Rico I don’t know where I met you. Carole says you wandered into a garage where I was jamming blues with some guys and asked if you could sit in on harmonica. I can’t recall that, but I do remember your magnificent shining soul of innocent enthusiasm… and the way you glowed and played around our kids and how you laughed and danced around to the music in our living room… and oh yes that black sport jacket weighted down and out of shape with all those harps you carried just so you’d always be ready.

“Hey Richie baby, you wanna play some blues?”

That’s what you’d ask me every time you’d come round to the house. And it was that beautiful version of Ruby and the Romantics’ “Our Day Will Come” that you taught me how to back you up on with the guitar, you bending all the way down on the notes (bending all the way down with your whole body) to reach every last bit of the melody:

“Our day will come, and we’ll have everything

We’ll share the joy, falling in love can bring

Our dreams have magic because

We’ll always stay, in love this way

Our day will come.”

But I’m not quite getting it yet, how you always wanted to play, to get high, to have fun; to do something not any something but something to express what kept pushing to the surface from the inside out.

“Hey Richie baby, you wanna play?”

And if I didn’t, if I didn’t feel like it, oh what sad-eyed disappointment.

Rico you so much needed to live in a world different from the one we were all struggling inside of. In your world everyone was happy and playful. What was all this suffering and fussing about?… You couldn’t stand that… yet it was a part of you… of all of us.

* * * *

And now Rico, to the Thanksgiving Day party at the house on 23rd Street – our friends’ place – where you had your vision; where you saw the endless table.

The two of us had sampled food and drink and chemicals of one kind or another and were sitting with our backs up against a living room wall discussing the plusses and minuses of the ten purple pills we’d each swallowed,

‘What were they? What were they up to?’

And then what happened? You tell me Rico. I think you went out for a walk. And when you came back in it was with a blast of joyous enthusiasm that lit up the room.

“Hey Richie baby, guess what? I saw Thanksgiving the way it’s gotta be where we can feed everybody, I mean everybody in the whole world at a giant table that goes on forever. And when I ring the dinner bell, when I ring the bell everyone comes to the table to eat and there’ll be room for everyone, and everyone can have everything they want. Richie baby, don’t you see? It’s so beautiful! I just ring the bell!!

What can you say to that? I just looked up at you stammering racing standing there with that mop of black curls and your thin face beaming out of your raggedy-ass sport jacket with the pockets all laden down with harmonicas.

“I wish we could do that, Rico.”

“You wish? Richie baby, it’s all that simple! The bell! The bell is all there is now for something like this. How can Thanksgiving be anything anyway withouteverybody? Oh man, oh Richie…please!”

I wish it was just like ringing a bell. A call to action. All of us here with purpose and love and ready to go do it on a moment’s notice… like Rico was ready. Talk about traveling light, he would have floated away if he hadn’t cared so much.

* * * * *

I think of a line from a Don MacLean song:

“This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.”

Maybe we all live that line at one time or another. A love for the world and for each other that is by its nature pure and holy and all-inclusive. Bound up and wanting out – wanting to know its own sweet expressive self so badly.

And so I think about Rico now – and about his crazy beautiful love that cried for everybody.