Finding our way as misfits
And a tribute to my dear friend Steve
Last week I launched Inner Life with my friends Sam Kahn (author of “Castalia”) and Mary L. Tabor (author of Mary Tabor “Only Connect”). Sam kicked off our first proper post on Tuesday, with his reflection on David Graeber’s iconic essay “Bullshit Jobs.” And you should see a new post later today. If you’d like to follow our collaborative, which offers intellectual writing twice a week, subscriptions are free.
Almost exactly a week ago I lost a dear friend, Steve Gorton. His heart stopped suddenly while he was running an errand for a friend. He had the wherewithal to pull onto the shoulder, out of traffic, and that’s where the first responders found him twenty minutes later. I include a brief memorial to Steve here because he was one of my strongest supporters throughout our family move. He would check in on me from time to time and offer some witty commentary on life in Idaho, such as his dog’s apparent indifference to elk and deer in their yard. “Maybe our dog is a sociopath,” he said. Another time, he wrote, “Most people I know choose what to me are the wrong luxuries, and seem to consider those luxuries to be necessities. They swallow a lot of resentment to fund their lives.” Steve was a successful businessman and whip smart, but he mastered the art of self-deprecation. “Perhaps you have heard of internet influencers,” he wrote once. “I am certain I would not make a good one, so I have decided to instead be an internet de-influencer. Internet de-influencers are people who post things that no one cares about. I believe I am very successful at that career.”
What Steve excelled at was making people laugh and making them feel loved. He confided in me that just before the birth of his son Samuel, named for the first Gorton to immigrate to America, he spent a lot of time worrying because he and his wife were starting a family relatively late in life. “One day at a restaurant,” he told me, “I was in line behind a dad with his young Down's boy and I saw the good way he was with his child. I immediately realized that no matter how Sam was, there would be love and it would be great.” We need more fathers like Steve in the world.
Steve was great at cheering me up, and he was one of the first subscribers to this newsletter. But long before I launched this site he eased my loneliness as a writer by reading drafts of nearly every essay I ever wrote, going back more than twenty years. There aren’t many people in our lives who really make us feel like what we say matters. But Steve was one of those people for me, and I hope that my writing gave him a small measure of the joy he brought to my life. If you’d like to read more about Steve, his full obituary is here.
But another reason I wanted to begin today’s discussion with a tribute to Steve is that he and I bonded, in part, because we have both often felt like misfits. He never quite belonged in Missouri or Kansas, where he was raised. He found his spiritual home as a young man in northwestern Montana and northern Idaho, and even after he returned to Kansas City to take over his father’s shipping business, he yearned for the mountains. Steve was very sociable and moved easily between Amish and Mennonite communities and the business world. He could enjoy a Sunday service and also yuk it up with an apostate like me. But most of us who feel that visceral pull to the dark northern woods are drawn there because it is a place where it feels natural to be alone. There is something about that deep fir forest that speaks to our own melancholy, that doesn’t comfort us so much as assure us that the part of us that doesn’t fit anywhere else has its objective correlative in talus slopes or beneath the cathedral-like dome of a mature cedar canopy or in the rumble of rivers so powerful they roll boulders over their beds.
This part of me, which I shared with Steve, dovetails with Sarah Trocchio’s feeling of being an academic misfit who is, nonetheless, finding ways to flourish in a profession that rarely shares her values. And that is where I’d like to start our discussion today. If you missed Sarah’s inspiring story on Tuesday, you can find that here.