Johanna's Memorial Talk

March 17, 2012

 

Steve

 

In the almost beginning, there was Steve,

and it has been so ever since.

 

We met in Mrs. Kerahare’s seventh grade class in McLean, Virginia in 1959.

I was eleven. Steve was twelve.

 

We were simple and pure and open.

We were very young.

We were different as night from day.

We were best friends from the start.

 

He gave me courage.

I gave him vulnerability.

Together we grew a lifetime –

a friendship powerful enough to support and inform

the foundation of the life that was to come.

 

We were part of a remarkable gang of four.

There was Steve, Dave, Suzy and me.

We were military brats.

We were kindred spirits.

We supplied the ground for each other’s roots to grow –

the fertilizer for each other’s minds to blossom.

 

We were miners for a heart of gold,

heeding our generation’s clarion call

to love and truth and right action.

 

Bob Dylan seeded our thoughts and lit a fire in our bellies.
He said the answer was blowing in the wind,

and together, we went a searchin.

 

Steve was our audacious, dear leader.

For better and for worse, I can tell you:

He was born that way.

 

Oozing confidence in his steel-toed, black, motorcycle boots,
he fearlessly led us into territory where no man or women had ever gone,
or so we thought.

 

Somehow he just knew everything about everything.

In the halls of McLean High they whispered:

He could read as fast as JFK.

 

 

Steve held up my sky.

In my darkest hours –

which were embarrassingly numerous in those days -

he believed in me.

 

He was one of the first positive voices in the soundtrack of my inner dialog.

He unapologetically poked holes in my sad story while cheering me on.

He counseled me to kick the shit out of my fear and grab life by the horns.

 

I think it’s fair to say, he taught me how to think.

Without him, I never could have dared to dream so big,

or question authority,

or think outside the lines.

 

I would never have thrown my head back

and laughed out loud at paradox.

 

His brilliant, hilariously irreverent mind was always on duty.

I can hear him now, bragging about how he aced his college boards and won a national merit scholarship.

 

I’m gonna apply to all them ivy-league schools just to make em let me in! he growled.

He did, and they did.

Bad Bob was well on his way to infamy. 

 

When I heard the unbearable news that Steve had left the building,

I madly started searching thru my old letters.

 

And there I found him in big bold handwriting that took up the whole page.

Even in his letters from Harvard, he said it like it was.

I think he’d like it if I read you some of what he wrote in response to my discontent with college. 

 

I’m telling you Jo – if you’ve got the urge for going, then go. Be careful about where you move to, but go, get out of Maryland. Somebody or other said that the value of a life was measured by the intensity with which it was lived. Don’t be a burnt out case somewhere in the wilds of Maryland. It’s the only life you have, don’t run it out someplace you don’t want to be. Put on your traveling shoes and go.

 

And a few months later, after I’d taken his advice and found a better place for myself at the American College in Paris, he wrote the following vintage Dantzker:

 

Sept 27, 1966

 

Jo,

 

It’s fall and school has me again. I trust you’ve also found someplace suitable to alight for the winter. Somehow a year in Paris seems better than a year in Cambridge, though there seems to be no good reason.

 

…Your travels sound great. People say it’s nice to go home, but I’d rather wander forever.

 

…My summer was profitable but tedious. My job was very interesting but it took so long – up at 7 in order to catch a ride and not home and done with dinner until 7. The only thing it taught me was not to do it again. I’m supposed to be an economics major here, but what I’m really interested in is social agitation. I’m up for riots and fires and explosions. I find it difficult to write about but: I’m violent. That’s probably the most succinct explanation of the way I am these days. All my solutions to social problems or any situation is simply to shoot the people. I think violence is a perfectly usable way to achieve social change.

 

He then blithely changed the subject to his plans to hook up with Dave at Haverford and Suzy at Antioch. He wanted to buy a car to go with his motorcycle and things like that. And then at the end he threw in some more wise advice for me to ponder.

 

…As for your parents, ignore them. You’re almost 19 and there comes always the time of the big break. Sometime you’ll have to break with father and assert yourself as an adult.

 

I hope you reply sooner than I. Your beautiful letters warm a cold winter’s day.

 

Steve

 

We went on to share many fantastic adventures in those formative years.

We drove cross-country four times I think.

I got the full force of his many sides.

 

I will treasure more than ever my supply of vivid memories

that stretch across our lifetime.

 

Steve lives in my heart now.

I can still hear his voice and feel the power

of the fierce, sweet truth with which he lived.

Ten thousand thank yous my dear friend.

Ten thousand thank yous.

 

Johanna