that I shared with several stacks of papers.  I was just out of a relationship and felt that I needed to work through issues that kept producing the same results.  A good friend of mine, Cynthia Bassett, recommended that I go to see Gail, who was a practicing psychotherapist.  I found in Gail one of the most remarkable people I've known in my life.

Everything about Gail was large--her physique, her voice, her laugh, her beaming countenance, her personality, her wit, her knowledge, her intellect.  She had been raised as a Southern Baptist in Alabama and spent time in the Philippines as a missionary (where she caught malaria), only to question the "truth" of her religious upbringing and then walk away from it.  She became well-versed in many religions and would certainly have stood her own in a debate with any proselytizer.  She knew the practices and sacred writings of those religions, not just Christianity.

Gail was at her best in combining compassion and truth-telling.  Her philosophy as a psychotherapist was that the patient should see results in a short period of time--not just after years of therapy.  I would say that she was incredibly intuitive, but that's not quite accurate.  She was incredibly attentive and knowing.  If you were prepared to hear the truth about yourself, she was prepared to tell you.  She would address you directly and challenge you on anything you said that seemed unreasonable or false to her.  I can hear her voice now, "Oh, well I have to tell you, Steve, you're wrong about what you just said."  And then with a great deal of compassion and insight, she'd tell me why.  I think she was right almost every time.  One was immediately challenged when you engaged in conversation with Gail, and you had the choice of either walking away from the challenge or allowing yourself to be honest and vulnerable to learn something about yourself.

Gail was more than a psychotherapist--she was a healer, a shaman--and she employed many alternative healing methods in her counseling, if you were open to them.  For years she had led vision quests for women and had explored and used the healing practices of different cultures, such as the Cherokee medicine wheel and dowsing pendulums.  She discounted most New Age practices and remedies as gimmicks, preferring hundreds of her own "nutsy, cuckoo" means and remedies, as she referred to them.  She could laugh at herself and share with you the most practical solutions to problems, but her healing powers, even regarding the mundane, were truly astounding.

More than once I was caught off-guard when Gail described something that had happened in my life--a specific event and the approximate date--that I had never mentioned to her!  That was Gail and her magic.  Then we would work on releasing the negative energy I still held surrounding the event.  I learned that there is a difference between placing blame and recognizing responsibility; a person may have been responsible for hurting me, but I could choose to stop blaming them and thus let the event go, finally and forever.  It sounds simple when I say it, but it was only a simple process because Gail made it that way.  I had struggled with some of those things for many years.

One of the most amazing displays of Gail's power was an episode that I still remember vividly.  When I would release all my attachment to some negative event in my life, Gail would say something like, "Ooh, that was a big energy shift."  So, I asked her once what she meant by "energy shift."  She explained that there's an actual, physical energy release when we let go of attachments or change beliefs, and that she could see that energy wave and determine if it was a small (unimportant) or big (important) shift.  After my dubious response to that, she asked if I'd like to see an energy shift for myself, and I answered, "Sure."  She closed her eyes, concentrated intently for about twenty seconds, and then my entire field of vision began to quiver and move, as one might see heat waves rising from the sands in a desert.  I closed my eyes, re-opened them, rubbed them, and shook my head; the energy waves did not disappear but even increased in intensity.  After a minute the waves suddenly disappeared, and then Gail immediately opened her eyes.  When I told her what I'd seen, she nodded and said, "That's what I see."  I never had to question Gail's powers after that.  (I have since learned that "energy shifts" are fundamental to alternative healing practices, such as yoga and acupuncture, although it's rare that you see them.)

Gail and I explored a lot of things in five years.  Much of the early exploration was focused on love relationships, since my original reason for seeing Gail was to get past a failed relationship.  In the first three weeks of our work together, she totally surprised me by her insights and understanding, and I quickly got past the disappointment I'd felt from the break-up.  Then I learned about the mistakes I'd been making for years.  Probably the greatest lesson I learned from Gail was how to choose a woman who was good for me and "easy to live with," rather than someone who might "look good on paper" (my term), but needed rescuing from someone or something.

I had always chosen women based on how similar we were, but Gail used a wonderful analogy to debunk that theory.  I call it her "airplane and rope" analogy.  Two people can be as different as a rope and an airplane, as long as the airplane is attached to the rope and the rope is anchored to the ground.  The airplane teaches the rope to fly, while the rope keeps the airplane grounded.  That can work very well in a relationship.

Another life lesson that I learned from Gail is the art of manipulating people in a good way.  I made the statement to her once that I didn't like people who manipulated others, and she responded, "We all manipulate others. We just have to learn the difference between good and bad manipulation."  She gave the example of parents manipulating their kids to do homework all the time, which is an example of good manipulation.  It's a very useful tool for anyone to possess, and I learned it from Gail.

I chose to continue working with Gail once or twice a month until she and her husband, Ron Yukon, moved to Arkansas.  Thereafter, we spoke a few times each year, mostly to catch up on each other's life.  When I divorced from my first wife in early 1998, I immediately called Gail, and her compassion and comforting words were extraordinary.  She was my "first responder," and she set me on the course I needed for recovery.  I still give this advice to each friend who is going through an especially hard time:

• Choose five simple things you can do to nurture yourself every day, and do them.  Those are your islands on which you feel safe.  I chose things like having a cup of tea and taking a walk with my dog.  I allowed myself to feel safe during those activities, and I allowed myself to hurt at other times.
• Allow yourself to hurt and cry as much as you want.  Don't hold back for any reason.
• Form a "support team" of people with whom you can communicate as often and as much as you need.  I found six people, including Gail, and they were my lifelines to normalcy.  I talked with them a lot.
• Find a local psychotherapist you can work with face-to-face.  I found a wonderful woman, Kathy Wilkins, through one of my support team people.  When I asked Gail what I should say to Kathy, she told me to ask her to "be a witness to my grief."  Kathy liked that phrase; no one had ever made that request.

I said that Gail's compassion was extraordinary, but what she did for me was almost unbelievable.  It really speaks to Gail's powers as a psychotherapist and strength as a human being.  During one of our conversations, I noticed a slight catch in her voice near the end of our one-hour session, and I asked her if there was something wrong.  She paused and then said simply that they'd had a fire the previous night, and it had destroyed the house and everything they owned.  She had spent the entire hour working with me on my problems, while she was only hours away from having lost everything!  I don't think I've ever met anyone else who had such focus and thought so much of others before themselves.

Gail pushed me to be a happy person.  Although Gail and I covered a lot of territory in my years of working with her, it consistently brought me to a better place in my life.  After one especially probing session, I asked her what the purpose was of all the hard work I had been doing.  Her direct, all-inclusive answer was "to be happy."  I realized at about that time that I had changed from being a fundamentally unhappy person who had happy moments to a person who was fundamentally happy and had sad moments.  That was a huge shift in my life.

In effect, Gail gave me a paradigm for being a happy person.  Part of that paradigm was honestly facing events in my childhood.  Part of it was in learning how to better choose relationships in my adult life.  And a big part of it was in recognizing my own powers--what I could control and what I couldn't.

One of my fondest memories of Gail was when we parted after our last face-to-face session, almost five years after we'd begun.  She hugged me and told me that she thought I'd changed more than any man she had ever worked with.  That felt right to me, because I had really worked in becoming a happy person.

And finally....  Gail died of complications from diabetes on November 3, 2011.  Her husband, Ron Yukon, called to tell me shortly after her death, and we talked and cried for an hour.  A week later, Ron did an amazing thing--he hosted a memorial for Gail on the phone!  Moderated by another close friend of his, the memorial allowed all of us to tell stories about Gail, and dozens of people phoned in from all over the country to take part.

Gail holds the distinction of being the last remarkable person in my life.  Certainly I've known many people who were remarkable in their own right since then, but no one has had to reach out to change my life's path.  Gail's push set me in my final right direction.

In my last telephone session with Gail in March, 1998, I voiced the fear that, after my divorce, I would never find another woman to marry.  Gail immediately responded, "Oh, you'll find someone who you'll marry.  In fact, you already know her and will meet her again next September."  It was a few years later that Gail reminded me that she had told me that, and it had turned out to be true.  Nine years after first meeting Suzanne, I met her a second time in September, 1998, and we married in April of 2002.  Gail never ceased to amaze me.

Article 11: Chester M. Ratliff, Jr.

I met Chet Ratliff in late March, 1979, when I was one of the people who interviewed him for a job at Interactive Applications, Inc., where I worked from spring of 1978 through July, 1979.  I remember having a cup of coffee with him and conducting the interview at a small cafe near IAI, and it was immediately apparent to me that he'd be a great addition to the company.  Chet joined IAI soon thereafter as a systems analyst/programmer.

Probably two weeks after Chet joined IAI, he and I had lunch together, and the conversation quickly shifted from work topics to our personal lives.  I wish I could recall every detail of that conversation, but I don't.  I only remember my impressions of him--that he was thoughtful, modest, very bright, and as much interested in knowing me as I was in knowing him.  I found out that he'd graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in pure and applied mathematics and physics, with a chemistry minor, and that he had grown up and still lived in Berkeley.  So, each day he commuted about 90 miles to work and back!

Although many things, including our diverse and common interests, drew me to Chet, one of the most interesting things to me was how he communicated.  Over the years I heard many people tell him that he was unusually quiet, even wondering if he was shy or intimidated.  From our first conversation I saw him much differently--as a person who listened intently and only spoke when he had something of interest to say.  That set him apart from most people, including myself.  If Chet was quiet for a short time, it didn't mean he wasn't "present."  I thought he was more "present" than anyone I knew.

Our early conversations soon led to our doing many, many activities together.  I think it's typical that a person does a few types of activities with a close friend-- maybe meals together, movies, shopping, one sport.  Chet and I had lunches and dinners together, saw many movies (I'm still somewhat amazed that I convinced him to see "ABBA: The Movie"), and went to classical concerts.  He introduced me to the comedy and late-night jazz clubs in San Francisco; I took him to a bluegrass concert in Berkeley.  He owned two beautiful Jensen Healeys, which he personally maintained, so what I know about cars I learned from watching Chet work on his cars.  We attended car road races at Laguna Seca and Sears Point Raceways, went to see the Reno Air Races, saw several A's and Giants baseball games, and traveled to Santa Barbara for a weekend to watch the Junior National Volleyball Championships.

One of our favorite pastimes was watching basketball together, and we often went to see the Golden State Warriors play, especially when one of Chet's four NBA-playing cousins was in town.  (He introduced me to Caldwell Jones and Major Jones after games in Oakland.)  When you sit courtside at a professional basketball game, you get a new appreciation for the remarkable athleticism of those players.

But what we probably loved doing most was skiing together.  Chet pretty much taught me to ski, helped me pick out all my equipment, and coached me down many scary slopes.  Besides being one of the most graceful, beautiful skiers I've ever seen, he was infinitely patient and encouraging of someone a lot less accomplished than he.  He bought us a pair of fluorescent orange Northface caps so we could always spot each other while skiing on a crowded hill.  (I still have that cap!)  In all the years we skied together, I only saw Chet fall twice, both times when he skied onto a narrow strip of snow that gave way.

As I progressed to an advanced intermediate level, we had more and more fun together. Although I have many memories of those days, I have two favorites.  Once while skiing down a narrow, steep hill late in the afternoon, he saw me struggling a bit, and over the sound of our skis, I heard him say, "Ski the hill; don't let the hill ski you."  He showed me that I had the control and ability to be there.  And then there was the time we got caught in a white-out snowstorm at the top of Heavenly Valley, on the California side.  You could not see more than ten feet in front of you, and it was getting worse by the minute, so he led me down the entire mountain without stopping--almost five miles of hills and trails--while dodging people who had fallen.  He knew I was right behind him, and he only skied as fast as he knew I could ski.  Those were great days.

Yet, what I remember more than anything from our years together is our conversations about life.  Although I consider Chet remarkable in so many ways, it is through our talks that he most influenced my life.  I also know that I influenced his life.

Chet pushed me to do right things.  Because of the influence of my father, who I write about in the first essay of this series, I grew up believing that I had a fairly good "moral compass"--the ability to do good and right things.  Not until I knew Chet did I realize that I had a bit to go.  I met Chet's parents, Chester Ratliff, Sr. and Christine Ratliff, soon after Chet and I met.  They were the most thoughtful, kind, generous people I'd ever met, and it was evident that Chet and his sister, Deborah, had acquired those traits from their parents.  Mr. and Mrs. Ratliff welcomed me as a member of their family, and I always loved spending time with them, even when Chet was not there with us.

I remember stopping by his parents' home with him once to pick up a basketball from his room.  I noticed some old handwritten notes (really, heart-felt aphorisms) taped to his wall and read a few.  His mother had written them when he was a young kid, and I was stunned by their wisdom, simplicity, and caring, such as "Always be considerate of others" and "Do your best in whatever you do."  (These may be inexact wordings, but they are very much in the spirit of what was written on each small note.)  What I saw that day reinforced what I already knew about Chet--that he was a consistently, uncommonly good person, and the goodness was instilled by his parents every day as he grew up.

But being a good person does not necessarily mean that you do "right" things.  I think you develop that quality on your own when confronted by hundreds of situations in life, if you've already developed a good moral compass.  It might be an action as simple as picking up an object that someone else has dropped or helping an elderly person open a door or letting another car change lanes in front of you.  Chet so consistently did "right" things that it pushed me to be aware of what could be done, if only you paid attention to those around you.  Many of us lead good lives but remain mostly oblivious of others.  A frequent part of our conversations was centered on how people could do more "right" things if they paid attention and put themselves in the place of others--sort of a conscious, consistent Golden Rule.

Chet and I were sitting in a theater one day in 1980, watching Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, when the movie was stopped, the lights came on, and we were all asked to leave the building.  After about 20 minutes, they allowed us back in the building and continued the movie.  Chet looked at me and said, "You know what that was, right?"  I nodded, and he immediately got up and walked out while the movie was playing.  A few minutes later he returned to his seat, the movie was stopped, and the lights came on again--this time with the theater manager standing at the front.  He announced that there had been a bomb threat, the theater had been searched (with no bomb found), and he'd like to offer a full refund to anyone who wished to leave.  Between 10%-20% of a fully-packed theater got up and left.

How many people would even think to reach out to the manager in that situation, much less act on their thoughts?  I never asked Chet what he had discussed with the manager, but it was obviously the "right" thing to do.  He thought every person should know what happened and have the choice of staying or not staying.  Many times I saw Chet do similar "right" things that were automatic to him.  He "pushed" me by being a constant example of "right" action.  Over the years I've tried to emulate that trait, with varying degrees of success, and I still chide myself when I miss or avoid opportunities to do "right" things.  I often think of Chet when situations present themselves and I act to help someone.

Chet pushed me to look at my biases.  Growing up in the Bay Area, you are inevitably in contact with people of different races, nationalities, religions, and cultures.  For Chet to have a white friend was certainly not unusual for him, but for me to have a friend who was Black or Asian or Latino or Muslim or some other minority was unprecedented.  I grew up on the east side of town in Rockford, Illinois, which is predominantly white and, in particular, Swedish.  There were fewer than twenty "minority" students in my entire high school (of 2,700 students), only whites in my Sunday school and Jewish temple, and only one Black student in my college dorm or any of my college classes.  I did not serve in the Armed Forces, nor did I ever work at a large company, so I almost never had occasion to meet people of other races, cultures, and nationalities.

Yet, I did not grow up with any conscious bigotries.  My father, for the most part, saw to that.  Being Jewish, I was exposed to some biases from other students at times, and my father probably used those incidents as examples of how not to treat people.  However, I was dimly aware of my mother's "Southern roots" biases, largely unspoken, and the truth was that my own racial thoughts and feelings had never been challenged.  I had been far too isolated in my life.

Chet and I never talked about how people might be biased, and so it is somewhat inaccurate to say that Chet "pushed me" to look at my biases.  What we did discuss was that all people should be treated the same, with respect and dignity and compassion, and from those conversations I intentionally pushed myself to look at whether I had any biases toward other people.  Was I quick to judge this race or that religion in any ways?  For that matter, did I identify people primarily by their race, their religion, or their culture, thus automatically considering them as different from me?

I once accompanied Chet to a party of a few dozen people, and midway through the evening I realized that I was the only white person in the room.  What stunned me was not that I was the only white, but that I had not noticed it before.  Our biases begin when we notice differences between people and then magnify those differences into value judgments.  When we notice, share, and enjoy our similarities first, our biases dissipate and are tossed aside, like getting rid of old, ill-fitting clothing.  It is so much easier to live that way.  Of the things that Chet brought into my life, that's what I value the most--an ease of living with and accepting other people.  I guess that's the definition of tolerance.

And Finally.... Chet and I live about 55 miles apart, so we don't get to see each other as often as we'd like.  Still, I am reminded of him often and he is always somewhere deep in my thoughts.  Now that the Warriors are playing so well, we should try to catch a game together again.

Article 10: Michael Edward Cowan

Mike and I are brothers.  We have the same father but different mothers, and he is ten years older than I am.  He grew up with his mother's parents in Detroit, and I did not even know about him until I was almost ten years old.  When my sister, Sue, and I were told that we had an older brother, our first question was, "Where is he?"  I think we greatly surprised our parents when we expressed unbounded excitement about having a brother; we wanted to meet him right away.

Soon after we were told about Mike, he came to visit us in Rockford, Illinois, on Labor Day weekend of 1959.  I do have a vivid memory of us going to Comiskey Park in Chicago that weekend to watch the White Sox and Indians play.  The two teams were in a tight pennant race, and we sat along the third-base line on a sunny day to watch a great game, won by the Indians.

Over the next few years, Mike would visit us every year or so, and we would write letters to each other.  We admired and worshiped our older brother; everything about him impressed us.  I remember playing baseball with him at our grade school's blacktop playground one time.  The gymnasium of the school had an all-brick wall, save for two small windows, a couple hundred feet from the playground's home plate, and Mike managed to break both of those windows in one weekend.  Man, could he hit a baseball.

Mike went to the University of Detroit, majoring in management with a minor in economics, and then he served in the U.S. Air Force from 1961 to 1965, primarily as a contracts officer.  He spent a year and a half in Greece, followed by almost two years in Turkey. After his military service, he worked at LTV Aerospace in Detroit as a contract administrator, but he moved to California in 1967 to take a job with Lockheed, where he initially wrote and managed large construction projects.  I often wonder how my life would have been different had Mike and I grown up together.  Would I have gone into the military?  Would I have moved to California sooner than 1976?  Would I have followed in his footsteps in other ways?

I came to a crossroads in my life in 1976, when I decided to move away from Illinois.  It would either be a move to New York City, to be near my sister, or a move to the Bay Area in California, to be near Mike.  I wrote him a letter about a prospective move, and he phoned me immediately.  He had just started his own software company, International Data Applications, and he wanted me to come to San Jose to "interview" for a job with IDA.  By the end of my ten-day visit, I was very excited about the company, had already found an apartment in Los Gatos for me and my dog, and knew it was the right move for me.  Mike went out of his way to not pressure me into working at IDA, for he even set up interviews at other companies.  After the first one, I decided that IDA was the right place for me.

I actually worked at IDA three separate times (1976-1978, 1979-1982 and 1987-1990).  We did a lot of software applications together, in international banking, real estate trust banking and property management.  The two of us visited banks all over the country, and in those years of working together, we made up for all the years we missed by growing up separately.  Mike was a multi-engine, instrument-rated commercial pilot as well, so I'd often fly in the co-pilot seat next to him on trips.

I can easily say that Mike has been the most influential person in my life.  I have gone to him for advice many, many times, and he has helped me in countless ways.  Although he literally changed the path of my life by inviting me to move to California, I didn't need much of a push to do that.  But there are three areas in which Mike went out of his way to change the course of my life.

Mike pushed me to finish projects. Perhaps the greatest lesson I learned from Mike, based on one discussion we had in about 1980, is that I should not only have the mindset for starting projects, but for finishing them.  Mike asked me to head IDA's software team when I returned to the company in 1987, partially because he knew I could finish projects that I started.  When I first began working with IDA in 1976, I couldn't do that.  After my return in 1987, Mike didn't push me to finish things; he would tell me what had to be done, and he knew I'd do them.

Having the discipline of finishing projects that I start has influenced every part of my life.  I probably got in the habit of not finishing projects in the 1970's, when it was easy to start a song and not finish it or work on a never-ending, tedious project.  Mike changed my way of thinking about projects, so that, to this day, I will not start any type of project without having a goal, a plan, a clear start, and a clear end in mind.  The alternative is having all sorts of unfinished work cluttering my life.

Because I am so project-oriented, it is not a surprise that Mike has so much influenced my professional career, but I am not alone.  When my last company, Quartet Systems, grew to its largest with eight people, five of us had started our careers at Mike's company more than 30 years before.  Mike always looked out for his people, and he provided the work environment, corporate culture, and support for a lot of good systems analysts.

Facebook has the words, "Done is better than perfect," painted on their walls.  Mike pushed me to adopt that policy in life long before Mark Zuckerberg was born.  Beyond being organized and creative, having the discipline to finish things has probably benefited me in life more than anything else.

Mike pushed me to write concisely.  As a contracts officer in the Air Force, Mike learned how to write very important, detailed documents.  Unlike anyone I've ever known, he could write a complete business contract off the top of his head.  (Sometimes he thought that he should have been an attorney, because his contracts were at least as good as any attorney could write.)  He also wrote a lot of technical and user documentation for Lockheed, Memorex and, most recently, Oracle.

When I began writing documentation for computer software systems in the late 1970's, I wrote like a novelist or songwriter.  My documents were twice as long as they had to be.  Mike pushed me to write in a much more concise fashion, without the use of a lot of adjectives and run-on sentences.  (My writing style in these essays is not the same style I use in my technical writing!)  Technical documents need to be clear and concise, unlike almost any other form of writing.

Mike gave me a phrase about presentations--both verbal and written--that he learned in the Air Force.  I think it's an invaluable guide in technical writing.  He said, "Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, and tell them what you told them."  Translated, it means that your presentation should have an introduction, a body, and a summary that all holds together.  Countless times I've edited my documents to be more concise, thanks to Mike's influence.

Mike pushed me to be responsible with money. Mike was the first person to urge me to be a saver rather than a spender.  He used to tell me, "Pay yourself first."  He helped me set up my first IRA and stayed on me until I'd contributed the maximum amount each year.  More importantly, he pushed me to have a "saving" philosophy, rather than a "spending" philosophy when I was young, and that has served me throughout my life.

Part of being a saver, rather than a spender, is to learn how to invest wisely, while minimizing risk.  Except for a couple of financial advisers, I really have spent very little time discussing investing with people other than Mike.  During the 2008 and 2009 recession, he was the voice of reason among the many voices of panic.  He taught me to recognize opportunity rather than fear loss.

I remember one phone conversation in 2008 with Mike, after the Dow had dipped another 500 points that day.  His initial greeting was, "Well, did you buy or sell today?"  Few people really have the discipline (and time frame) to "buy low and sell high," but we discussed market dynamics frequently, and he did not let me panic.  As a result of our investing talks and approach, my wife and I regained our losses within eight months of the initial 2008 crash.

Maybe the greatest lesson I've learned from Mike regarding investing and saving is that I should always be mindful of different types of risk.  As socially liberal as we both are, it is amazing that we are both fiscally conservative and always have been.  Mike really pushed me to be that way, and it has made a great difference in my life.

And Finally....  Mike retired a couple years ago and lives near South Lake Tahoe with his wife of over 40 years, Sumaye.  We don't get to see each other often, but we talk frequently.  There is no one I would rather spend a day with than Mike.  He is one of the very few people who can always make me laugh.  His wit reminds me of a couple of the old comedians, like Mort Sahl and Jackie Mason.  Subtle, but not without substance and bite.

When discussing one business associate, Mike once used the line, "Down deep he's pretty shallow."  Sadly, that perfectly described the person.  It's a funny line, but you have to think about it.

And then there was the time in a Philadelphia bank's conference room when Mike and I were surrounded by a roomful of bankers.  One banker joined the meeting late, announced that he'd just found out that he had conjunctivitis, and received no response from anyone.  He then spent the next two minutes explaining what conjunctivitis is (we all knew), at the end of which Mike said, under his breath so that only I could hear, "Oh, I thought it was too many run-on sentences."  I nearly died laughing, and no one in the room knew why except Mike.

[Mike passed away on June 6, 2021, after a long illness.  This essay was written in 2016.  I was very proud to give the eulogy at his funeral service.]
 

Article 8: Margaret Cardwell

I met Margaret Cardwell in the summer of 1974, in an Urbana Park District extension building, two blocks from where I lived.  She was the instructor for my beginning ceramics class.  The ceramics studio occupied a single classroom in the old school building then owned by the Park District.  I had not taken a class in any visual art since my sixth-grade art class, so I had no idea what working with clay would be like.

I remember the studio was filled with equipment--6 or 8 kick-wheels, tables for hand-building, 2 electric kilns, many 5-gallon buckets filled with glazes, sinks, storage space for large packages of clay and rows of shelves for clay tools and unfinished projects.  It was foreign and intimidating to me, and I easily could have skipped the second class had it not been for Margaret's encouragement, kindness, and expertise.  Learning to throw a piece of clay begins with a process called "centering," which is harder than it looks.  The irony was not lost on me, at a time when I was struggling to "center" my life.  If I could only center this chunk of clay and make something of it, maybe my life would follow suit.

Having done wheel-throwing now for many years, I look back on those first few weeks with a bit of awe.  The clay was gritty, the old kick-wheels were hard to turn at a steady speed, and we were elbow-to-elbow in an over-crowded classroom, but somehow Margaret taught all of us to make presentable pots.  She mixed in some hand-building projects as well, such as working with clay slabs and hand-rolled coils, and by the third week, I couldn't wait to get to class.  One night in class, Margaret approached me and, out of the clear blue, asked if I'd be available to join her and her husband, John, and two of their friends for dinner the following Saturday.  I was quite surprised but readily accepted.

Margaret and John lived in a beautiful home, about twelve miles west of Champaign-Urbana near Lake of the Woods Forest Preserve.  They had converted their garage into a studio for Margaret, but I don't actually remember any ceramics equipment there.  She was really an all-around visual artist, for she did oil painting, watercolors, collages, macrame and--the most surprising--large metal sculptures.  Next to three or four easels, you could see her acetylene tank and torch.  Their home was filled with a lot of incredible artwork--mostly her paintings, sculptures, macrame pieces and ceramic pots.  I don't think she owned a dish or plate that she had not made. And, oh, by the way--she was the first gourmet cook I ever met!  Her dinners were exquisite.

Margaret and John were from California but spent years in Mexico and Positano, Italy, as Margaret dedicated her life to art and pottery.  John spent his time writing and eventually became an English professor.  (He always reminded me a little of Ernest Hemingway--tall, full gray-white beard, literate and articulate.)  They moved to the Champaign-Urbana area when John got a job at Parkland Junior College to teach English.  They were in their early 50's when I met them, and it was the second career for each of them.

Over the next two years I got to be quite close to Margaret and John.  I helped them plant their huge garden and partook in many wonderful meals and evening-long conversations with them.  I thought of them as having the gold standard in marriage relationships, and I still think that to this day.  At the center of that relationship was a constant respect and interest in each other, always with kind words and deeds.  Once I asked them if they ever got angry at each other, for I had never seen it.  After careful thought, Margaret responded, "Well, there was the time I made a batch of chocolate chip cookies and set them out to cool while I went to class.  John had eaten all of them by the time I got home.  I was pretty mad at him then."  I just nodded and smiled.

Margaret pushed me to create visual art.  Although one might argue that guitar playing is an art form involving one's hands, I really had never used my hands in creating a visual art before I met Margaret.  Ceramics is like painting, sculpture, macrame and drawing, in that you envision the finished object that people will view, and then you try to make it.  Margaret was very patient and encouraging in her teaching, but she also pushed me to be a good potter, giving me techniques that she didn't teach in her classes.  Of course, unlike most of the students, I had the benefit of seeing hundreds of things that she had made, so I asked questions others didn't know to ask.

Part of learning to be a better potter was learning how to run a ceramics studio.  In addition to the classes, a pottery club of 35-40 people used all the studio's facilities.  Only four people, including Margaret, were in charge of running the studio, but she encouraged me to be the fifth person.  I joined the management team and learned how to mix glazes, stack and unstack the kilns, and organize the shelves for classes.  In turn, I learned much more about ceramics than most of the other students.

There is a distinction to be drawn between the mentoring I've received from other instructors in California (especially Jill Getzan, an amazing ceramics artist and dear friend) and the frequent push I received from Margaret while I was first learning ceramics.  I can't overstate the importance Margaret played in my life during those years.  Working in clay was a stabilizing force for me.  When she pushed me to create visual art, Margaret helped me focus all my attention on what I was making at the moment.  She pushed me to focus on art and other important things in life.  That is why she is on my remarkable person list.

And Finally....  Margaret Cardwell passed away on December 18, 2010, at the age of 92.  I last saw her and John in the fall of 1980, when I visited them in Illinois.  We went to the Covered Bridge Festival in Indiana during that visit, and I have a beautiful photo of them from that day.  Although I lost touch with Margaret and John after that visit, I still have all the ceramic pieces I made in her classes, and I still think about the remarkable things they did for me.

Article 9: Stephen W. Porges

I met Steve Porges on a volleyball court in the summer of 1974.  I ran a summer outdoor league in Urbana, Illinois, and after the final matches were concluded, he asked if I would like to join their co-ed team to play in the upcoming fall indoor league in Champaign.  His team was comprised mostly of people from the University of Illinois Psychology Department, and it included his wife, Sue Carter.  Over the next two years, our team won five of the six park district leagues that we entered.  Steve and I were the big hitters and blockers, and our styles complemented each other, since he is left-handed and I am right-handed.  We could both jump well and were serious competitors, and we both thoroughly loved the sport.

As with many of the teams in those leagues, the tradition after each evening's matches was to grab a pizza and beer at the closest pizza restaurant, so we often sat together and talked for an hour after our matches.  That is how our friendship developed beyond being volleyball court mates.  One thing that set Steve apart from most of the other people was that he was so engaging and present.  He asked questions about me and my life, and he listened intently.  Years later I realized that people in my new home, California, get to know each other primarily by doing things together, while people in the Midwest get to know each other through talking and listening.  Steve was one of the great "listeners" in my life.

When I look back on the close friendship we developed during my last two years in Illinois, it isn't at all surprising to me.  We had both grown up Jewish and easily expressed our emotions and feelings, while enjoying a wry sense of humor.  We were both greatly influenced by music--Steve had been a very good classical clarinetist, and I had been in a folk band and was a songwriter.  We both loved volleyball and played a LOT of it during those two years--always on the same team.  And we both had found our professional callings in life--he as a neuropsychologist and I as a computer systems analyst.  We both loved talking about our work.

To begin to understand the impact that Steve has had on my life, I should say some things about his career and work.  Steve is probably the most intelligent person I've ever known well.  He currently holds the position of Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University and is a part time Professor of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina.  He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago and at the University of Maryland.  He's a former recipient of a National Institute of Mental Health Research Scientist Development Award and has published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers across an amazing number of disciplines, including anesthesiology, critical care medicine, ergonomics, exercise physiology, gerontology, neurology, obstetrics, pediatrics, psychiatry, psychology, space medicine and substance abuse.  In one interview of Steve a couple years ago (from which I took much of this biographical information), neuropsychologist Rick Hanson commented that, if a Nobel Prize were awarded in psychology, Steve would certainly have been a recipient by now.

To quote from the biography in Rick Hanson's "Hardwiring Happiness" series of interviews, "In 1994 [Steve] proposed the Polyvagal Theory, a theory that links the evolution of the vertebrate autonomic nervous system to the emergence of social behavior.  The theory provides insights into the mechanisms mediating symptoms observed in several behavioral, psychiatric, and physical disorders.  The theory...provides a theoretical perspective to study and to treat stress and trauma."  The titles of his two most recent books indicate the breadth and importance of Steve's work.  The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication and Self-regulation was published in 2011, and Clinical Applications of the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe was published in 2013.

Steve was certainly laying the groundwork for his Polyvagal Theory in the years that I first knew him.  Many of our conversations included discussions about his initial theories linking physiology and behavior.  I recall discussing how he wanted to analyze the complex wave that is comprised of a person's vagus nerve signal and heart rate, break down that wave into its component frequencies, associate those frequencies with different afflictions, such as hypertension and autism, and then be able to predict and treat those afflictions if the frequencies were abnormal, even in newborns!  He told me once that he enjoyed discussing his theories with me because (a) I understood what he was saying, (b) I challenged him by asking questions and (c) I was not an academician.

I think Steve's greatest ability as a psychologist and theoretician is the far-reaching, interdisciplinary quality of his work.  His theories are not simply scientific postulations, but they have immense clinical and practical value in today's world.  To be successful in his research, Steve has had to be very good in a lot of disciplines, and one of those, interestingly, is mathematics. Important to the success of his research has been his "intuitive math abilities," as he likes to say.

Soon after we met, he told me that he had just learned about the Fourier transform, which (simply put) is a mathematical tool that decomposes a signal into its component frequencies, similar to breaking down a musical chord into its component notes.  In his research, Steve had been forced to re-invent auto- and cross-correlations, which is just one step away from the Fourier transform frequency extraction method, because he had never heard of Fourier transforms!  (Well, who has except for a mathematician?)  As a person who majored in math, that's pretty amazing to me.

In looking back over our years of friendship, it was difficult for me to define exactly how Steve changed the course of my life, mostly because the influences were complex and not typical of any relationship.  The impact of those influences has taken a lifetime to emerge, unlike the influences of other remarkable people I've known.  But these two influences have, indeed, changed my life greatly.

Steve pushed me to always maintain diverse interests. This may seem like an odd way to influence another person's life, but Steve was the first one to make me fully aware that you are healthier when you actively nourish all parts of your life.  Steve saw me through some difficult times, but amid each emotional upheaval, he pushed me to see the importance and value of different parts of me.  He urged me to integrate those interests and activities, so I would not be consumed by the loss of any one of them.  He would ask me about my music, my sports activities, my computer projects, my reading, my ceramics, my physical health, my relationships.  If I were feeling down about something, he'd urge me to go play volleyball.  If work wasn't going well, he'd urge me to write a new song.  If I were grappling with a philosophical question, he'd encourage me to work it out in the ceramics studio.

I shared a lot of experiences with Steve that led me to realize how important diverse interests are in a person's life--from competing together in volleyball to discussing a computer technique over lunch, from seeing violinist Yehudi Menuhin at the San Francisco Symphony (while he and Sue were on sabbatical at Stanford University in 1981) to attending a lecture he gave in a psychology class at U.C. Davis.  I always admired that Steve could pay such careful attention to each part of his life.

For many years I've been told by people that I have an inordinate number of interests and activities.  Steve pushed me to keep those interests alive, in effect creating my own health safety net.  It goes further than having a busy lifestyle.  If one can be deeply involved in diverse things, then life changes, such as retirement, need not be so challenging.

Integrating and nourishing my diverse interests led to the second influence Steve has had on me.

Steve pushed me to be more resilient.  Steve was really the first person to make me aware that mental health, emotional health, and physical health are deeply connected.  (I may even add "spiritual" health.)  He would ask, "Are you taking care of yourself?"  He wasn't asking if I was taking my vitamins; he was inquiring whether I was paying attention to and taking care of all the parts of me.  I think his profound empathy and concern for other people has led him on a natural path in developing his Polyvagal Theory, which opens doors to exploring the range of human behavior when a person feels "safe," not safety from being isolated, but safety while interacting with other people.  In one interview, Steve stated, "We make the world better by making people safer."

Steve has pushed me towards safe places.  I remember telling him once in a phone conversation that I was feeling down about something, and an hour later he showed up at my door with two full bags of groceries, just to make sure I was eating well.  Who even thinks to do that for someone, much less carries through on the thought?  That night I ate well and felt better.

Resilience is the ability to stabilize oneself after a challenge.  I am still working on that set of skills, as we all are.  One of my favorite quotes from Steve is, "Healthy steady states are not steady," so we can expect life to throw us challenges.  As part of my physical health issues in the last twelve years, I have sought and received the support of many others, especially my wife, Suzanne, and through those experiences my resilience has improved.  There was a time in my life when I was a lot less resilient, but Steve was the first to push me towards more resilience.

And Finally... In this article I have not said much about Steve's wife, Sue Carter, who also became a dear friend of mine.  To quote a Wikipedia article on her, she "is a biologist and behavioral neurobiol-ogist.  She is an internationally recognized expert in behavioral neuroendocrinology.  In 2014 she was appointed Director of The Kinsey Institute and Rudy Professor of Biology at Indiana University.  Dr. Carter was the first person to identify the physiological mechanisms responsible for social monogamy."  She was also the first to discover the relationship between oxytocin and social behavior.

Sue is such a warm, modest person that it was a long time before I discovered how highly regarded and accomplished she is in her field.  I was at Steve's and Sue's home one Saturday afternoon when I asked what they were doing that evening.  She responded that Masters and Johnson were joining them for dinner!  (I offered to bring the wine, but she said they had that covered.)  Now she's head of the Kinsey Institute, which was founded in 1947 by Dr. Alfred Kinsey (whose research was the basis for the Kinsey Reports).

My final words about Steve refer back to my article on Gary Usher in this series, where I mention that my search for a life's philosophy was first influenced by Gary.  For all practical purposes, that search lasted for nine years and culminated in a brief conversation that Steve and I had in a San Francisco deli one night, before going to the symphony.  We often discussed philosophical questions, and Steve knew I was searching for my "meaning in life," my theory to explain the reasons for living.

Suddenly, I got it, as simple as it could be.  I said, "Somehow life has always been a conflict for me between pursuing what I wanted to do and helping others.  Now I see that they have to work together.  The secret of life is to be the best you can be and to do good for others.  Isn't that right!?"  Steve looked up and replied, "Yes, that's right.  Would you pass the mustard?"