My dear friend David Cobb has died.
Word travels slowly sometimes, so if you haven't heard the news that I just learned today on Facebook and then from other more reliable sources, David was hiking on a trail with his partner, Ruthi, had a heart attack and died, at the age of 63.
There are other people who can speak much more knowledgeably about David's early years growing up in a home without running water, on the oil-soaked shores of southeast Texas. About his years working as a lawyer, about the many organizations he founded and the many different sorts of campaigns he worked on. I'll just share a few of my personal recollections, and hope others more capable than I will have more expansive things to say.
My memory fades a lot over time, but according to my quick bit of research just now, it would have been the summer of 2002 when we met, though we were in touch intermittently for years prior to meeting.
The reason we were exchanging emails now and then in the late 1990's was because I was a touring musician singing leftwing songs -- a movement musician -- and David was a movement organizer, of the sort who understood the great power of culture in building anything.
He closed his law practice to focus full-time on organizing the Green Party in 2000, I believe. We met in Philadelphia in the summer of 2002 because of the mid-term Green Party convention that happened there then. Fellow musician Dana Lyons and I were singing at it, and Cobb was one of the organizers of the weekend.
David's wife, Nathalie Paravicini, was a co-chair of the party and was also at the conference, which was where I met her, as well.
They lived in Houston, Texas, then. The next time I was in Houston, a few months after that convention, I was going to look them up. I discovered that they had split up, and David had moved to the west coast, but Nathalie was still in Houston.
Nathalie and I became romantically involved and our daughter Leila was born a few years later, which only meant, among other things, there was that much more of a connection between Cobb and I.
In the years I spent based out of Houston back in the early aughts one of the highlights was my exposure to the local Green Party chapter that David had helped build, which was easily one of the biggest, most active, and most diverse, bilingual Green Party chapters in the country.
I saw David a whole lot for years in the early aughts. The Green Party was bigger and more organized than it had ever been in the US back then, and for people like David and I who did a lot of traveling and speaking or traveling and performing, there was a whole lot more money sloshing around on college campuses that student organizers put to great use, organizing conferences and hosting speakers and performers such as David and me.
David and Nathalie both continued their intense involvement with the Green Party for many years, in many capacities, which was one of a variety of reasons why I saw David often, whether it was in Pennsylvania, Texas, California, Oregon, or elsewhere. I don't have any recollection of the number of different protests or other events both of us were at, but certain ones stick to my memory more, like the time he got arrested for trying to participate in a presidential debate, and the wonderfully festive convention of the Student Greens in Texas around that time, when David was the Green Party's candidate for president in the 2004 election cycle.
One of the most frequent occasions I'd see him over the years became the times I'd be doing a west coast tour. Nathalie and I moved to Oregon a few years after David moved to California, so when I'd do a driving tour from Portland down to somewhere in California, I often visited David either on the way down or on the way up, to participate in events he was involved with organizing, or just to catch up.
I'm sure I'll be one of many people to say that David always seemed bigger than life, possessed of a relentless optimism and can-do spirit, even in the bleakest of times. When he was running for president, he conjured up a downright presidential air, and briefly allowed many of us to believe in such a dream, no matter how unrealistic.
David always seemed to be searching for what he could do that would potentially be the most useful in the service of humanity, which is clearly what motivated his involvement with the Green Party as well as his Move to Amend initiative and all the rest of it.
No matter how many times my friends keep dying, often much younger than anyone would hope, that sudden final absence is always shocking. For many years now, I do so much less traveling in the US, and have ended up seeing friends like him far too rarely, especially for the past decade or so. I was, though, looking forward to many more conversations about the state of the world with David Cobb, and now unfortunately it will remain the case that the last time we tried to have such a conversation, when he started up his podcast, I was suffering from an inexplicably terrible internet connection for most of the frustrating conversation.
And that's how it goes. Here's to you, Mr. President.
