[raulus]

Me and Steve at the airport in SLC. You can tell it’s him because of the distance between his eyes and the shape and position of his ears.

We were on the same flight from SFO to SLC. August 1998. This was back when planes weren’t always full - trust me, it used to happen once upon a time.

Some little kid took my assigned seat, so I took the row behind. Just before they were about to close the doors, Steve slipped in and sat down next to me.

We spent the next couple of hours chatting about the upcoming season (he didn’t seem to think they were going to be that dominant), my “run and gun” poster of him that I had hanging up in my childhood bedroom, whether he had a hot date that night (he didn’t), and my experience being a missionary in Taiwan - I had just returned home about 5 months before. Then he signed a barf bag for my little brother, who suffers from the world’s most sensitive case of motion sickness, and signed my ticket sleeve for me.

We walked through the SLC airport together, and I flagged down a fellow fan who took this picture of us together on the escalator. The photographer was standing on the lower part of the escalator looking up at us, while we were facing backwards riding up the escalator, which is why the photo has such a great upward angle.