No ordinary Joe

Linda DeNicola
My Take

This is a cautionary tale: blogging may be hazardous to your health. I know this to be true because I recently lost a friend who died while blogging.

Now, it wasn't exactly the act of blogging that killed him. But if he had been more mindful of his surroundings, he might have become aware of the effects of the carbon monoxide that was malignantly seeping into his camper parked in the parking lot of a cafe in Salt Lake City, Utah.

I still can't believe my friend Joe Bankhead - yes, a distant relative of Tallulah - is gone, and so suddenly, so inexplicably. What is so poignantly true is that Joe fell asleep and died while working on his blog, where the first words he wrote were "Wake Up!"

Joe called himself a "sillyosopher." He intended his blog to be a place for people to express themselves in an "enjoyable, light and pleasant way."

I think Joe would appreciate the irony of it all. It isn't just the irony of what he wrote on his blog, but the fact that his blog continues even though he is gone.

For a while, his blog became a place for all of his friends and family to connect with him and with one another. Putting our feelings about Joe, and the loss of Joe, on the blog has been cathartic for 57 friends and family - the number of postings on his blog site.

After a couple of back-and-forth conversations with Joe posted over just a day or two, there is a posting on July 1: "Hello, bloggers, I'm a friend of Joe Bankhead in Salt Lake City. Regretfully, I have to inform those close to Joe on this blog (which he ironically forwarded to me last night) that he passed away this morning."

Another blogger wrote: "Apparently Joe pulled up to the Coffee Garden at 6:30 this morning, but when he did not come in by around 9 a.m., someone went to check on him, and he had passed out. Apparently he was working on his computer and maybe the battery went dead. He started up the motor home and apparently succumbed to accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. This is not confirmed."

The blogger added, "I saw him last night after 9 p.m. playing chess at the Coffee Garden. He looked as happy as could be."

Another friend provides a wonderful explanation of Joe, an uncommon man who lived in a camper and traveled around the Southwest painting watercolors, playing chess and, until a couple of years ago when he got a computer, handwriting a newsletter called "Journal of a Wanderer on the Highways and Byways of the West."

She writes that Joe loved painting the establishments in small towns that he visited all over the western United States and that he had altered his motor home to look like an adobe home, ladders included.

When his motor home finally fell apart and couldn't be repaired, he was gifted with a larger vehicle. She added that because Joe was generally a generous and openhearted guy, gifts came his way.

I have my own Joe story. We met in Boulder, Colo., where I was living at the time, through mutual friends. Boulder was one of his warm weather stops, and as usual when he came into a town, he went straight for the local coffee shop. In this case it was the Trident Cafe on Pearl Street, where my friends met every Saturday morning and most weekday mornings. Someone mentioned that I was from New Jersey.

Remarkably, Joe said that he had spent two years in Monmouth County as a young Mormon missionary. He said that he had lived in Long Branch and became friendly with an artist who, it turned out, I also knew slightly, Jim Avati.

Joe told me that his experience in Monmouth County led to his eventually leaving the Mormon Church. He said it was an eye-opener because he realized for the first time that there are good people outside of the Mormon faith.

After he returned to Utah, he married, raised two sons and established a printing business. When his marriage ended and his sons went off on their own, he sold the business and became what he dreamed of becoming: a traveling Southwest artist. He followed his artistic inclinations, his yearning for beauty, and his curiosity about human nature, always seeking out strong chess players.

Every summer he made his way north to Boulder by way of Arizona, Utah, New Mexico. I knew that he needed to sell his watercolors to keep going financially, so I bought about 10 of them one day when I was feeling flush and eventually gave them to friends as gifts. I still have three that I kept for myself.

The second year that he came to Boulder, Joe and I would take off in my car and look for beautiful places to paint. He would always complete a pretty watercolor while I muddled along trying to gain some control of a medium that I hadn't used in 20 years. He taught me some of his tricks, like masking off about a half-inch on all four sides to create a border and using a toothbrush to speckle paint on parts of the completed painting.

Just before I left Boulder for the last time, and he left to head south for the cold weather, we painted together in Chatauqua Park right up close to the foothills called the Flatirons. These foothills were dear to me because I saw them every day from my bedroom window, or when I walked to work at the University of Colorado athletic office, or when I came out of Kings supermarket. I knew I would miss them, just as I missed the scent of the sea when I was in Colorado.

We sat on the boulders in the park and for over an hour I was fully awake, one with the Flatirons, inspired. This time when we showed each other what we had created, I had a painting that reflected everything that I valued about my time in Boulder and the fleeting time with Joe Bankhead, artist, writer, chess player, friend.

For me, this is a cautionary tale, but it is not really about blogging. It is about doing what you love and finding what you value, because life can turn tragic and slip away at any moment.

- Linda DeNicola is a former staff writer for Greater Media Newspapers