In Memory

Randall Wayne Goodall - Class Of 1966 VIEW PROFILE

Randall Wayne Goodall

Nov 14, 1948 - Sep 29, 2011


Wayne Goodall Randall died peacefully September 29 at home, among people who loved him. 

He grew up in Claremont, California, attended Claremont High (class of 1966) and Lincoln School in Kathmandu, graduated from Oberlin College in 1970, and lived 32 years in Oakland. 

He expressed grace and thoughtfulness in elegant book designs, in assembling a great circle of good friends, and in sustaining a happy family. 

His loving wife Naomi Schiff and his daughters Ruby and Zina Goodall would appreciate contributions in his memory to ACLU or to ANS/CA-Betsy & Merrill Goodall Scholarship Fund, c/o Virgil Day, 14612 Bestor Blvd., Pacific Palisades, CA 90272

~ Published in San Francisco Chronicle on Oct. 7, 2011



SOUL FRIEND

The thought of not having Randall around to cast his knowing eye on the madness around us filled me with quiet dread

by Hugh Delehanty - Sunday, February 23, 2014

The day Randall moved into the flat downstairs, I knew he would be a perfect fit. A tall, bespectacled man in his late twenties, he had the serene demeanor of a yogi twice his age.

The house, a funky duplex in a part of Oakland that we dubbed "Upper Mid-Downtown," was a living museum of spiritual enlightenment. The owner of a religious bookstore in Berkeley, I was told, had once lived there and previously invited several gurus to come for extended stays, including the renowned Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa. This was an enchanted place, a nexus of East and West. The large basement was filled with spiritual artifacts ­— ritual masks from Bali, Hindu sculptures from India, Druid paraphernalia from godknowswhere — mixed with the personal belongings of former residents who had journeyed East and never returned.

Randall was a different kind of seeker. He had gone to school in Katmandu, when his father, a professor at Claremont College, was hired by the U.N. to do consulting work there. That experience had sparked a lifelong interest in Eastern religion and philosophy, including a stint as a grad student at the East West Center at the University of Hawaii. Randall had a lively inquisitive mind, a wry sense of humor and a deep skepticism about spiritual fakery of any kind. He also was a man of big appetites. He could down six meals a day and not put on a single ounce.

Randall was never predictable. At Claremont High, he founded a club for poetry enthusiasts called the Calliopean Minority and then insisted on reading Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo" at every meeting. When he was an undergrad at Oberlin, he ran for school senate on an anti-voting platform. In his election flyer, he encouraged students to go to the polls and write on a piece of paper: "I am a highly evolved sentient being from a faraway star, visiting your planet on a mission of peace and goodwill." Needless to say, he didn't win.

Shortly after he moved in, Randall asked me if I could stash a few magazines in my flat. The next day he showed up with a dozen or so boxes of vintage erotica. He never told me why he needed to hide the collection, but I assumed it had something to do with him not wanting to be embarrassed when his girlfriend Naomi came to visit. Later, after the two were married, Randall confessed to a friend, "The percentage of what I do in order to secure Naomi's good opinion is astronomical."

Once, when we were planning a New Year's party, Randall, who was an accomplished graphic designer, proposed that we use a suggestive drawing on the invitation with a line that read, "Food, music and nude dancing on the roof" or something to that effect. The place was jammed that night with curiosity seekers, including my future wife, Barbara.

Things happened quickly after that. I started living with Barbara in San Francisco and, a few years later, I got a job at Sports Illustrated that took us to New York City. Meanwhile Randall moved into Naomi's house a few blocks away and they formed a design business downtown. Although I didn't see him often during those years, we remained close friends. There's a Gaelic phrase that describes the kind of friendship we had: anam cara. In Celtic tradition, according to poet John O'Donohue, an anam cara was someone "you could share your inner-most self, your mind and your heart. This friendship was an act of recognition and belonging. When you had an anam cara, your friendship cut across all convention, morality and category. You were joined in an ancient and eternal way with the 'friend of your soul.'"

I could always count on Randall to bring me back to planet Earth. Once when we were in our mid-

fifties, I had a long conversation with him about the second half of life. I prattled on about all the things I wanted to accomplish in the coming years: painting a masterpiece, learning Italian, traipsing all over the globe. Randall gave me a bemused look and admitted that he didn't have such a list. "I've raised two great children," he said, referring to his daughters, Ruby and Zina. "What could be more important?"

A few months later, I got a call from a friend who said that Randall was undergoing treatment for late-stage colon cancer. A chill ran through my body. My friend said that Randall didn't want anyone to know about his disease, but I should call him anyway. When I finally reached him, he was remarkably matter-of-fact about what he was going through. He said the chemo was awful but seemed to be working and he expected to go back to work soon.

The next time I saw him, the cancer was in remission. We went to lunch at a Chinese restaurant near his office and talked mostly about baseball (which he loved) and politics (which he found amusing). Every time I brought up the subject of his health, he steered the conversation back to baseball.

I was at a convention in southern California when I learned that Randall had relapsed. By the time I arrived in Oakland a few days later, he was barely conscious. He smiled when I handed him my present: a Babe Ruth baseball card I'd had since childhood. I also gave him a note thanking him for everything he'd done. He died before he got a chance to read it.

At the memorial gathering, Naomi displayed a scrapbook filled with tributes from Randall's friends. One compared him to Gandalf: "Full of incredible knowledge but never too serious." Another marveled at how his thinking paralleled the graceful way he moved his body. "His mind bounded from thought to thought," the friend wrote, "and his opinions were beyond right and wrong. They hovered in the air, quirky and ephemeral, inducing wonder."

For me, losing Randall felt like a gnawing pain. He was the first close friend of mine to die from that magical time in the '70s when we were all coming of age and trying to reinvent the world. Randall understood me in a way that few people have. The thought of not having him around to cast his knowing eye on the madness around us filled me with quiet dread.

The French writer Joseph Roux understood this pain. "We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan; and a widower, that man who has lost his wife," he wrote. "But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence."

But that's not how I want to remember Randall. What I recall are those lazy days in summer when he and I would head out to the Oakland Coliseum with a posse of friends and cheer for what we lovingly referred to as "the fuckin' A's." Win or lose, he would be perfectly at ease, lounging calmly in the sun, savoring his Polish sausage and beer, and wondering what strange and unpredictable thing might happen next.

 



 
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10/20/13 02:25 PM #1    

Frank Stuart Ryerson (1966)

Dying – With love for my dear friend Randall Goodall

            - Frank Ryerson

He knew months before he told us that he was dying.  He generously kept it to himself so we could go on as we had for the last twenty years, sharing meals and movies every two weeks, continuing the kinds of conversations that only friends of forty or fifty years can have, who’ve shared all the transitions that come with aging, the procedures and complaints, who’ve survived relationships and the end of them while never ever letting go of each other.  Randall told us only when he knew we would soon see them on our own, the changes in his body.

We upped the ante then, fancier dinners, though before long he stopped eating at all, movies still, but a play and even an opera.  After he limped off to the bathrooms from the picnic table by the amphitheater, we sat under the trees and marveled at his enjoyment of us, mourned his transformation into something skeletal.  We could not even then bring ourselves to speak of his absence.  Throughout the play, I kept turning toward this man sitting on my right, bundled up in blankets, his profile that of a skull, laughing and smiling, but a skull like the one I thought I saw in a long ago acid trip underneath the face of my girlfriend.  Randall was a skull, with his warm heart still shining through the eyes, a laughing smiling skull, and looking at him I felt none of the fear the drug vision brought me with my girlfriend, just fascination and wonder.

We saw any movie he wanted to see, silly movies that he and I particularly had a soft spot for, Aliens and Cowboys and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, silliness that Randall and I smiled through and other two endured.  I insisted on picking him up and driving him now, though he, so obviously fragile and weak, stubbornly protested that he was fine and could take the train as he always had.  I arrived early and reveled in precious hours alone with him.  One of these afternoons he handed me a book he was reading, the collected columns of Stanton Delaplane, made me read one of the columns that had caused him to laugh out loud, and we wallowed together in nostalgia for the San Francisco Chronicle of the 70s and 80s.

I asked him how he really felt about dying, because he kept it to himself and we did not talk of it when the four of us were gathered together, asked him not about the physical pain of dying but the feelings that came with his knowledge that death was coming so soon.  “You know,” he said, “I have some moments of perfect contentment, and then some of total despair.”  I laughed and said that was a normal day for me.  “The worst part with Naomi is that we can’t make plans anymore.  Always been one of our favorite activities, sitting in the back yard drinking tea and making all kinds of plans.  You know, maybe we’ll do this or maybe that, and most of them things we know we would never do.  We can’t do that anymore.  We miss it.”

Nearer the end, this lifelong atheist surprised me with his “mystical experience.”  He’d slept late in the day.  He knew it was later than usual because of the way the light came into the bathroom from the window, he said, and then when he looked at the tiles on the floor, he saw that the sun was shining on a single tile.  “I had a mystical experience.  That’s the only way I can describe it.  That tile was glowing, lit up,” he said, “and looking at it I had the thought that it would be all right with me the idea that consciousness could exist in some way beyond the physical.”  That’s the way he said it, that the idea would be all right with him—he had to search for that phrase, had to pause as he tried to explain his experience and this thought, brand new to him.  He didn’t want to make too much of it, yet he didn’t want to dismiss it either.  The idea would be all right with him.  I don’t know that he ever told anyone else about that glowing tile.

The opera was his last night out.  We could see the strain it put on him, watching him pop pills for the “breakout” pain that was beyond the reach of his fentanyl patch.  I have a photo on my phone of the four of us at the opera house, we smiling softly, our happiness to have him and each other undeniable, but his eyes bugging and confused.  We scheduled our next night for his house, for a movie on his new flat screen, his new Blue Ray, recent indulgences.  We ate dinner with his wife and daughter and he tried to serve us, clumsily, knocking over the water pitcher onto the dinner table.  Later, he laughed all the way through the Will Ferrell movie we’d rented, still obstinately refusing in this last week of his life to give up his enjoyment of what he had always loved, books and movies and his family.  And our friendship.

I hugged him at the end of that night, hugged bone and skin, and knew I was not likely to see him again.  Steve did though, a few days later, on Randall’s very last day, held his hand after Randall finally surrendered to the hospital bed hospice brought the day before, the day he finally did quit.  I still envy Steve that moment, bending over him and clasping his hand as Randall mumbled something unintelligible into his ear.  He died that same night, as if when he could no longer walk and talk and laugh, he was done, as if he did not have the patience to sit around in a coma, could not see the point of it.

When I woke at one AM the next morning, I read the email sent by his daughter that told me of his death.  Of course I knew it was coming, but I wept uncontrollably, wept for the first time since the day he told me.  Hours passed but I could not stop, and when I called into work at six to let them know I was not coming in, I was still sobbing so hard I could not speak.  “You must really be sick,” she said on the phone, my struggle to speak sounding to her like someone with a bad case of the flu.

Randall did not tell us of his dying until he had to.  He wanted our time together not to be about him and his dying, but about us and our friendship.  His announcements were reluctant.  He told Steve and Jim across the restaurant table, before their movie.  Steve reported that Randall had said that he was angry because his wife’s new stepfather was celebrating his 90th birthday, and HE was an asshole. “Why does a complete asshole get one third more life than I do?”  And he looked them in the eye across the table to say that it helped him to know that they too were going to die some day.  He called me the next day in Mexico, and told me in a casual, matter of fact voice, as if he were reporting some sort of statistic, and concluded by saying, “So that’s that then,” checking me off some list of important errands he had to get through that day.

I do not see an end to my grief, but I am grounded in my understanding that I am but one tiny drop on an unending ever-expanding ocean of loss.  Several years ago I watched the magnificent Brazilian movie, Central Station, which ended with a line engraved on my heart.  “I long for my father.  I long for everything.”  The middle-aged protagonist, caught in a crush of fellow passengers pressing in on her from all sides on a bus, but utterly isolated in her despair and grief after parting with a child she who had touched her heart, awakened her heart, whom she knew she would never see again, says with tears streaming down her face, “I long for my father.  I long for everything.”  Randall’s death has been a rude interruption I find unbearable at times of a conversation begun when we were eleven years old, a conversation that never got stale, a conversation like every other gift in this life must inevitably come to an end.

 


08/04/14 07:04 PM #2    

Murray Mack Gilkeson III (1968)

I last saw Randy over at his parents house on Blaisdell Dr., after his dad Merrill had passed away.  He mistook me for my younger brother Todd, even though I used to stay at his apartment up in San Francisco whenever I was passing through.  I made some comment about "early Alzheimers" and he replied that at this point it wasn't all that "early."  

He was in my older sister Sue's class, a couple of years ahead of me, but I always remembered him as being on the cutting edge of the 60's, a seeker and a real intellectual.  He was a mentor in a lot of ways and I will always remember him in that light.


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