Let's Play Twister, Let's Play Risk: What We Learn From Our Mentors

We Pull Our Beliefs From The People We Meet

My friend Paul would have been 57 on Friday. He's been gone for 14 years, or half of a Saturn cycle. I casually mention astrology here because I am reminded of his awesome eye roll - which he delivered every time it came up in conversation. He wouldn’t accept astrological insights as truths, but he didn’t argue against them either. His neutrality meant that I was speaking a language he didn’t want to have to learn, and that was a valid point about knowledge that has stayed with me. Paul was good at creating natural boundaries and parameters, because he saw everything as a project to organize and manage. His greatest superpower was grasping the big picture before sorting all the details, which made him an effective Mentor at many levels. He liked to make people feel good – and he knew that started with himself. 

I continue to be educated by his presence in my life, and (astrologically speaking) 14 years is a good time for examining what we’ve learned, so I’ll start with the timing of his death: He was 42 years old. According to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 42 is the ultimate answer to all questions of “Life, the Universe, and Everything”. He knew that, plus a lot of other cool facts about how the world works. I wonder about that ‘coincidence’ or ‘synchronicity’, along with many others. It often appeared as if Paul already had some of the answers to the questions we all ask ourselves about who we are and why we are here (at least in the context of the 1990s). He was a cool kid, but only because he had no real desire to be one, and that was part of his magic.

He talked about the end of life with regularity and ease, and I eventually got comfortable with this objective discussion. At this stage, it has become part of my healing work, and he deserves some credit for opening that door. Paul believed that he wouldn’t live very long, and he had concerns about becoming an absent husband and father. The roots of this issue ran deep for him, and he didn’t take on either of those roles without weighing the merits and value. He faced his fears and did what he wanted to do with no regrets. He loved his wife and kids very much. Even though he was right about leaving the planet early (as he was about most things), I know his intentions were to give his best – regardless of the amount of time he got to spend doing it. I can’t speak for his family, but it sure appears that he followed through on that for them, and for himself. 

He was a great friend to a lot of people, with additional style points for spot-on practical guidance. As a mechanical engineer, he didn’t mind telling people what to do, but he didn’t get off on it either – he just happened to be good at it. He had a semi-public way of calling his friends out when he thought their choices were wrong (which was often the case with my personal life). He once said to me, “this will be the dumbest thing you ever do in your life,” and so far, he’s probably right! His approach was direct, funny and real, which helped any resulting embarrassment wash away quickly. He’d follow it up with his one-armed bear hug, always giving big brother energy (mentor and tormentor)… even to people who were older than him. You could feel his strength, energetically, even if you didn’t call it that. I think we can all agree that he was a structurally supportive human.

To be successfully wise and foolish at the same time takes a certain finesse, and he walked that tightrope like a master. His ability to do that attracted what some would argue to be a bit of a cult following (known as The Branch Cravidians and/or Brandt Cravenians in underground circles). This status crowned Paul something of a Captain and Social Director, as well, and he made the job his own. This is a good time for a shout out to Team Stupid, Party Rescue and Club Craven: facilitators of fantastically good times! Whether it was a BBQ competition or a canoe trip, he would wake you up blaring Rush, after you’d barely fallen asleep because of the previous night’s impromptu dance party. He’d also threaten to kick you out of the inner circle if you couldn't hang, but he didn’t really mean it. He would, however, make you ride in a different car if you showed any signs of weakness or whining on a road trip. Facts.

It was clear to me that people wanted to do what Paul was doing, simply because he made it fun and joyful while he was doing it. It didn’t really matter what it was. He once dragged me to a KY-102 blood drive on his motorcycle and I laughed for 3 hours while also fearing for my life. We came back to work half-drunk in the rain, and instead of keeping that fact to ourselves like normal employees would, he just walked in and announced what we had done as if we had just won first place doing it. I know this was a risky move, but with Paul at the helm, I always felt invincible. Probably because no one ever questioned us, and we never got in trouble. #superlucky.

His attitudes toward life were loosely anchored to Jimmy Buffett’s lyrics and they blended beautifully with his own journey. He had his share of hardship and complications like everyone else, but he sailed through them head on, making sure he had the right tools for whatever he encountered. He was a hardcore manifester (he probably wouldn’t have called it that), and I wonder what these types of conversations would be like with him now, post-pandemic, with the BLM and Me Too movements as a landscape. I definitely looked forward to hearing his perspective because I learned things that expanded my own ideas, but the past 25 years have really moved the needle on my own ideas. It would be really fun to hear his take on 2024 (I’m imagining Bill and Ted). I honestly don’t know what he’d think of current events, and that’s okay with me.

I knew that our style of friendship meant a lot to me, but I didn’t understand the lasting impact it would continue to have throughout my life. Who knew that the songs we used to make fun of would show up on the radio whenever I need a directional push? Or that I would still hear his voice calling me “Magoo” whenever I’m not seeing something that seems obvious? Above all else, he has modeled a way for the rest of us to be present with meaningful moments, and I am grateful for the constant reminders he still sends me ways to do that. It ties my past feelings to my present triggers with wholeness. He understood that concept well before I did.

We met in junior high. We hung out occasionally, and worked together at Tippin’s Restaurant, but it wasn’t until he finished college and started looking for a job that he became a close friend, confidante, judge and heckler in my life. I’ve only met a few other people in the world that are like him, so it wasn’ hard to allow his input in each of those roles (even Judge) because he was good at them, and I trusted him to tell me exactly how he thought or felt about whatever I was doing. Paul E. Craven has been a true and honest Mentor to me, largely because of his impeccable comic timing and his willingness to be straight with the truth. He never once made me mad, because his intentions were never confusing. Again: parameters and boundaries.

We had established an “I have your back” rapport one night in high school. Paul was driving a bunch of us around on a weekend night, and on a stop at McDonald’s, we picked up my ex-boyfriend, who’s habit at the time was to ignore me whenever he saw me. This was no problem for me at school, but really embarrassing in front of the people in Paul’s car. I was able to play it cool until “our song” came on the radio (seriously?!), and then it was a little harder to hide my feelings. Universal timing.

Paul saw me struggling in the rearview mirror, and said nothing until we were away from everyone else. He didn’t know the history or why I was upset, but he listened to me spell it out. Then he looked me directly in the eye and said some version of his infamous empathy anthem, “It sucks to be you…”. It was so unexpected that it made me laugh, recovering my teenage pride instantly. Another time, I fell down some stairs, and he was the only person to see it. That incident provided us with a lot of laughs for a long time. Our feelings were never romantic – we bonded over intellectually silly things and music. He was obviously a very special person all around, and it felt like he was “on my side”, somehow, even when he didn’t agree with me. Way better than fake agreement, in my opinion.

One of my favorite stories is the one that put us together as office mates for a few years. I was working for an engineering company, Kansas City Equipment (KCE), and they were looking to hire two new engineers. Paul had just graduated from KU and participated in a large group interview event. The stack of resumes had been sitting on my desk ever since (untouched), as the KCE Owners, Mike and Larry, thought through what they wanted to do. A few weeks went by without any action, and we received a phone call about it. The caller said he’d interviewed for the job, but that his phone had been disconnected for a couple weeks, and he wondered if anyone had tried to reach him. His voice sounded familiar, and as I listened to him talk, I was excited to find it was my old friend, Paul Craven.

Needless to say: I put his resume on top, recommended that he not tell them about his disconnected phone and then lit a fire under Mike and Larry’s desire to get someone hired. They remembered who he was, and since I could vouch for his integrity, they hired him immediately. 

Paul and I shared an office, and I have never had so much fun being at work, doing my job. Day to day crap is where the bulk of our friendship formed, because sharing stories of mundane life grows our relationships, organically. Mistakes and miscues happen in every office, but we always enjoyed exploiting them for our own amusement, and we took every opportunity to do that. I laughed a lot every single day.

We were a small company, which gave us good access to the owners’ ears, and Paul and I had lunch with our boss Larry a few days each week (thanks again, Larry!). We were able to maintain good work communication and get approval to do things we wanted to do – like getting paid to come in and paint the offices on the weekend (which we enjoyed with beers and music), or drive his company BMW to Colorado for a Jimmy Buffett concert (which we also enjoyed with beers and music). It was the early nineties and we did more than our share of bragging about who partied harder the night before. In fact, we had a stretch where whoever was the least hungover had to go get us Egg McMuffins before McDonald’s stopped serving breakfast. *This may be a reason why they say youth is wasted on the young?

Political correctness became ‘a thing’ around this time, and our office was dragging their feet loudly (and proudly) about it. PC might have been Paul’s initials, but it definitely was not his strong suit. I'm happy that he didn’t have to figure out a way to answer for the bad choices of white men in the world, because he really was one of the best of them. He was still part of the problem, yes, but only because he’d been fully conditioned to be that way. I know that’s not a popular perspective, but I stand by it in the vein of doing the best we know how to do with what we are given. And he made that effort, even though we weren’t seeing the real problem.

To that point, Paul was a huge Mojo Nixon fan, and I remember him telling me that I couldn’t go to the concert because he straight up didn’t want to have to defend how much he enjoyed it, or watch me be bothered by Mojo’s crass statements. This seemed fair at the time (caring, even!). I knew he wouldn’t have organized the world how it was/is, he just knew instinctively how to work with what was there. I didn’t think/know to fault men for that stuff at the time - it was a much cloudier lens we were looking through, in general. Paul was an objective reasoner, an activist for honesty, but patriarchal change didn’t seem as possible then. For the record, I wouldn’t have liked the Mojo Show, and I’m glad he kept it real with me about it.

This next story hasn’t aged well, but it’s part of the reason why I am writing about Paul Craven right now. I’m finding that it is nearly impossible to create proper context around the things that have happened in the past, and how we handled them then vs. how we would approach them now. Our judgments and defenses sit out in front of the heart of each matter, making it difficult to explain ourselves. My friendship with Paul has a powerful lesson in how far women have come in enforcing workplace protections since the early nineties. On this issue, I made a point to be objectively aware of my feelings as it happened, because it simulated current events. Here is the sordid tale:

The morning after Anita Hill’s accusations against Clarence Thomas became public, I came in to work to find a can of Diet Coke sitting on my desk with several pubic hairs piled on top of it, and a bunch of nasty porn loaded onto my computer in the background. I wish I could say that I saw it differently than I did back then, (because I definitely do now), but I know that circa 1990, above all else, I was really happy to be included in the joke, even when it was at my expense. That was what the cool girls did so that they could stay in the room with the ‘guy talk’. Out of context, I’m not proud of it, but in context, it was sometimes as good as you could get.

I know that’s seriously messed up, but we were actively screwing up a whole lot of things back then, as a nation. I’m not sure whether Paul was the ringleader on this ‘prank’, but it didn’t matter that way… All of the guys were in on it, and they all thought it was hilarious. I remember declaring that “I am an actual poster child for sexual harassment right here, guys”, and  “do you effing idiots not have anything better to do?”, but those comments were drowned by laughter and back-slapping (mine included). I didn’t feel personally offended, just annoyed at ‘our’ ignorance, I guess. I’m not sure what happened to the Diet Coke, but chances are I cleaned it off and drank it while listening to Dennis Leary’s “I’m an Asshole” (one of our favorite songs).These were the normal conditions women dealt with regularly, and they didn’t even make us angry for the most part – our only recourse was to roll our eyes, and we know how effective that isn’t!

This incident seems sensational as I tell it, but it is insignificant in comparison to the whole of my experience at KCE, or my friendship with Paul Craven. They both taught me a lot about myself and helped me find ways to grow up and become the responsible adult that the world was requesting me to become. Paul showed me how to do that and still be able to have fun and enjoy the things that happen around me, no matter what they are. They say that Fun is what you make of it, and Paul spent his lifetime mentoring all of us toward embracing that belief. Both in and out of context, I am grateful to have those experiences.

Okay, maybe not the part where he drove us down a mountain barely using the breaks after we’d just done a beer tour in Golden, Colorado… I volunteer Rick Brandt to field comments about that story…he was there too! Meanwhile, I’m going to turn on REM’s Man on the Moon and remember the deep conversations it sparked when we first heard it, and then I’ll be open to seeing what comes next… Paul probably already knows.