cri de coeur

     And then young Kate was walking up to the podium. She was a budding rose, thought Merideth, to her mother’s full blown flower. And the other Catherine? The widow? Maybe one of those white, waxy looking hybrids, like a gardenia without the smell. 

       "Baruch atah Adonai,” intoned Kate.  Reverend Paul looked startled, but most of her audience seemed just plain puzzled by the Hebrew words.  The girl seemed tense but composed. She glanced at a piece of paper in her hand, and then looked out.

      “Soon after my father died—was killed—someone asked me what kind of man he was. I was not thinking clearly at the time, and I said something about his artistic gifts—and he certainly had those—and his generosity and his great love and loyalty for his family, and his temper. He had one of those too! Usually it erupted when he felt that someone was being unfair—not to him, so much, as to others. He despised prejudice—whether because of sex, race, religion, nation of origin, social class—and tried to break it down wherever he encountered it, in his business and in his daily dealings with people.

     “But it occurs to me that the most fundamental aspect of the way he thinks about things—thought about things—is that he was always searching for patterns. He finds, found, meaning in symmetry from fractals to the periodic table, from ocean currents to the whorl of petals on a wildflower, from a quartz crystal to a brick wall. He was fascinated by this stuff. This was how he built things—like computer chips and houses and businesses—from seeing how one piece made a pattern in the whole.

    “And he was like this about people too. He did not see people as isolated individuals, but as a mosaic of interlocking families and communities. Block Island fascinated him because of this. He was interested in the way the old families were related to one another, how they interlocked and interacted with the newcomers and the tourists who sustained them. How they fit into the wider world. His vision of the Island probably looked something like one of his almost diagrammatic pencil drawings, a combination of tiny shapes that, taken as a whole, shows not only a web of connections, but a schematic overview that takes on a whole different shape.

      “My point is, yes, he was my father, and I loved him and many of us will miss him, but my point is, this occasion—right here, right now!— is greater than my personal grief.

     “My father saw something wrong in the patterns here. And that something is what got him killed. Because he was the kind of man who would try to fix whatever was messing up the pattern.

     “So I ask you, in his memory, to find the break in the web. Find the flaw, the sour note, the rip tide, the anomaly, that he saw and most likely confronted. I know this is not supposed to be what you talk about at a funeral service, but if you love him or care for him, if you love your island, heal it.

    “That would be the best memorial for Malcolm Samuel Addams, born to Lenny and Ruth Addams in New Rochelle, New York, on February 14, 1947. Died on May 29^th of this year. On Block Island, of all the places he had lived, the place he loved the best and had chosen to spend the rest of his life in, in search of community and renewal and the beautiful, natural, rhythms of life here.

    "Baruch atah Adonai.” She took the black ribbon off her shoulder, tore it in half and threw it on the ground, picked up the piece of paper she had not consulted since she began speaking and went back to her seat.

     “I am so proud of my daughter,” said Kat quietly. Tears were running down her face. “And, yes, she is his daughter too.”