IN LOVING MEMORY
Redmond Grybauskas (in Kenya)
September 20, 1991-January 9, 2025
Angus Speech
In the summer of 2006, the internet briefly went wild over the upcoming Samuel L. Jackson film, Snakes on a Plane. I was unaware of these developments, because I had been in Vermont at sleep away camp for the summer and been completely offline.One day, I went to the camp post office and found that I had a package delivered to me. I still remember opening the white padded envelope and pulling out a small paperback, and reading, with total bewilderment, “New Line Cinema Presents Snakes on a Plane, a novelization” with a note from my dear friend Redmond explaining what I’d missed. I confess I didn’t finish the book, but spotting a typo in one of the early chapters, I remember thinking, I must have been one of an incredibly few people to have opened this book. Then, as now, I smiled as I turned it over in my hands as I thought to myself, “Redmond… where the hell did you find this thing?”I could say so much about Redmond, my dearest and oldest friend who I grew up with… talked with hours into the night at sleepovers and campfires. He just seemed to see things in the world that other people walked by—their beauty, their potential, or their humor. A few weeks ago, when I visited Janice, she showed me these beautiful pieces of art that Redmond made with an old broken fax machine that he had found, either in the back of a barn or on the side of the road. He would make these collages and feed them through the fax machine, and these glitchy, gorgeous smears of toner—they are hard to describe, but again, I found myself shaking my head in wonder at their ingenious beauty. How the hell did you think of that?Redmond of course traveled across the world and our friendship took on a familiar rhythm. I’d get a text from an unknown number and it would be Redmond. I’d see him in these little episodes when he’d be coming back from somewhere far away. I’ve been smiling at the many wonderful gifts that he brought me over the years, evidence of his relentless curiosity, his sense of humor, the sense that no matter where he had traveled that he had thought of you and seen this thing that you would love and so he’d traded someone for it and then wrapped it in his sweater for a 13 hour bus ride through monsoon conditions to bring back to me—and that amazing sense that Redmond saw things in the world that other people just missed. The beautiful yet functional mirrored poster with instructions on how to mask your heat signature from a drone in Arabic and English, a bullet that he had found on an abandoned Army base that he’d wrapped in copper wire and then stored for me in a frighteningly huge dagger and sheath, a statue of two pigs in the act of sexual congress, a very nice Sennheiser microphone and audio interface that he wanted me to have, and two typewriters—one, when we graduated 8th grade, and one that he found and lovingly serviced and left to me. When I’d see him, each one would come with a wonderful and outrageous story.Our lives became so different and sometimes I’d worry how my quiet life as a preschool teacher would seem hopelessly boring. But we always found our way to that kind of storytelling and free association that we would have recognized from a sleepover as kids. Invariably, as our nights drew to a close, he would get a text from a buddy of his saying something like, they’d fixed up an old Cessna on pontoons and had an extra seat to fly down and watch the sunrise just in time for horseshoe crab mating season, and Redmond expected he could probably make an extra seat available for me if he just took out the fire extinguisher as long as I didn’t mind perching off the jumpsuit next to him, or something equally audacious and dangerous. I’d get nervous and point out that I had a field trip that I needed to lead, and as a matter of fact, I really probably ought to be going, and he’d get that twinkle in his eyes and make one more attempt to persuade me, and I’d slink off with my tail between my legs. We’d give each other a big hug, and when we’d part, I had some abstract sense of him out in the world somewhere, possibly convincing someone that it’d only be a few miles out of the way to drop him off in town, or being greeted like an old friend by the regulars at a dive bar in some far-flung capital. He lived simply, made friends instinctively, and he spoke up when he thought something was wrong. I think that curiosity was what propelled him out into these reaches of the world whose edges I could imagine but not quite see, but I never doubted for a second that no matter what new number he’d be calling from, that I’d see him again soon, with another outrageous story to tell—the kind that only Redmond could.