Like many times in the past, I started searching for him with an email message. I normally don’t get a response from him using this approach; I usually end up driving the three hours to his place in the hopes of finding him at home. However, my emails don’t bounce so I assume he is still somewhere in the vicinity. Since he has a tendency to roam the world, the odds of finding him at home are not great. This time the email bounced back, meaning that something had changed. On a whim I tried Googling his name, and up popped his obituary!  Something had indeed changed with his passing in October of last year.  I was surprised at the strength of my reaction to this news – I was stunned, and filled with tears.  I am still going through the roller coaster of feeling fine one minute, and choked up with tears and grief the next.  I guess this is a sign of deep connection and love with the deceased – it is too bad that our bodies are so great at informing us of this after the opportunity to stay connected has passed.  I was aware that I really like the guy, and think of him often even when separated by months (or years) – but I wasn’t prepared for the depth of my reaction to his loss.

Rocke was one of those one-in-a-lifetime kind of guys.  His world was always a “big” world with few apparent bounds – everything had an outsized aspect to it.  Perhaps the most amazing, and at times annoying, thing about him was his photographic memory about the big and tiny, details of everything around him.  Because of this, discussions might include recitations of pages of quotes from philosophers such as Kant, to detailed specifications (including part numbers) of the inner workings on some specific vintage fighter plane engine that took his fancy for some reason or another, to lengthy discussions of the theory of relativity or quantum mechanics – or any other of a myriad of possibilities.  It was always far beyond anything I knew about, and in far more detail than I had any desire to know – but he demanded my attention because it was all obviously somehow critically important to the functioning of the world.  I always found him to be endlessly fascinating, but only possible to withstand in small chunks at a time. 

The stories about him are probably endless – each person he encountered undoubtedly has many such stories that can’t be told in the right way because no matter how you approach them they all sound like wild exaggerations, and flights into one sort of fantasy or another – no person can live like that.  In fact, that was always one of my amazements – somehow he managed to get to 81 years as the artist of his own life, painting the most outrageous experiences of life lived his way.  I didn’t think it was “safe” to live like he did. And all the time he was full to overflowing with love, compassion and understanding of others.  He just did things for others, no question, no hesitancy – just “do it”.  Little things like driving down from Sparks on day to bring me a little stone that he felt was full of “power” that I needed to help me through my life.  Or bigger things, like putting on free “feeds” for the local down-and-out folks where he would cook for 300 people in his little kitchen in the bowels of what appeared to be an abandoned gold rush era hotel – at a time when he was obviously destitute himself.  Money didn’t appear to hang around him very long, there were always much more important things that needed doing. The stories could go on forever, but never really capture the essence of the man – my friend and a reminder that I have choices about how I want to life my life.   He will be missed – even though I seldom talked to him.  I knew that an amazing experience was in the offering whenever I felt the need to partake.