the death of a friend

News of this nature never comes at a good time.

The first message I opened this morning was from my friend, Roxane David, in Villa Obregón. The message was brief and to the point. Her husband, Ed Gilliam, died around midnight today of a heart attack.

No life can be easily summarized in an essay. And it is even more difficult when larger-than-life personalities enter and exit our lives.

Most of us knew Ed from his art. His love was abstract expressionism, a passion he acquired while studying art at Berkeley. Art formed the core of my relationship with him. But it was not how we met.

A couple of years after I moved to Mexico, I heard about a project that caught my interest. Our area of Mexico is surrounded by farms. During the planting and harvesting seasons, migrant workers from southern Mexico come to the area with their families to work in the fields. They are primarily Mixteco.

My doctor at the time was instrumental in setting up a compound that provided housing and food for the families and schooling for the children -- schooling that would not have been available to the otherwise. I was invited to join two other men who had some responsibility for raising funds for the food. Ed was one. The other was John Alexander.

We would meet each Friday morning at Lety's, a local Mexican restaurant with the best huevos rancheros I have ever eaten, and discuss business. We also came to know each other personally. When our project was over, Ed and I continued to have breakfast each Friday morning, eventually being joined by Roxane.

The three of us added another regular date on our social calendar -- summer dinners at Magnolia's in La Manzanilla. To most people in the tourist villages where we live, simply sharing two meals a week hardly sounds like a firm friendship. But, for the three of us, it was.

Ed was a raconteur. Over breakfast and dinner he shared stories of his Navy days on an aircraft carrier, witnessing an atomic test in the south Pacific, surviving polio, witnessing the Free Speech movement at Berkeley, being an all-state hockey star in Colorado, sharing tales about his cousin Michelle Phillips and her father, and recounting his art adventures as a student in Europe. We must have talked for hours about "What is art?" and "Why is it important to the human condition?"

 
Certainly we had our differences. Politics. Religion. The ever-raging tension between Pascal and Descartes. But our shared love of art mortared over those inconsequential divergences. For one important reason. We tried to respect each other despite what would otherwise have been relational chasms.

A fellow blogger noted the other day that keeping a family heirloom is seldom important solely for its material value. Its true value is in the memories it triggers.

If that is true, and, to a degree, I think it is, I will daily be surrounded by memories of Ed. When Ed first saw my new house, he thought the upstairs terrace was perfect for a gallery. We tested that theory with some of his favorite works.

He was correct. The lines of my house were a perfect complement to his art.

The result? I purchased 15 or 17 of his paintings for the house with no name (the good life). The house looks as if it had been built for the paintings, and the paintings look as if they had been painted for the house.

As is true for everything in life, we never quite complete what we had attempted to accomplish. Ed had promised, as soon as the tide of the virus had ebbed, that he would touch up portions of my paintings where the sun had had too much of its way. That will not happen now.

But I have a far more mundane (and human) memory. Ed loved canned baked beans. Somewhere along the line down here, he decided to use plain beans and doctor them up to appear as if they were baked beans.

About two weeks ago, I was going to try my hand at some beanery doings. I had taken out my telephone to send a message asking Ed what he added. Something intervened, and I never asked the question. Now, I will never know.

The fact that I will not know what Ed added to his beans is not important. What is important is that I failed to have the opportunity to share another moment with my friend.

Instead, I will rely on the rich trove of memories I shared with Ed over the last twelve years.

We will miss you, Ed.