While walking out the Charlotte pier on Labor Day weekend I kept looking over at the funkier, slightly shorter Summerville Pier on the other side of the Genesee River. On Sunday we rode our bikes over to the east pier and walked out past the warning signs, “No Hand Rails, Uneven Surfaces, Deep Water.” There were a handful of fishermen and woman out there, plenty of trash and really uneven surfaces. It was a mini vacation.
We stopped in O’Laughlins to go to the bathroom and the Bills were down 21-0. We heard cheers coming from the homes along Rock Beach so assumed they were catching up but we were really surprised to hear they won by the time we got back home.
We expected a slightly more irreverent send off for Barbara Stewart but her funeral service was quite beautiful. She had more sides than we knew. We first met her when we did a website for her government consulting consortium, SWI. And then we found out about her kazoo side and lifelong efforts to make the kazoo the national instrument. Along the way we learned she had won an Olympic gold medal for pole vaulting, appeared on Conan O’Brien, worked with Tony Randall, held a violinist chair in the Philharmonic and Dave Ripton was her handyman.
At first we found it hard to shut her up and get down to the work at hand but she had so many fantastic stories to tell and she was so much fun that she won us over and we’d look forward to her visits no matter how much time they ate up. She planned her final service and it was an eclectic mixture of classical and camp with an operatic closing number, “Climb Every Mountain.”
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