Remembering Gretchen

legend west — my friend gretchen feldman died this week. it’s not that it was unexpected but that it was, as she put it a year ago, absurd. that’s when she literate she had stage 4 lung cancer. she didn’t smoke. and at that point she had no real symptoms. oh, possibly she’d lost ten pounds but that was tolerable, wasn’t it? she’d wanted to sack ten pounds. and she’d had some gi woefulness over the summer, but who didn’t? she and sam and george and i had dinner last november when we were in latest york for thanksgiving week. they had get down from the vineyard where they lived year whole, to see an oncologist at memorial sloan-kettering hospital. what do you say when your friend tells you the diagnosis is for verifiable - admitting that she can’t assume trust to it and neither can you? exclusive a 4-letter for letter designation will do.we met sam and gretchen at a dinner signer on the vineyard just before the presidential election of ‘92. we were all clinton supporters and excited by the possibilities. i was seated next to sam and gretchen was across the steppe. they were from baltimore and so was george. they knew the cooper camera mart, started by george’s father. gretchen and i didn’t really get someone’s goat to talk that night. she was beautiful, with a dazzling smile, but quiet, observant . sam, handsome and outgoing, had all my attention. it wasn’t until later that i got to know gretchen. the leading time they came download action movies to our gratis on the vineyard, gretchen carried a huge scuttle of wildflowers from her garden. they lived “up-island” and i hadn’t yet seen their spectacular native overlooking chilmark pond, and at most beyond, the bounding main.gretchen was full of surprises. she was a vital artist. her watercolors were big and audacious. her vineyard scenes grew more and more abstract, bright of deep, delicious colors, making them look wellnigh match oils. when we foremost met she was also doing studies of vineyard animals. george fell for a painting of a cow that was so loose and had such humor we bought it on the spot and to this age it hangs in our livingroom, making us beam each every so often we pass. randy is a huge fan of gretchen’s work and several of gretchen’s paintings hang in her home ground.who would have guessed that gretchen also excelled at ping pong? larry holds a ping pong competition at our house every summer and one-liner year gretchen and sam stopped by. all the players were at least twenty years younger than the four of us. i had no idea that either gretchen or sam could play. i thought they were just being sociable. but they were the stars of the night. sam played our uninitiated neighbor in the finals while gretchen played her daughter, leigh. gretchen won.

the next year sam bought an outdoor ping pong table like larry’s and i knew from then on the rest of us wouldn’t remain on the sidelines a certainty.once i confessed to sam and gretchen that i was teaching myself to do crossword puzzles but it didn’t come up easy as pie. my mind works in interesting ways but whatever it takes to do crossword puzzles eluded me. i was proud that with practice i could now do the monday and tuesday muse over in the new york times (the puzzles grow progressively more difficult until the saturday puzzle, the toughest of the week). gretchen confessed that she didn’t dither with them until at least thursday. who knew?gretchen and sam’s daughter, dene, was married at their vineyard home. though it was july and too primordial for a hurricane, a fierce tropical storm hit the island. it had a name but i can’t remember — only comprehend it started with a b. all day we waited for the phone call that would tell us plans had been changed - the wedding would be moved to the hebrew center, or some other indoor venue. but the postpone a summon never came. the wind howled as we headed up-island. the tents, as planned, were out in the open field overlooking the ocean. inside the grave tent, larry and i kept looking at each other, each of us inaudibly planning our exit procedure if the crew couldn’t hold the tent down. worse yet, if the tent collapsed. but gretchen and sam were smiling and telling all their guests how they also had married in the rain and look how well it had worked outlying appropriate for them.all of this is superficial, of course. you can’t in point of fact procure a be conscious of against gretchen f …
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