Tuesday, January 28th, 2025, would have been my brother John’s 75th birthday. I woke thinking, Oh, I need to call John today. How strange, how wrong, it felt not to have one of our cross-country chats. Like me, John was born and raised in Atlanta. When he was around thirty and I was twenty-ish, he moved to San Francisco. There, he became a clever, in-demand, pen-wielding ad man, later a creative director who befriended the celebrities he hired for shoots or met in Marin County on his children’s ball fields and school auditoriums, celebs like Steven Spielberg and Téa Leoni. Over the years, those of us living our quieter lives back east kept hoping something would draw John home to stay. We missed our smart gentle brother, but California had lassoed his heart for good. Our southern charm and Georgia sunshine were no match for the fog rolling in off the mighty Pacific, the hills rising impossibly beneath the wheels of the cable cars, the giant conifers piercing the skies, the 49ers, and the quirky beach towns where John summered with his family.
John’s son and daughter grew to love San Francisco and Marin County with a passion to rival his. On Saturday, the first anniversary of his passing, Ben and Laura Lee held a memorial service in Stinson Beach, the quirky beach town John loved best. Tucked below Mount Tamalpais in West Marin, Stinson curves along a peninsula east of Bolinas. Seals swim and dive for their dinners in the lagoon on the peninsula’s north side. Egrets and herons glide over the sea and roost in the trees.
Our family had visited John often in recent decades, and these wonders of Stinson, the memorial itself, brought him back to life in bittersweet ways I hadn’t expected. Ben and Laura Lee set up a display that featured laminated copies of the print ads John created. His original portfolio briefcases spilled their treasures: John’s brainstorming notes, folders holding rough drafts, more ads, including one for a brewery that features John himself striking a gangster-like pose. A longtime colleague told tales of John’s ad days and reminded us he earned a professional nickname–Mad Dog Mattingly–when he once shed his Southern gentleman skin to stand down a difficult and demanding director. John’s children shared stories about John as a California Dad–the hours he spent shoveling snow at their cabin in Lake Tahoe to create luge-worthy troughs for their sleds, the steak dinners and fish fries he prepped, his habit of pulling over at every turnout during countryside drives–“Take it in, kids” his favorite refrain as they gazed together at the sea, the mountains, the dramatic cityscape of San Francisco. As her comments drew to a close, Laura Lee spoke of John’s close relationship with his grandson, her five-year-old son Ollie, who called him Poppy. With that, Ollie rose from his seat and lifted a basket from a table near the front. “California poppies,” Laura Lee said as Ollie handed out small bags of seeds for those in attendance to plant. Later, she, Ben, and Ollie spread John’s ashes beneath a Blue Oak tree that rises leafy green atop a slope of Mt. Tam, where in better days John loved to hike and think and admire the view.
The next day, as we walked Stinson’s main drag, we paused in front of the tiny Stinson bookstore that sits across from a bar and grill called the Sand Dollar, a bookstore we learned John dreamed of owning. Sell books by day and live in the apartment above by night. Somehow I never knew, but that’s how John hoped to spend his golden years. I’d wager he read nearly every book in that store, but life got in the way. In his early fifties, John developed a bad back, had a couple of failed surgeries, and spent the next twenty years struggling to adjust to the often debilitating pain that resulted. His dream was deferred, as so many are. Though this makes my heart ache, I’m glad to know of it. It helps me better understand the brother I loved.
Home now, I can hardly wait for my poppies’ spring bloom. And I’m grateful for the new memories of John I’ve gathered, new images of him as a California man. Among these, I’ll cling to two in particular, one grounded in reality and the other a bit of a fantasy: John resting for eternity in the shade of his Blue Oak, a chilly breeze rustling and the mighty Pacific spread before him, and John very much alive, shelving books in his tiny store, his glasses on his nose and his mustache twitching as he chats and smiles and rings up customers. As dusk falls, he turns out the lights, scales the stairs without pain, and enjoys a steak and a glass of wine, the rumble of the surf in the distance and the summer bustle of his adopted town below his window.
