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11 
He was a decidedly social person and especially enjoyed mingling with other artists.
He accepted invitations to group shows with his friends, but his entries might be surprising.
In a show whose theme was trout fishing, he did a piece in which Goya's Saturn is devouring a raw fish rather than a child.
For a show based on ladders, his was made of hair binding up wounds.
He encouraged fellow artists, like urging elderly and uptight Dunbar Beck to show risque art.
Or telling Deborah Butterfield not to give up horses just because academic types disdained objective art, and she did not give them up.
When mounted police attacked us at an anti-Vietnam War protest in San Francisco, they didn’t realize Reich had a way with horses, and he deflected them -- by word, gesture, will?
He calmly stood up to bullies.
Reich’s endless creativity allowed him an unusual tolerance for ambiguity in art and life. He not only tolerated uncertainty,
but embraced it and rejected dismissive or exclusionary thoughts or ideas. He hated phrases like, “That’s it.”
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He could paint, draw, sing, dance, play musical instruments
(piano, guitar, mouth harp, harmonica, didgeredoo, concertina),
write songs and poems, pound a nail, teach. He could imitate bird calls and call cows.
And milk cows. He raised animals and plants. He understood oak galls, and he made a mean souffle.
Rose Maddox sang Reich’s “Somebody’s Lookin’ for Gold” with Merle
Haggard and band. It’s on Youtube:Don sang it this way:
He could throw a ball or rock with great accuracy -- he could make his hand do exactly what his eye and mind demanded. Eye, mind and hand were one.
Reich and another Sacramento artist, Darrell Forney, drinking and smoking pot, decided to do quick portraits of each other,
a friendly challenge. Reich picked up a scrap of paper, dipped his thumb in the marijuana ashes, and in ten seconds made an absolutely
spot-on portrait of Forney, whose face dropped when he saw it.
He could draw a perfect circle and a straight line without instruments.
He had a fragile psyche, yet he was physically very brave.
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