A Memorable Journey

I’ll do a wrap-up post on my time at WWDC, but I felt that I had to write about this first. On the way back to Van­cou­ver from San Fran­cisco, I had sched­uled a shut­tle, but at the last minute, can­celed and decided to use BART again. It was one of those deci­sions that I’ll no doubt look back on and think, it’s a good thing, because oth­er­wise I wouldn’t have had the expe­ri­ence that I had. Fri­day the 13^th has always been lucky for me, and this June 13^th was no exception.

After board­ing the train at Civic Cen­ter, after 2 or 3 stops, 2 men in suits got on the train. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Navy blue suit, blue eyes and gray hair, a US Flag lapel… it was Howard Dean. Yes that Howard Dean, the for­mer Gov­er­nor of Ver­mont, front-runner can­di­date for Pres­i­dent in 2004 (whose cam­paign I worked on) and cur­rently, the Chair­man of the Demo­c­ra­tic National Com­mit­tee. ‘I’m never going to have another chance like this,’ I said to myself. In a moment or two, I got up the nerve and intro­duced myself to him, telling him that I had worked on his cam­paign (He imme­di­ately said ‘Thank you’ for that) and that I was a great admirer of his. He was on his way to some meet­ings at hotels at the air­port, and to avoid the traf­fic, had decided to take BART. I told him where we had moved (and why). He had many ques­tions about Van­cou­ver; he hadn’t vis­ited the city for 40 years. He did men­tion, that he loved Canada, and often went to a fam­ily house in Nova Sco­tia, near Bras d’Or Lake (since Ver­mont is so close to the Cana­dian bor­der). Pam and I had gone to that area for our hon­ey­moon. He talked about how cos­mopoli­tan a rep­u­ta­tion that Van­cou­ver has, and that he could absolutely under­stand our move here. He asked if we were going to get Cana­dian cit­i­zen­ship, and that obvi­ously, being a techie, I would have had no prob­lem get­ting landed immi­grant sta­tus. We chat­ted about a num­ber of sub­jects: the Pri­mary, What Pres­i­dent Barack Obama will do to help put the coun­try back on the right track (and whether we’d return after that), even a bit about our land in Ver­mont (“You should hang on to that”, Dean said. “When we get out of this Real Estate slump, that’s going to be worth some seri­ous money.”). We rem­i­nisced a bit about when I had last seen him on the cam­paign, in Portsmouth, New Hamp­shire, when he spoke by the river, with boats with his ban­ners float­ing back and forth behind him. When I com­mented on the flag pin on his lapel, he said that it was “to show the Repub­li­cans that they don’t own the flag”. He laughed when I sug­gested that per­haps the Democ­rats could have a slightly dif­fer­ent (and maybe a more ele­gant) design for it.

To prove that this is not what it sounds like, a ‘tall tale’, I got his assis­tant to take a pic­ture of the two of us, seated on the BART seat:

We parted as he went off to his meet­ing, and I headed to my check-in for the flight home, feel­ing as if I were in the air already. At the gate, I imme­di­ately called fam­ily all over North Amer­ica to tell them of my good for­tune and began this post.

My last­ing impres­sion of Dean is pretty much how I imag­ined him one-on-one. He seemed inter­ested and charm­ing, intel­li­gent, a good lis­tener and a smart busi­ness­man. He was very gra­cious, and seemed gen­uinely inter­ested and engaged. In short, I was not disappointed.

I sus­pect that the aver­age per­son has a shot at meet­ing and talk­ing to, per­haps 1 or 2 famous peo­ple in their life­time. You hope that those celebri­ties are peo­ple that you’d also like to meet and per­haps even some­one who you admire. I’ve actu­ally had more than my share of meet­ings with famous peo­ple in my life so far. I’ve met and even had some con­ver­sa­tions with sev­eral com­posers, includ­ing Olivier Mes­si­aen, Aaron Cop­land, Vir­gil Thomp­son, Ned Rorem, Elliott Carter, Steve Reich and Leonard Bern­stein, play­wright Edward Albee, the writ­ers Isaac Asi­mov and William Gib­son, and some brief moments where I shared a tran­sit ride with Michael Dukakis and William Weld (It’s odd how I always meet the politi­cians when rid­ing on mass tran­sit) I’ve even met some lumi­nar­ies in soft­ware and busi­ness, includ­ing John Scul­ley (the first CEO of Apple Com­puter while Steve Jobs was in exile) and Bill Atkin­son, one of the more inter­est­ing fig­ures in the his­tory of com­put­ers (he invented 2 early pieces of soft­ware for the Mac, which became the first of 2 cat­e­gories of soft­ware, Mac­Paint, which begot bitmap edi­tors and Hyper­Card, which it may be argued, was a pre­cur­sor to the World-wide Web and has been said to be the inspi­ra­tion behind the con­cept of the Wiki). As Nearly-Canadians (and as I’ve noted in pre­vi­ous posts in this blog), Pam and I even shared a pic­nic table with actress Nancy Robert­son (who plays Wanda on “Cor­ner Gas”) and briefly met Roch Car­rier, the author of The Hockey Sweater, a clas­sic story, ani­mated film and key­stone of Cana­dian identity.

Nev­er­the­less, it was great to finally be able to tell Howard Dean how much I had looked up to him. On June 13, 2008, with­out any warn­ing, I got a chance to talk to one of my per­sonal heroes, and I’m thrilled.