A Lasting Man

This seems to be the year of death for me. Another friend of mine died in Hawaii while snorkeling, he had a heart attack and didn't survive. Yesterday afternoon his brother and wife had a memorial for him at their home and it was packed, for he was a Willits Boy at 60, eternal boy of genius and thought and movement. He was an artist and had had lithos made of his pen and ink nature renditions. He could make a buffalo look like it was traveling off the page, a bunny appear to leap from the white it was drawn on.

I am proud to say I began him on his journey as an artist. He lived a while with my husband and I. We had a fourteen room Victorian and often had people stay in a spare room. We sat one summer day under the plum orchard and he said, "I wish I could draw. I wish I could set down on paper what I see inside." I quietly got up and went into my studio, returning with a box of new oil pastels, a pad of good paper and a pencil with sharpener. He grinned when I put them in his hands. He pulled his chair up to a wine barrel filled with blooming blue penstemon and began. I have the original hanging near a chair I like to sit in to catch the light to read by.

At the memorial, his brother or sister-in-law had laid out copies and copies of lithos of various animals and botanicals and at the bottom, a basket full of note cards with envelopes. I took perhaps five packs of a nest and eggs of mine he had drawn so beautifully. I had made in the late eighties wreaths for Christmas presents one year and one was a heart with delicate pastel flowers I had dried from the garden and hung on our door. He drew that too and called it Robin's Heart. I didn't know it, but his brother had the original which Drexell had colored it and Mike gave me that as well as three remarkable pieces that Drexell had promised me years ago of poets or philosophers and quotes of their work: Karl Marx, Allen Ginsberg, Jean-Paul Sartre. They were so surreal and I love them with my whole heart. I encouraged him to do more of those. I believed that genre was where his world acknowledgment would come from. I already had a few from various birthdays, one of Rilke and one of Bob Dylan and Milton. Quite a wonderful collection.

But what struck me the most were those simple notecards. I was sorry I hadn't taken more. I envisioned, just a half an hour ago , in that twilight place between wake and sleep, having more packets of them and giving them to various people for the holidays. I had to get up from bed and write this out. I saw Drexell all over the world. Like he had drawn an astonishingly sexy Iris which I thought I should send a packet to Zaby in New York because she is one of those people who is not afraid of her own sexuality, a packet of violets to my friend Betsy in San Bernardino because "The Secret Garden" is one of her favorite books and violets grew in the garden and Mary weeded it first in order to make the Garden. When he first had those cards made up from the originals I bought dozens because I had the money and I sent them to my mother, my aunt, different friends. I saw in that waking-sleeping place, my friends sending those cards to their friends one at a time, all over the world until Drexell's spirit was all over the world and he would never die in the sense of a regular person. He was not a Picasso, but I believe on a more simple level he could continue in the memories of many many people simply by them receiving a note card with a loving message on them. I was at peace finally and knew when I finished writing this that I could go to bed and not toss and turn. I saw in living colors even though he worked primarily in blacknwhite, a rainbow of my friend reaching from one continent to another.