Life is…
“Life is just a series of problems that you overcome one by one, and then you die,” says Maggie Smith’s character, Violet Crawley, dowager countess of Grantham in the popular PBS program, “Downton Abbey.”
Somehow we can see that it’s so much more, especially as we think about key moments in our life’s course, and how one person’s message set us off on new and compelling directions.
This weekend my friend Bob Borthwick shared an email from a childhood friend, Brant.
Brant had sat down for a drink with one of his favorite teachers from Cal Poly and they shared memories of their inspiring mentors. Brant’s teacher recounted his journey back to meet a former drafting instructor who had taken the time to demonstrate how a 3-D object can be portrayed on a two-dimensional drawing—in a way that clicked with him. One can’t be an architect without getting this relationship and that revelation was a deciding moment for his whole career and all those he would influence. Back to Oklahoma he went to tell his instructor what it had all meant to him. He found that instructor teaching another rambunctious class, trying to get through. After all these years, no former students had ever taken the time to express their appreciation, his grateful instructor told him emotionally.
This was Brant’s impetus to get in touch with his former community college English teacher. He recounted his story, before and after he experienced her class, wanting her to know what an important effect she had had on his life.
After dropping out of high school Brant found himself floundering in San Bernardino, driving a fuel truck and “communing with other misfits” like himself. A friend sold him on going to his first English class because the instructor was “really hot, looked a lot like Barbi Benton, but was extremely intelligent and taught a great class.” He found a teacher who “seemed to engage the classroom with a creative energy” he had never experienced before in school. Brant stayed with it, finishing the class as a different, more confident person. That class led to taking others, and to his eventually getting an architecture degree at Cal Poly. Now he’s working for an architect in San Francisco and has started a music production company.
Bob countered with his story of hearing a talk as a struggling community college student. Howard Boltz, the founder of Cal Poly’s landscape architecture department, spoke enthusiastically at Bob’s architecture class. “I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a landscape architect,” Bob recalled. Boltz encouraged and guided Bob to transfer into the program. Now Borthwick heads his own firm and is completing over 40 years in the profession.
For me it happened at Oregon State where I went to summer school to study tailoring and clothing design. To fill out my schedule to get enough credits for my home economics minor, I took a two-week workshop by a guest professor from the University of Minnesota, Gertrude Esteros, called “Art in the Environment.” I thought it would be “How to select drapes for your home.”
In one of the first classes up came a photo of an apartment she had lived in. She had a temporary assignment and she knew she would only be in that apartment for six months. Still, she fixed it up beautifully. But the lesson wasn’t in the details of what she had done, but the reason for doing it. “Take care of every environment you are living in, no matter how short your stay is planned to be. It is affecting everyone in it, and you must make that influence as inspiring as possible,” she impressed.
Through the Lewis Mumford planning films, field trips to planning and landscape architecture projects in Portland, and a housing study we were assigned, the possibilities of landscape architecture, environmental design and planning opened up for me for the first time. I was no longer an undirected art and clothing design student, but a highly motivated and inspired graduate who would seek out how to affect the environment as a profession.
Where is Professor Esteros now that nearly 50 years have passed? Why had I never told her how much her philosophy and class had meant to me? Google tells me her papers are in the archives of the University of Minnesota. It gives her birthdate as 1914, with no ending date. There is an article from a local paper with a touching portrait of her along with stories from her Red Cross service in New Guinea during WWII.
She was 97 then. Next step, a letter goes to St. Paul, Minnesota, hoping to find Gertrude Esteros, age 101.
As she and our mentors show us, life can be a series of inspirational moments created by caring, sensitive people, leading us to a more lovely world. We have only a short stay here.
Landscape architect Ann Christoph is a former member of the Laguna Beach City Council.
