Skies Electric

David Crawford, assistant of Graphic design, passed away yesterday. He was young, probably in his mid to late thirties. Usually well dressed, very neat in appearance. You could tell by his stutter that he was intelligent, in the sense that he had too much to say, was thinking about so much that it was hard for him to keep up with his mind.

Once, while working in the studio where he was holding class, I saw something on the ground, moving fast, out of the corner of my eye. I got up and discovered it was a squirrel. I just kind of shouted "Hey! Guys! There's a squirrel running towards you." At first no one reacted, but eventually everyone started moving and trying to help the frantic squirrel get back outside. How these squirrels keep getting into the art building is still a mystery.

About a week later I was working, making coffees in the student center. David came up and ordered a coffee, mentioned that he remembered me as "the kid who found the squirrel", and told me that he had a squirrel story to tell me sometime. I kind of laughed, only because he had his own squirrel story. I told him I'd enjoy hearing it sometime.

About 4 or 5 days after that, I was in the same class I had been in before just before his class actually began. I jumped at the chance to ask him about his story. He casually obliged and told it to the 6 or 7 other people in the classroom. It went like this:

(Try to imagine this story told with a mild stutter. Not a speech impediment but something more charming and humanizing, something to let you know there's more going on in the person's mind than they can physically express.)

"So about 15 years ago I was living in a bad neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Everything was kind of dilapidated and falling apart and it just wasn't very well kept. Anyway, my roommate was a painter and had an art studio set up in one of the bedrooms. One day we were both home and we heard something rustling. It turns out there was a squirrel in his studio, running though paint and making a mess. We tried to corner him but he kept running around, covered in white paint. Eventually he ran out into the hallway and into the bathroom. And, okay, here's the punchline: he ran up the water pipe into our upstairs neighbor's apartment..."

He kind of smiled nervously when he finished the story because he realized his "punch line" was no punch line at all. Where one would expect the climax of the story, the highlight, it just ended. That alone made the story funny to me, that it would just stop abruptly with nothing very funny actually happening. I instantly decided that I liked this guy's sense of humor.

After that, I saw him several times. Once he was standing up at the top of the outdoors stairs going to the second floor of the art building, reading a magazine and looking out over the west lawn. I walked up the stairs (he was still reading) and paused ever so slightly as I rounded the corner so he would look up and we could exchange "hello"s. Another time I was walking out of his classroom when he was seated at the front. He said "hi" and I said "bye" a the exact same moment. I guess it makes sense that the first thing one would say is "hi", but seeing how I was leaving I thought it more appropriate to say "bye". Just one of those little oddities that make life wonderfully awkward, something that keeps a smile on your face while walking home.

The last time I saw him I was, once again, in the studio during his class. I was with another person and we were conversing and whatnot, unaware that the class had already begun. He approached us and asked us to be a little more quiet, that he couldn't concentrate with the noise we were making. We were instantly silenced and felt bad for disrupting his class. My friend Danny, who was in the class, noted that David wasn't the kind of guy who could yell across a classroom. He got up and walked over to talk to us because, as Danny said, he wasn't the kind of guy to ever raise his voice. Even if it was for a simple "hey, guys, quiet".

Outside of those three or four run ins, I didn't really know David at all. I had a little insight to his personality, enough of a taste to know that he was an interesting individual. Just a really smart guy with a lot to say. I'll miss you, David. I can't pretend like we ever knew each other outside of squirrel anecdotes, but I'd like to imagine we could have.

[I edited this post out of respect for David's family and friends. Though everyone considers their own speculation important it's not necessary to include here.]

I want to direct any traffic from this page (((here))), to a memorial site set up for David. There are lots of pictures and links to his own artwork there, including couple videos. It's wonderfully informative and well put together.