kate_schaefer | Anita Rowland, 1956-2007

My friend Anita died a little over a week ago. I miss her.

I'd known her since 1991. Over the past 16 years, we did the things friends do, first as casual acquaintances, then as friends: parties, dinner groups, movies, concerts, watching meteors fall all night long.

She liked science fiction, Regency romances, opera, dancing, sparkly hair ornaments, happy endings, and abundance in all things. She was like me in being a bit of a border collie, wanting people to get organized and do things; unlike me, because she was fairly relaxed about how quickly they got around to doing whatever it was. She couldn't drink, because alcohol sent her into fits of uncontrolled sneezing.

She was about the best grandmother I've ever seen, and I say this from the standpoint of being a pretty good grandmother myself. She and I had each married men with two daughters from previous marriages, so our relations with our grandchildren are defined by experience, by time, by love, not by blood. During her illness, I often took care of her grandson. He was always happy to see me (I'm a reasonably fun adult for most small children). He wasn't always happy to see Anita when it was time for him to go home. Time with me was time spent playing with K'nex or trains or Legos, time at the zoo, at McDonald's, at the park. Time with Anita was normal life, which had plenty of K'nex, trains, Legos, zoo, McDonald's, park, swimming pool, crayons, cartoons, Matchbox cars, songs, snacks, games; it was normal, and he could take it, and her, for granted, like air, like the earth. It is a very great measure of success when a happy child takes an adult for granted.

I'll miss her. I do miss her. There was an article about a Russian opera singer in the New York Times recently; I thought, Anita would be interested in this. Glenn ran into a group of Santas smoking and swearing and generally being badly-behaved (for Santa, anyway), and we thought about Anita dressed up as Santa, shaking jingle bells on a stick, and asking, "Naughty or nice?" with all the other Santas in the Cacophony Society's Santa Rampage, which of course made us think about the year the Cacophony Society went out caroling in the voice of Bob Dylan. Anita's Bob Dylan impression was about as bad as mine, but you could tell who she was supposed to be.

There is no way to sum up the whole of a person in writing. She was good. She was kind. She was quietly witty. She was a music major who took up the trombone when she was young, and had to give it up once it became clear that her arms weren't ever going to get as long as they needed to be for that instrument. She wasn't a saint, and she didn't ascend to heaven in a cloud of singing angels. She did feed hungry people, whether they were members of a convention where she ran the hospitality suite or homeless men at her church. I was never clear about whether she believed in anything related to church except for the music and feeding the hungry; those seemed like enough.

I miss her. I say goodbye.