It is all about living a full life

If you have Spotify, here is David's musical playlist ;)

This is the beginning of my speech for the Memorial, still working on it ...

Thank you all for joining us in celebrating the extraordinary life of David Miller. I also want to thank you all for the incredible support that you all have given my family at this time.

Sorry that I have to read this, I am not good at giving speeches.

David was my North Star. I saw life through David in a different light, through him I saw incredible possibilities. I experience facts and history through his story telling. He seemed to know everything about everything. Simply put, He was my google search. When my friend Robin and I were on road trips, we only had to call David with a question about the area we were in, or about a town I wanted to know about, a mountain range that we were driving through and he would tell us a story on speaker phone. 

He was my political partner in crime. Because he represented the newspaper, he never posted anything political on Twitter or Facebook but we would rant together in front of the news. He would say something perfectly pithy, and I run to the computer, asked him to repeat it and post it as if I came up with it myself. Making me look like a genius. 

David was my project manager and interior design consultant. He taught me how to install molding, pick paint color, how to paint a wall properly. We remodeled most of our house after work and he taught me all of the tricks. I have painted a room more than once because it was not the color he thought it should be. He always picked the perfect frame for a piece of art. The perfect quilt pattern for a bed. I always trusted him to make the right decorating decisions.

He was my landscape manager. He taught me how to mow a yard and insisted it was a mowed a certain way, in the same pattern, and mow very slowly. We called him the midnight mower. He would start edging and weeding in the late afternoon, and always end up firing up the mower when it was turning dark. He almost always mowed in the dark. His last mower even had headlights. 

David was life’s DJ. He knew every fact about almost every band, musical artist, the type of music. He loved all types of music, blue grass, rock and roll, jazz, country and western, classical, popular, Christmas music was his addiction. He did not have a favorite type of music, he loved it all.
The first time my family met David in San Francisco he planned a week of entertainment. A Harry Connick jr concert at a winery, camping out at Yosemite, a night at the opera, a road trip to Hearst Castle. And he later documented the trip with music on two recorded cassette tapes and sent them to my family. It was the most amazing gift. He had the talent of making the perfect gifts to remember a special time.

I learned how to build furniture with him. We built things. I thought we were so nerdy when our favorite Saturday night tv viewing was PBS’s woodworking shows and lust after the tools they were using. And of course we watched This Old House and Hometime to learn tricks of the trade. 
When I decided I wanted to make art from wood and found objects, tools would magically appear in the garage to make that possible. He always encouraged me to do whatever I wanted to do and taught me the skills to do it.

When I lost my job during Covid he was my daily cheerleader. When I was down and disillusioned about not getting hired again, he gave me pep talks, talked up my talent, kept me going. But he also was my art director. I would do an illustration and ask “what do you think”. If he said “it’s Okay”, it knew it was not okay. That was his way of saying it needed improvement.

When I started photographing flowers, cameras and seamless backgrounds came on Christmas. One of the first rooms he remodeled in our house was my sewing room so I would have a special room to create.

We built this incredibly rich, fun, art-filled life together full of carved duck decoys, Oaxacan folk art sculptures, paintings, music, Indian pottery and totem poles. Not to mention camping trips, baseball games, cookouts, delicious food, kid adventures. I never really seemed to need anyone else. 

I always felt like I was living a dream with David. Simply put, he spoiled me rotten.