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February 5, 2009
My friend of thirty-five years. Grant Magruder Stockdale
was my dearest friend.
I do not say that lightly.
It is hard to tell people about someone you loved so much.
If you knew him for two minutes the job would be so simple.
One look at his face would have told you about his kindness,
sense of mischief, incredible quick wit and some of the joie
de vivre he embodied.
He was a painter, author, musician, dancer, sailor.
husband, father, businessman and one of the most
outrageously hilarious people I have every met.
Nobody was funnier than Grant.
We met in Washington when I was twenty-six.
The first time I met him I succumbed to the gravitational pull of his particular universe.
I never escaped that orbit. Most people didn't.
When he laughed it was nearly always conspiratorial.
You were in on the joke with him and you felt as if you had
dreamed it up yourself.
But the humor and observations were uniquely his, even though you somehow felt very clever indeed.
Any day was a better one if Stockdale showed up.
He seemed to travel in a great cloud of happiness and ideas.
He was a joy dispenser.
Grant could do anything. As outrageous as he was, he was
humble about his innumerable talents.
I was always amazed at what he did.
I have spent a life time worrying about how to write or paint.
He just decided it was within his reach and did it all.
It was years before I knew he was a very good painter.
He never told me.
I learned it when I saw a painting he did of his soon to be wife after we were all in Paris together in the late seventies.
It was a New Year's Eve where we danced knee deep in streamers until dawn.
We laughed until I thought we might die.
He turned out many paintings that I thought were powerful.
When I asked him once why there were no faces in his paintings thinking he might reveal some deep reason, he took a drag on a cigarette and said, "Because I can't make faces that don't look crazy."
I did not know he was in a band until he mailed me a CD the
group had done.
I didn't know he had written two novels until he invited me to read them.
As humble as he was about the artistic things he tried, he
was proud about being a carpenter and builder.
He built cabinets and decks and furniture and encouraged his family to create a space in which to live that was unique.
Their home was a wonderful, fanciful place where I always left my cares at the door and relaxed and laughed.
Always laughed, among indigo tables and big green painted fish and harlequin patterns on the floors.
Every nook and cranny was used as an opportunity to create something that expressed the joy of life.
The whole family seemed to be living in its own artist's colony.
It was contagious.
Over the years, we all devolved to our jobs and our work.
We all needed to support ourselves and provide for our
families.
To Grant, the notion of having to make money was
almost an annoyance, a trial.
He wanted to make art. He wanted to laugh. He wanted to live. No one lived larger.
I can see him now dancing the samba on Columbia Road.
I can see him with some bizarre hat on his head delivering a
speech in a made up accent in the middle of a trendy
restaurant.
I can see him at the helm of a sailboat with his shirt streaming being him.
I can see him flying in the rope of a spinnaker laughing with his head thrown back.
I can see him rolled up in my living room carpet pretending to be dead after a night of too much champagne.
I can see him in a white linen suit on a sweltering day in Washington walking across Connecticut Avenue to the Indian restaurant
with a cocktail in his hand.
I can see him at art galleries loving everything he saw and being astonished by the beauty.
I can see him in Tuscany eating the food and drinking the wine with his wife and children he loved beyond measure.
He called his children his "prizes."
I cannot see him angry or jealous or petty or envious.
If any of those ideas lived in him they were well hidden from
me, even as he approached the end of his life.
He is gone and the gravity has ceased.
I will careen out of the orbit and land in some foreign place where no one
speaks that particular familiar language we once spoke.
I will have the memories.
They will be a comfort but not enough.
He is irreplaceable and unforgettable.
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