Kesey sent me a postcard once. I still have it, stuck in my Bible where I put it the day I received it. Not so much because I worshipped the guy--though I only hope that one day people will say my writing is half as good as his. I was heading off to a weekend retreat that day, and was just packing my Bible when I got the postcard, so that's where it got stuck. But somehow I think that's an appropriate place for that memory. We put important things in our Bibles; for centuries families have handed down family Bibles, in which are written every child's name, and whole family trees can be traced.

When I was fifteen I was writing a paper on Kesey's 1964 trip across the country in that bus, and I got it into my head that the very best resource for that paper would be the man himself. So I looked him up in the phone book at the library, and there he was. So I sent him a letter asking if I could interview him. It was many months later when I got his postcard in reply--I had of course long since turned in the paper. But the fact that he replied, and replied personally, to a fifteen year old kid who just wanted a good grade on a paper she cared about (because I cared about the topic--had read Cuckoo's Nest, and well...)--well, I just think that was so cool.

I saw him read from Sailor Song at the Seattle Book Fest the year it came out. It was just a little while after Jerry Garcia had died, and he talked about how all the hippies and Deadheads (is that redundant?) were coming to him, asking what they should do now that Jerry was gone and they couldn't follow the Dead all over anymore. Ken's response was essentially, "Go home." Go back to your communities, and make them communities again. And carry on--with courage, generosity, and love. Babbs could have taken those words straight from Kesey's mouth.

Such a loss to the world. Not enough people understood what we had in that man. :) Monica