Dear HoCo Diary,
A little-known Colleen Morgenthau fact–mostly because it just doesn’t come up that often–is that I have a Master’s in Rhetoric. My interest in the field was and is rather traditional, in the sense that it has to do with the nuts and bolts of language, in particular tropes and figures, and their persuasive effects, the scholarship which was mostly done pre-20th-century. I thought of this phrase “nuts and bolts” as I walked up once again to Cured/18th & 21st, where I’d been two weeks ago to talk to local restaurateur Vince Culotta. I caught myself smiling goofily as I swung open the heavy door to the main entrance at how I’d thought “nuts and bolts” on my way to meet David Saunier a HoCo polymath. Because, one of the many wonderfully windy arteries leading into the beating heart of his rich, storied, very Howard life is a degree in architecture.
However, I didn’t know this when I came upon the first nugget of knowledge, in the form of the orthographic boldness of the name of the local business he co-owns, human | creative + code, that made me think and say to Robert, “I must interview this young man!” Such a fascinating spelling, and as all spellings are, persuasive and rhetorically telling in their own ways and to their own degrees.
David and I decided to meet at Cured in the latter half of the week to talk about owning a business in HoCo. I intentionally got there a few minutes early, worried that I’d have trouble finding parking at an eatery during lunchtime. I didn’t. In fact, three business-casual, professional men were saying their adieus, vacating their spots in the garage, just as I pulled up. I was slightly nervous, already impressed with David, and he hadn’t even said a word yet (aside from in Facebook Messenger to set up our chat). He has an intimidating list of accomplishment and a clear, native intelligence. I almost swiped the back of another car with the front bumper of my rental! As I got out of my car, I thought, “It’s so muggy–like a sauna. A Saunier-a!”
Related: Robert spoke with Reverend Regina Clay about spirituality and HoCo.
God Bless Air Conditioning
Inside the cool and calm of Cured, hostess Patty Wecker seated me at a cozy corner table among the warm, brown interior of the restaurant and the placid clink of silverware and glass. I was reviewing a list of questions I wanted to ask him, slightly nervous, when I heard a soft, “Hello,” next to me. The furrow in my brow awoke into raised eyebrows and parted lips.
I looked over, and my worst fear was realized: he was more dashing and handsome than in his pictures! Oh, no! He’s one of those people who you know just rolls out of bed and through the day being awesome like that. But I’m a Jewish mother in late-middle age, so it made me proud and happy to see his effortless equanimity. He was wearing a blue tee-shirt and light denim slacks and had shortly cropped salt and pepper hair, which I thought was very sax-player-esque–and he is one.
David’s energy has that where’ll-it-end-up mystery of a jazz composition that’s probably one of the reasons I’ve always had the Carrie Bradshaw reaction to it. Even as I want to know more about it, doing so doesn’t come naturally to me–as Carrie said to her sax-playing boyfriend on an episode of Sex and the City,“You don’t know where it’s going and it’s just kind of like, ‘Blaannnh!'” David, however, has a generously confident strength when you interact with him that makes you feel like he’ll support you in the partnership of conversation, in mutual comprehension.
“Great,” I thought, “Now, with the jazz-y air he has about him that’s so different than mine, which is more like a 1960s doo-wop song over what I’m told is a techno beat, I’ll be nervous and talk even more than normal. If anything, I need to talk less.” I calmed down quickly, in response to David’s warm, contagious ease, what with his soft voice and his relaxed body language. On the other hand, he looks straight into your eyes, often drawing his eyebrows together slightly in an intense sympathy. Me, I look here, there, make goofy faces. David’s much more solid–but not at all aggressive. And his eyes are trained right in yours when you talk. “Why are you looking into my soul right now!?!?” I thought. And, please–continue!” Honestly, I need my own sitcom. Robert would be its biggest fan, in fact!
A Meatless Meal
Our first commonality, which I was simply delighted to find, was that we’re both vegetarians. It’s a life choice rooted for both of us in, as David simply put it, “[We] like animals.” We came to this knowledge about each other as we considered what ingredients-as-names nouvelle cuisine dishes to order to munch on as we chatted about business ownership in HoCo. It was the first example of David’s prioritizing of his moral code in all he does, a practice I’m sure was instilled in him by his upbringing not only among HoCo’s focus on intentional living but his parents’ careers in the Peace Corps. There’s been a focus on the hands-on realization of loftier ideals in David’s work, perhaps informed by how he’s always been drawn to fields with tangible, almost tactile-kinesthetic components–the dry smoothness of architectural blueprints, the cool heft of a musical instrument. My favorite example of this among many he told me of was One Economy, the non-profit he eventually became the head of.
“We helped create the concept of broadband adoption. Why were the x percent of people in this country still not online, and what could we help to do to get them online–was it a price issue, a content issue, or an availability issue?” he told me of the hybrid problem-question that led to the founding of One Economy.
My second favorite idea that David came up with along with the ultra-capable partners he’s had a history of working with grew out of his frustration at something both Robert and I have been frustrated with in our website work too. David noted with consternation what I’ll call the “white generic” in the models that stock photography sites use. When you can find images of people of color, they’re almost always negative portrayals–criminality and poverty, for example. So David and colleagues seek to provide, with a project in the works, a more ethnically balanced pool of models across the stock image spectrum.
Sometimes a Sandwich Bun Is Just a Sandwich Bun
Later on, recalling annoyedly to Robert about the trend in culinary arts that favors naming a dish by listing its ingredients, I thought to myself that David’s probably fine with that whole movement in restaurant fare that eschews names in favor of a mini-catalog of ingredients, practices, and fun facts. Whatever happened to just calling it, “Brisket” instead of “Pan-Seared Inner Thigh of Cow With Its Roots In Ashkenazi Jewish Culture?” David knows, however, as a jazz musician, that if the player’s talented, the instruments are tuned, the objective is right, and you’ve got a happenin’ joint–in this case, HoCo–in which to practice and play, wherever you end up is not only fine, but great. And that includes supping on dishes with frou-frou names. We did–I much faster than he–and they were delicious. I asked him, in between giant mouthfuls of the side salad and pickle that came with my entree, what it was like owning a business here.
“HoCo and Columbia, in particular, really helped raise me. So it’s rewarding to me to provide value back to it and those that live here,” is the response he delivered, in the boyishly clipped yet lilting cadence of his speech, when I asked him why he chose to co-found human | creative + coded here.
It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing
So go the lyrics to the jazz classic by Duke Ellington. And David’s career path has it, as he’s moved from the non-profit sector to the private, from large firms to a three-person enterprise, “cobbling together,” as he said, a career along the way. As I’m getting to know HoCo, I’m certain it’s one of the few places that offers the ideal mix of physical comfort, durable community, and chosen civility, as the county motto goes, for such a measured, methodical, piece-by-piece design and construction of a profession.
“He uses his creativity and technology skills to maximize the positive and minimize the downsides of technology,” Alec Ross, an author and entrepreneur who’s worked with David on several projects over the past 20 years. In that vein, the firm he co-owns, human | creative + code, works with up to ten clients at a time to identify branding needs and then craft design solutions based on them.
“We are a brand and digital solutions studio dedicated to making you look great, regardless of the medium,” according to the company’s website.
Order and Orders
When our waitress arrived to take our orders, David opted for a mushroom cavatelli and I for a black bean burger. We settled in to get to know each other.
I had framed our conversation to be one I would recount as a column here in the “Businesses” section of our site, but one thing David reminded me that I’d not thought about in so long (but, in fact, was the undercurrent in my roundabout arrival at studying classical and Medieval rhetoric) was that you have to let life happen in these big areas like “career,” “family,” and the like, at least to some extent. And so I tried to do just that, with what I can only describe as moderate success. But again, David isn’t the type who thinks in absolutes, as far as I could tell. It’s more about the journey than the destination, even in our chat earlier this week. Perhaps this purposeful but sauntering approach to a life-path–wait…Sauntiering!–is what inspired his interest in jazz music, which David studied as an undergraduate at Parsons. After that, he got a graduate degree in Architecture at the University of Maryland College Park.
It struck me that we had this in common, too–our undergrad years were the few during which either of us had lived away from the places we were born and raised. We loved our hometowns–I, Manhattan and he, HoCo–so much that we’d made conscious decisions to stay and root our lives there. But, he sees, again in a confidently relaxed kind of way, what I didn’t foresee but am happening on in my third act: potentially living somewhere else.
Another person with deep roots reaching across a lifetime is Eric Ebersole (D-12). Eric taught mathematics at Wilde Lake High School in Howard County when David was a student there and has gotten to know him as an adult, too. I asked him about David, and Eric affirmed my feeling of parental pride in him: “He strikes me as the same thoughtful and gentle person I knew before, perhaps even more refined by maturity.”
“Ten years is a long time. I have no idea,” David said, chuckling as he did, when I asked where he saw himself in ten years. I laughed, too, because the question struck me as slightly absurd when I said it out loud. Who knows where life will take you in a decade! The thing about David is, he knows how to work with this uncertainty, inserting conscious living into it without staunching (Saun-ching!) the flow. I had asked him where he saw himself and the business in ten years.
“Ideally, I’d like to be doing human | creative + code half the time, but doing it better, in a way that sustains my family and my partner better than it does now, and doing something more concentrated the other half the time,” David said. And then the jazz song took a turn I didn’t see coming at all–but this time I saw the joy in that veering off, and also how it fit the pattern of morally informed, bold approach to life that is the Saunier Way: “I’d like to maybe live somewhere else, at least part of the year. If my family could make that work, I think that would be extraordinary.” This person in whose DNA is coded this place called Howard County would consider such a different course–it’s quite inspired, and very RoCo!
As we paid for our victuals I thought about how the idea of this meal came to be only a week or so ago when David and I planned to meet. It wasn’t written in the stars, as I believe some things are. We both are, then, “cobbling together” our lives here in HoCo. Perhaps all people everywhere are.
Thanks for reading! Check back with us each here at rocoinhoco.com every week as Robert, Colleen (and pup, Moses) get to know the many facets—one each week–of this prismatic place called Howard County. We want to take you along with us, so follow us on Twitter at @rocoinhoco, join our Facebook group, and follow us on Instagram at @rocoinhoco.