Breath on Glass


This week I received sad news, a friend and peer of mine, Marshall died this week suddenly. He was only 42 years old. We worked together on many projects over the last decade, and I found myself thinking much about the day I first met him. How a simple phrase he said to me, made me like him instantly, and perhaps in that phrase I caught and understood something about him, something that in many ways exemplified the way he lived his life. That day all of those years ago, we were both "pretending" to be grown-ups in our suits and dress clothes for a business meeting, where he was presenting information about a site, that he felt strongly needed to be cleaned up and I was effectively one of the clients. He was in-front of me as we filed into the conference room, full of managers and decision makers, and I remember asking him who all of these people, and he said nothing but JAFOs-and I whispered whats a JAFO, and he said I will tell you later. After the meeting he explained to me that a JAFO, was just another fucking observer. I liked him instantly and had the wonderful experience of working with him for many years. In all of the years that I knew him, he had a slightly off-beat left-of-center way of looking at things and approached his life with gusto, whether in work or play. Every time I came to Austin, he took me out to lunch to eat at Ross's, where the food was good and plentiful (he loved good food), and invariably the conservation went from work to home, to his cats and his wife Cecily who lit his world. I saw him last in Chicago where we both spoke on the same panel, and where once again we were "pretending" to be adults. What image I will hold in my mind of him, is him in jeans, a Hawaiian shirt, and sandals, his arm around his wife, at dinner in the midst of a great story. Marshall was never once a JAFO.