I'd finally gotten around to writing my first entry for 2003. It started like this:

Here I thought, I should put in a link to Sam's page. He must have some recent exhibits I could point people towards; I always thought his stuff was very cool. Sam had an inarguable role in my decision to follow my gut and study art in college. It would be kind of funny if he noticed the traffic coming in from my page and discovered a little online homage to him.

The google search came up with a bunch of Sam Walkers. One, I learned, makes techno music. Probably not my Sam Walker, but I vowed to check it later. The whole reason I was thinking about him was because, after I took his Printmaking class and found myself strangely in love with smelly inks and the alchemy of intaglio, he urged me to dig in to the art program and take Drawing classes. I shook off his suggestions; the Printmaking class had been an indulgence, nothing more. "I can't draw," I told him. It was true, as far as I knew. I was never that arty kid in high school who made the eerily accurate drawings and was urged to apply to the art schools. I'd steered clear of art classes and quietly took a bazillion photographs, standing over the ghostly assembling images floating in pans of chemicals, wishing like anything that I knew how to paint. The idea that I could take art classes without already knowing how to draw was unthinkable to me. I couldn't make my hand obey the dictates of realism. It was hopeless; nothing I ever attempted would look quite like what I intended.

Sam waved aside my concerns. Somewhere in the conversation, he said something I've never forgotten. "You don't take Drawing class to learn how to draw," he said, "you take it to learn how you draw."

Nothing I've ever done -- story, painting, collage or photograph -- has ever turned out quite like I meant it to. All the best ones got away from me somehow. If my hands had merely obeyed my will and produced a perfect rendition of my intent, where would the magic be? The class demanded that learn the basic techniques of realism, of rendering reality. But I never loved the accurate images the same way I could the ones where uncertainty gave way to something unexpected.

I was thinking about this in the context of leadership... I was going to steer the article towards the realization that I couldn't just copy what I'd seen other officers do. I needed to spend the time finding out how I was going to do it myself. It was going to be a neat little examination of the risks of doing the things that you really care about -- the things that really matter because you've secretly wanted them and suddenly find them within your grasp. Isolated in the grotesque red light of the darkroom where I sank photo paper into the sour developing fluid, I wished I could trust my hands to paint. Like some nights at the rescue squad when I wondered if I could hack being an officer, transcending my introversion and uncertainty. I'm not a characteristic "leader" any more than I was an obvious artist with a sure and accurate hand. But I did at least begin to figure out how I draw.

It only took me a few minutes longer to locate Sam's trail on the web. Here's what I found: after a short battle with pancreatic cancer, Sam died on October 16, 1999, at the age of 49. There it is. My first ridiculous thought: he won't discover the sweet little paean to him I was planning.

Sam: sorry it took me so long to look you up. There's a kind of survival in the graces and changes we make to the lives of others, and in that regard, I carry your indelible imprint.