ALAN writes:

If an astronomer looked up one evening and saw that a bright star that had been there for ages is no longer there, he might say, “The universe has changed.”

That was approximately how I felt at the moment last week after I walked into a branch library in St. Louis and paused to look at an exhibit of railroad photographs in a display case.  One of the staff members came over to where I was standing and said he had something to tell me.  What he said was the last thing in the world I would have expected to hear: “Mary passed away…..”

It was one of those moments when you stand there, stunned, and want so much not to believe what you have just been told. Those few words caused my universe to change.

Mary had worked in that library for 28 years.  She died from natural causes at age 53, and her death, wholly unexpected, came as a shock to everyone who knew her.

In this age of outrageous excess and overstatement, the word friend is greatly overused and misused.  Mary and I were friends, in the proper sense of the word, for all those years.

We met by chance in or around 1989 in a large, old antiquarian book shop in downtown St. Louis.  A mutual interest in books, old magazines, music, and local history formed the basis for our friendship.  But Judy Garland started it all.

It so happened that Mary was looking for older books about Judy. Each of us had enjoyed motion pictures like Meet Me in St. Louis and The Harvey Girls, and Mary wanted to read more about Judy’s life and career.  I managed to find a few such books for her, along with a 1944 issue of LIFE magazine with Judy pictured on the cover.

In the years following, Mary and I kept in contact and met every so often for conversation and to compare impressions of this or that book, magazine article, movie, or collection of recordings.  We talked on benches in a city park, in a student lounge on a college campus, and in a medical school’s library.  We visited book stores and candy stores.  We dined at restaurants and cafeterias along old Route 66 in St. Louis, five of which have since closed or been demolished.

Mary had a wonderful sense of humor and it was not hard for me to provoke her laughter.

We exchanged Christmas cards and she talked about her love of passenger trains.  We talked of musical productions she had seen at the Municipal Opera in Forest Park.  We talked of her interest in the life and death of Abraham Lincoln, of her mother’s interest in the history of the St. Louis Archdiocese, and of her father’s interest in the golden years of radio broadcasting.

In the realm of popular music, Mary’s favorite singer was Crystal Gayle.  She told me of her vacation trips to Nashville and showed me albums of pictures she had taken at concerts near St. Louis at which she spoke with Crystal Gayle and established a friendship.

In the realm of old television programs, Mary especially enjoyed the 1960s comedy series The Munsters.  She told me how happy she had been one evening in 1991 when she attended a hardware show in downtown St. Louis and met and spoke with actor Al Lewis, who portrayed the unforgettable character Grandpa in that series.  It was one of the last television comedy series that incorporated and projected the old, classic kind of humor:  Self-effacing, innocent, never trendy, pretentious or mocking.  It was the same kind of gentle humor evident in Leave It to Beaver, which Mary also enjoyed from a time before she was born.

When entertainers like Fred Gwynne, Yvonne De Carlo, and Debbie Reynolds died, she remembered them and remained grateful for the entertainment they provided that she had so enjoyed.

Part of Mary’s job was to arrange exhibits for the display case in the library where she worked, a responsibility she happily accepted.  Stamp, doll, and postcard collections, the Charlie Brown comic strip, St. Louis history, passenger train photographs, memories, and mementos—those were just a few of the many exhibits that Mary arranged.

Mary lived her entire life in one neighborhood, not one of the oldest neighborhoods in St. Louis but one of the best.  It was an area of tree-lined residential streets where many houses had large front lawns and where old-fashioned neighborliness is still practiced.  She remained a loyal member of her parish.  She attended its grade school, which closed several years ago because of declining enrollment.  She worked every year at the parish homecoming festivities.

One Sunday afternoon a few years back, Mary and I walked through an old Catholic cemetery in search of monuments and gravesites for people in her extended family.  She took photographs and I took notes for her to add to her continuing genealogy project.  We paused at the stone for her grandfather, who had been a policeman. We sat and rested for a while on a bench in a far corner of the cemetery, and I told her we were just a few yards away from my mother’s final resting place.

In the movie Meet Me in St. Louis, the cakewalk number Under the Bamboo Tree and the Halloween segment were the scenes that she enjoyed most. In a movie that abounds in charming scenes and sequences, Margaret O’Brien’s “Tootie” was Mary’s favorite character, and the Halloween segment is built entirely around “Tootie.” It occurs to me that Mary may have seen part of herself in that mischievous little girl, and that it may have inspired her to remember equally delightful, imaginative adventures from Halloween nights in her own childhood.

There was a time in America when children could enjoy those kinds of adventures on Halloween night—adventures offering opportunities for the rich play of childhood imagination; a time now long past, having since been eclipsed by the excess and overproduction that we see around us every October.  It occurs to me that Mary had the good fortune (as did I, before her) to grow up in the tail-end years of that era when it was still possible for children to rely upon their imagination instead of having it pre-empted by TV screens and mass-marketing hype.

Mary possessed what the American philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand called “a benevolent sense of life”.  I know all about that because my own parents possessed it, and I have no doubt that her parents possessed it, too.  It is a priceless gift and is becoming increasingly rare.

But Mary always had it.  It was the essence of her character.  There was no element of envy or malice or resentment in Mary’s character.  She was untouched and unaffected by such things; untouched and unaffected by the excess and ugliness and decadence that modern life often throws in our face.  She knew they were there, but she never allowed them to alter her frame of mind or her outlook on life.  She had no room for them in her life because life gave her so much joy, happiness, astonishment, and the capacity to appreciate those things.  She retained her love of life, of beauty, of decency, of achievement, of excellence; of her parents, her parish, and her family and friends—her benevolent sense of life.  Neither health problems nor the loss of her mother diminished her love of life.

Not by her choice or desire, Mary has now added to her family genealogy.  Because of the age gap between us (I was fifteen years older), the thought never occurred to me that a day might come when Mary would not be here.  I regret that it did.  Had I any say in the matter, I would gladly have taken her place.

— Comments —

Stephen Ippolito writes:

You may not have written in couplets, Alan, but your piece was no less poetic for that. I doubt there is any heart so cold it wasn’t warmed by your Elegy for your friend.

Alan’s remembrance of Mary reminded me very powerfully that what we generally believe to be the central truth about life does not really hold true at all. Though it may seem to us in our busy, distracted daily lives to be a truism that life and people value, respect and reward material success above all else, that is not really true. Far from it.

I’ve yet to hear a grieving spouse or true friend console themselves with a reflection on the size of their departed’s bank balance. What really matters in the end is whether we have touched the hearts of those whom we have known and whether, by personality, example or our works we have eased the paths of others. There is no other measure worthy of a human life.

Alan’s remembrance caused me to reflect that the personal qualities that go to make for a life well lived are the very qualities that the perfect human, Christ, modelled and which  Mary posessed in spades: kindness, generosity, warmth, self-sacrifice  and humour. These are the true hallmarks of a genuinely valuable and worthwhile human life: a life that enhanced the life of others just by being met along the way.

In a world where good people are often denied the rewards they deserve, I am very glad to know that Mary at least was favoured to have known the love and loyalty of a true friend. Thanks for sharing your your thoughts about Mary with us, Alan.

Please follow and like us: