I spent most of yesterday at a memorial service for my friend Sue. She was one of the kindest most caring people I knew. She was not a rocket scientist by any stretch of the imagination, and was always at heart a bit of a hippy, but she was enthusiastic, tenatious, driven and was always thinking about others first, be they people or be they animals. I hugely respected that. She was also a fan of my cooking, and that demonstrates that she had good taste too.
After the service we went to drink beers back at her house on her deck, which really was how she would have liked the whole service to be - she would ahve cringed to hear so many pople talk about her in such glowing terms, and would rather have just kicked back an had a good time. The fact that someone brought a massive crate of "raging bitch" IPA from the local brewery, would have had her in hysterics.
My favourite Sue anecdote: at a departmental meeting there was a lot of discussion about how to get all teh various new people together to meet and socialize, as there was a worry that too many people were working in isolation, and so happy hours, pot lucks and other get togethers were discussed. At the end of the meeting, after everything had been decided, Sue chirped in with "you know, back in my day, when you wanted to get a gropup of people tto know each other better, you just put them in a big room and dropped acid."
Anyway, I've just planted some flowers in my garden in a couple of little memorial plots (last time she was at my house we talked about planting ideas over wine and home cooked food), and here's one of her favourite poems to share with you:
"I think I could turn and live with the animals, they are so placid and self contained;
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition;
They do not lie awake in the dark and wheep for their sins;
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;
Not one is dissatisfied- not one is demented with the mania of owning things;
Not one kneels to another, nor his kind that lived thousands of years ago;
Not one is responsible or indistrious over the whole earth."
- Walt Whitman
No comments:
Post a Comment