DIED 2013
THE VERY DAY WE moved to Baltimore, my nine-year-old daughter met the girl across the street, and the two have been an item ever since. These days they are big girls, playing big-girl games; I think they will be friends for life. Back when we all met, the little neighbor came with a pack of siblings, and also a rather impressive grandmother. She was a tall woman, with a lot of pepper remaining in her salt-and-pepper hair, and hastily applied but never omitted fuchsia lipstick. She had a gruff, impatient manner, and strict rules for the children, whom she shepherded every day in summer to the neighborhood pool. Sometimes I would sit with her on the bench outside the gate and smoke a cigarette. We usually discussed the novel her book club was reading; she had been in that book club for forty years. Often as we sat there, a small person would approach to report an infraction or that someone had gone missing. General Patton swung into action. Having raised six children of her own, she was a believer in the decisive response and the stiff penalty.
After putting up the fight you would expect from such a woman, she died of cancer at eighty-one. That summer, her leaderless troop drooped around the pool. It was not until I read her obituary in the Baltimore Sun that I really knew whom I’d been sitting next to on that bench. After graduating from college in the fifties, it said, she had hitchhiked around the U.S. and Europe, then went to work as a reporter in Connecticut. There she fell in love with another reporter; they spent the early years of their marriage running a printing press in Woodstock, New York, then moved to Baltimore so he could take a job at Hopkins. A staunch progressive, always volunteering for the Democratic Party, for local schools and liberal causes, she was deeply drawn to rural life and frugal values. So after the kids were out of the house, she and her husband bought a country store in New Hampshire. In her third act, or maybe her fifth, after he died, she came back to Baltimore to help with her grandchildren. She took in boarders, rejoined her book club, tended a garden.
Now I picture myself, blathering on about Jeffrey Eugenides or Ann Patchett, thinking I’m the one with something interesting to say.