Early yesterday afternoon--Wednesday--I was enjoying my second stint at the Open Door Coffee Company here in Hudson (reading, etc.), and as I was about to leave for home (and then for the Dreaded Health Club), Nigel, one of the great baristas there, came over to tell me that he'd just gotten a phone call from someone who knows me. This person had something for me, Nigel said, some "papers" of some kind. Whoever it was had told Nigel not to let me leave; he was on the way over.
I had no clue what was going on. Who is the person? What is he bringing?
In just a few minutes, in came David, a young man (a college teacher) whom I know for a couple of reasons: Our paths have crossed in coffee shops, for one--but, mainly, because he lived for some years in a house here in Hudson where we had lived from 1980-90. (He did not buy it from us but from one of the owners who followed.)
Not long ago, he and his family sold that house and bought another one here in the village--one where another family we'd known had lived for quite a while. In the process of some remodeling, David had found a document-sized postal envelope that had fallen out of sight when the family had moved out.
The envelope was from Joyce. And it was dated October 2, 1990.
Let's flash back a moment. By then, Joyce and I had moved to Aurora, to a great old house on East Pioneer Trail. Our son, Steve, had left for college. Freshman year. I was back teaching at Harmon Middle School (8th graders); Joyce, who had been teaching for a decade at Western Reserve Academy, had received a Teacher-Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities--a sabbatical year to work on her latest interest (great literary works by women). Her mother was suffering from Alzheimer's--so severely that we had moved her to Anna Maria, a care facility in Aurora (another reason for our move there).
Okay.
David handed me the envelope, said a few kind things, and left.
I opened it.
Inside were a number of documents relating to the death of Joyce's father, Thomas Coyne, on August 13, 1990. Among them was the program for the service, held in the WRA Chapel, 11 a.m., August 16, 1990. As I paged through it, I saw that my older brother read Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night." I saw that our son--and his great friend from Harmon, and WRA, Andy Paul--and Trudy Appling, the daughter of Steve's beloved WRA choral director, Bill Appling (who played the piano for the piece)--and another WRA friend and classmate, Christina Quagliata--performed "Brother James's Air."
And I saw that I delivered the eulogy.
Of course, I remembered doing so--but I couldn't have told you much about it. But inside that envelope was a copy of my remarks. I read through them in Open Door, tears in my eyes, and could not imagine how I managed to get through the thing that August day.
Maybe I didn't.
Anyway, I headed home and handed Joyce the envelope--and she got to experience the same storm surge of emotion and memory that I had.
Neither of us could remember why Joyce had mailed these materials to our friends ... had they requested them? ... had they been present and wanted copies? I'm not sure we'll ever find out.
But what a Thanksgiving gift.
I'm positive we have copies of all these things--somewhere. But to have them arrive on Thanksgiving Eve is simply too wonderful even to imagine.
Thomas Coyne, Joyce's father, is always present in our lives--we talk about him all the time. But yesterday, he stepped into the room, and, seeing him, we realized once again the pure wonder of that great man, a man who loved his family fiercely. And that love--as my eulogy reminded us--endured until his final breath.
And this ... our older grandson is named Logan Thomas Dyer.
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