I remember walking with Mark Baumer in Providence to get a juice. I remember his quiet height and his goofy eyes and his careful listening. I remember him telling me the story of how—on his first walk across this ridiculously big country—a camera crew from Dairy Queen made a big show of giving him a coupon that didn't work when he tried to use it later, off-camera.
We all have our own ways of seeing the world, but I've been thinking all day about what made Mark so special, and I think it was how his way of seeing the world found such joy in the strange roots and reaches of everything, how he was so fearlessly weird and defiantly kind in blinking big enough to send his vision over. I imagine him running down the street in a huge parka with the stew of the world sloshing in a plastic yellow bucket, and he's balancing it on top of his long hair, and it's splashing everywhere, and he's laughing and we're laughing and everyone is hanging on.
He was one of the funniest and least alienating people I've ever known, even though his style of being both those things was so hummingly the opposite of the usual versions. And I feel such vivid grief to think about—like his parents said in their post—just the simple fact that we won't be able to talk with him again. To say something and hear what he says after, to see something and point to it and hear what he calls it. Like how he told Claire about wearing sunglasses when he meditated. Or how he told Blake "You're more likely to mistake a rock for a bear than a bear for a rock." Or how he wrote missed connections for his housemate.
I remember reading passages to Jenelle from the book he made out of his first walk across America, I AM A ROAD. Everything was a person; everything was feeling and eating. Mark didn't eat animals. I remember one time I emailed Mark for a project where people wrote about short stories, and I just found what he wrote back, and I want to put it here and have it stay here, in whatever kind of staying this serves as.
So many knew and loved Mark, and my thoughts are warm and wide for them, and I hope all the stupid, beautiful twists of the world—a tiny person who wants a raisin, a long hair in a shower nozzle, an away message that says "Brb I'm moving the moth back"—brings some memory of something funny and brilliant Mark said or did that they'd forgotten about, or they can't forget about, and I hope all of this time and light around us knows how good it is to have all of that Mark.
(for those who didn't know him, Mark was walking barefoot across America to raise money for climate change // he was on day 100 // here's a good place to start to get to know him: http://thebaumer.com/)
