Pat, What wonderful tributes – we are all better people because we met you.
Your teaching moments. Ordering NINTENDO POWER MAGAZINE and explaining to me, “I don’t care what they read as long as they learn to read”, and me, ordering the subscription immediately.
Your ability to research – Remember, Barron’s Book of Fourteen Bazillion Colleges. You helped me to understand, “There is a college for every one of them, and the trick is to find the one that they like and it likes them. The schools that don’t like them - you don’t want them to go there.”
Your vocabulary, never being bested in Scrabble, except once by Brian, who contended that it was a gimme and you stated, fair and square - a debate that is unresolved to this day.
Your passionate defense of the English language when I called and asked you if the meteorologist was correct saying, “typhonic winds’ and you saying, “They just don’t care. They make up words and think it is acceptable. At work (GE), everything in print from menus to Letter to the Shareholder must pass my desk (as Chief Editor at GE), and I send back corrections, and the writers cross out MY corrections and re-insert THEIR made-up words. Even the Chef, makes up French words. FRENCH! They DON’T care! When we’re gone, the language, it’s all over. Diagraming a sentence? Pfft!”
Your insistence that the words, “Let’s get together again” is an action sentence that warrants taking out the calendar (MONTH AT A GLANCE at hand) and saying, “Yes. Let’s. When?”
Your gracious invitations to Wood’s Hole and your cheerfulness during our family meals at the long, long dining room table with Cheerios requiring brooming of scattered O’s and occasional milk mop- up. Also, your tolerance for 5 children executing big-wheel racing from the living room, through the hallway, passed the party-line phone, around the kitchen to the pantry, into the dining room, w/two doors swings in both directions until you asked Jerry to mitigate collisions and he mandated one-way traffic.
Your instructions to our children biking unaccompanied into Falmouth to visit Eight Cousin’s Books: stay together, look around, wait for each other at the intersections, no racing, wait for us at the store. And our walks in the evening on the Wood’s Hole bike path with the children racing their bikes to the ferry and on the way back in the dark you reminding them, “Look for the big rock, stay together, walk your bikes through the trees” with us walking behind them with the flashlights and they, not scared of course, choosing to hover nearby.
In Brooklyn, for Thanksgiving dinners, you used your Mom’s silver, not stainless, real silver at each place setting. We all loved it. And, after researching it to the point of certainty, yes, silver can and did go into the dishwasher. We loved that too.
And also in Brooklyn, you organized so many, many celebrations of birthdays, baptisms, communions, confirmations in the dining room of the big house and in the backyard with Carvel ice cream cake and there was drama with boys not allowed in the girls playhouse and boys not letting girls play cowboy and everyone including adults being scared of the Pee Wee Herman look-alike so you dismissed him early and the children talked and talked about him.
Our confidences and discussions about our children’s varied paths and shared concerns and worries and fears and hopes were without judgement and with an uplifting sense of companionship in the dark. Holding hands.
Pat, your love of music, dance, songs, delight in delicious food, determination, ability to show up no matter the weather, the time, the place, your helpfulness, your laughter, your love, your friends, neighbors, relatives, times, places, stories, books, walks.
You share your life from yesterday through all our tomorrows.
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