Jeffrey Phillips
Dear Billy and Beth, I was so sorry to hear about your mom’s passing.
One of my happiest childhood memories was when my parents put me on a plane to visit Buffy in College Park, near Washington, D.C. After taking me on the new Metro to D.C. the second day of my visit for a congressional tour, she dropped me at the station, Cheverly I think, the next morning so I could venture back to tour the other museums on my own. I was twelve!
I had a wonderful day, and I can still recount many of the details forty-five years later. Your mom was right there waiting for me at the station in her white Toyota, just as planned.
It was years later that I learned about the tongue lashing my mother gave Buffy for letting me spend the day alone in D.C. Any fury passed quickly, of course. That was your mom, steady and sure in her own good judgment.
At the end of the week, she and I drove to the family farm in Sugar Grove, NC to meet your grandparents, where my mother and grandmother would rendezvous. I can still see our mothers bent over in laughter, washing dishes in their slips, while I had talked your grandmother into smoking the clay pipe I’d bought at the Smithsonian.
Rest in peace, sweet cousin Buffy.
You gave a twelve-year-old boy one of the most confident, happy, and unforgettable weeks of his life.