Steve Jobs

I met Steve Jobs only once. I was in medical school, and my father and Ann invited me to dinner. Ann, my father's second wife, was Apple's first human resources director, and the two of them acted in some ways as mentors to Steve. We were the same age, and they thought we might connect on some level.

One of the first things a person noticed about Steve was his physical grace. It was something he held onto during all the years of cancer and illness later in life-= the long, lithe body and the ease of moving. After dinner he folded himself into a cross-legged position on the floor and talked about how he would like to live a Zen-like life with no clutter and very few possessions.

His physical grace was accompanied by a restless, probing mind. I could almost see him breathing knowledge and ideas from the air around him. He gobbled up ideas. He hardly talked to me at all. It was my father and Ann he focused on and their knowledge of business and life he wanted.

Somehow, through the keenness of his aesthetic eye and his insistence on user-friendliness, Steve brought that sense of grace and ease to Apple users everywhere. When Apple shouldered him aside inn1985, its vision sagged. Then Steve came back and brought out the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. All of these carried so much of Steve's sensibility--his genius for style==that people all over the world are feeling they lost a brother today.