June 10th, 2024

    Everybody is multi-faceted, but Anne seemed to have more facets than most.  Thinking of her, the arc of life as it is usually lived quickly gives way to a montage of enthusiasms, talents, strange fancies and unexpected projects, a sort of whirlwind that defies any easy, linear synopsis. Wife, mother, salesman, actor, singer…There was the real estate phase and the jewelry phase and the antique phase.  If memory serves, there was a brief opera moment and some violin too, and of course, somehow totally out of the blue and for no discernible reason, the successful bar owner.

     What was special about Anne though, was not so much what she did, but how, in whatever she did, she was able to enthrall, to seduce us with her special aura.  What was it that held us all so spellbound in her company?  It was, I think, her innate grasp of human personalities.  No one had keener antenna.  Spend an hour in her company and she’d pretty much have you figured out on sheer intuition.  In this she was impressive, disarming and unfailingly entertaining.  One could imagine that if she had lived three or four hundred years earlier, she would have been suspected of being a witch.  Today we call it charisma.

          It was Anne’s facile grasp of people that gave depth to her other natural talents.  It’s what made her a good actor, and the good acting is what made her such a compelling singer. She had a voice, of course, but what made it work was her sensitivity to emotion.  (She sang just once to the public at One Tippling, after which, the bass player, who had never heard her sing before, turned to me, and just whispered “Wow”.)

    And speaking of One Tippling, what can account for someone in her late fifties and in easy circumstances, starting a risky business?  It is easy to underestimate how daunting this must have been and how gutsy it was of her to have taken on such a project.  And along with the business, there was always some concurrent busy-ness.  There she was with Elizabeth, popping up on Facebook from South America, or India or Iceland or the Far East.  This seemingly sedentary woman was clearly not, but filled with a wanderlust and a restless, driving energy.

     Talking about Anne recently with Jeremy and Elizabeth, I was reminded of another side of Anne: a proclivity to worry.  Sure in her tastes, original in her thinking, she had the social confidence of one who had grown up with advantages (and, one might add, a refreshingly unapologetic view of them) but against this more assured sense of self was a brigade of anxieties.  If this never seemed uppermost, it was because her sense of humor tempered her anxiety.  Or maybe I have it backwards here, maybe it was just this tension between exuberance and anxiety that was at the base of her sense of humor.  In retrospect, her fretting seemed uncalled for.  Everything she did seemed to turn out just fine.

    Anne and Jeremy and Elizabeth and Daksh were with us this last Thanksgiving.  Looking at the picture of the guests, with a dozen or so people staring down a long table, Anne’s face in the photo is partially blocked. I wish I’d gotten her better but at the time I didn’t think much of it because at the time I could not conceive of what, even now, I still cannot quite believe: that Anne would not be there for the next one.  Now for me that photo will forever evoke, not a moment of an event, but the constant, unspoken fragility of life.  Anne, not so long ago, partially obscured, and now – suddenly --   gone beyond our capturing.

     And so now, as many of us are facing our own purple dusks of twilight, we are left with our memories of her: the Holly Golightly parties that seem from another era, the silly Christmas mornings, the curiously clipped way Anne would pronounce “Jeremy” when agitated.  And in doing so, we confront that deal we are all forced into without our consent: that to enjoy the wonders of life you must sometimes watch as it is taken away from those you love. It seems unspeakably unfair.  It is a bitter bargain, but sweetened today by the remembrance of the many enjoyments that Anne gave us, her eccentric grasp of the human spirit, her laughter, and her magical zest.