I have a friend who just doesn't play ball. If you toss him a tennis ball or wad of paper, as people who work in cubicles do to keep their sanity, he’ll make no effort to catch it.

He'll duck out of the way, step aside or just watch it pass, and then he'll stare at it on the floor as if it were a dead canary. He would catch a ball no sooner than he would an open-faced sandwich.

That's just the way it is with him, and you have to respect that. But I feel sorry for him just the same. A tossed ball is an invitation, a gesture of kindness, a gift.

—

Ken Kesey — writer, artist, musician, showman, prankster, farmer, wrestler and legendary tosser of balls — died this past week. He was 66, too damn young.

Kesey produced a few great novels, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest” and “Sometimes a Great Notion” among them, along other written works, but his muse veered off in other directions, to performance art and theater, and he spread his magical vision in classrooms, too.

Some writers are bigger than their art. They cannot be defined merely by the objects they fashion, by the words they arrange. Kesey was, like Garcia and Dylan, someone who will help define these times.

As Tom Wolfe documents in "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," the tale of the Merry Pranksters' cross-country bus trip that carried the Beat Generation into the Age of Aquarius, Kesey was a man who didn't just chronicle the times, he lived it.

His message was that you must live life to the max and do it with love. Do your thing, and then take it further. Only then will you know your world and yourself.  “We are all astronauts of inner space,” he once said.

And he said something else that strikes a chord in today’s self-help culture.  He said, “We've been turned away from reality. We must confront it. We don't want to think of the bad stuff that's going to happen to us, but it’s life and we need to be able to reach our arms around it and say, ‘Hey, it’s awful, and it’s beautiful and I love it.’ ”

And then he says, “Let’s quit examining ourselves and trying to make ourselves psychologically perfect. We aren't and never will be.”

But Kesey’s gone now, joining the recently departed Ginsburg, Burroughs and Bowles. The autumnal tree that is this generation has lost another leaf, and every time that happens you want to dash under the branches and catch the leaf before it hits the ground, to save it, preserve it, press it in a book. Keep it somehow alive.

Kesey told a story in an interview maybe 10 years ago, a story from his childhood when he and his brother would travel around in their father’s bus. Yes, there’s a bus in this story, too.

They were leaving Boise and the Kesey boys were on the roof of the bus throwing a ball back and forth. They saw a couple of kids down on the street and threw the ball to them. They threw it back and forth and then the bus drove off.

The kids in the street still had the ball. It was perfect. “That to me,” Kesey said, “is art at its peak.”                           

—

They buried Ken Kesey on Wednesday, taking him to a grave in the back yard of his home in Oregon. His hearse was his bus, a psychedelic vehicle named “Further,” a replica of the bus the Pranksters took across country nearly 40 years ago.

As I pictured him in his casket heading on down the road, leading the way as he always had, I felt like that kid on the street in Boise. It's only when people like Kesey are gone that we realize what we have in our hands.

— 30 —

This column was published in the Southern Illinoisan

shortly after Ken Kesey’s death  on Nov. 10, 2001.