Charlotte has been my best friend for more than 60 years. She died today and I'm not sure what I am going to do without her in my life.
I first met her when I moved into a dorm at UC Berkeley. There were two dorms in one building. I was in the smaller dorm, she was the grad resident of the larger dorm and I knew from the very beginning that she didn't like me and tried to avoid her.
Then I met her at the Newman Center, where I spent most of my time at Berkeley, and we became friends. I lived with her and Mike for about a year when I was trying to pay some bills. I shared a bedroom with baby Tavie, who woke me up every morning, jumping up in her crib and laughing at me. I would take her to Mike and Char's bedroom and then get dressed for work...when I walked down the hall to the front door, the cat grabbed my legs and gave me runs in my stockings (he gave me stockings for Christmas)
When she and Mike moved to Alaska with two toddlers, I wrote to her every day. They were living in a log cabin in the winter (it was -50 degrees the day she landed in Fairbanks...she was born and raised in San Francisco). She told me later it was my letters that got her through that winter.
We each had five kids. Her two oldest were born before Walt and I got married, but Jeri and her Jenny were about 6 weeks apart in age. We raised our kids together, lived near each other, watched the same soap operas, went to the same nursery school and grammar school until we moved to Davis and they moved to Palo Alto. Ned and I were talking tonight about how this isn't two families, but one family. In fact, while her daughter Jenny texted me about Char's death, I learned about it first from Ned, who heard from her son Tim. Later Jeri told me she had spoken with Jenny.
Char and I did all sorts of things together. We learned how to make candles and filled her kitchen with wax. We learned how to make bread and spent a lot of time testing out different flours (and learned to cook with sourdough starter). We went together to get Christmas trees and found two wonderful, full trees and then realized that we had no way to tie them to her Saab so we managed to squeeze them into the car, and I rode covered by tree branches.
I remember when we took our then 6 kids to the train to watch the animals being unloaded for the circus. We followed them to the place where they would perform and got trapped between the cages with big cats and the parade of elephants. "Watch out for that one--she kicks" the guy with the elephants warned us.
But our best experience involved pumpkins. We took the kids to a pumpkin patch to get pumpkins for Halloween and when the holiday was over, Char and I decided to use the pumpkins and make pumpkin pies. We did that for two or three years. I was the crust, she was the filling and since neither of us had a freezer. we just gave them to neighbors and friends.
The third year we made 32 pies and Char said she felt so silly she would let me toss a pie in her face. We gathered friends with a camera and staged a chase around the house, ending with my tossing a pie in her face (the dog loved it). When it was over she said "you know what this means for next year..."
The next year, I greeted her in rain gear, preparing to have a pie thrown in my face. We did the same thing after we made our pies, only this time I was the one who got the pie in the face.
For two years, our kids had been watching their mothers and they demanded to have pies to throw at each other. So the next year, we got little pie pans, made 9 little pies (her youngest was too young; David was 9 months old) and the kids filed out of the house with their pies and began tossing them at each other. The longer it went on the better it got and there is a movie about it on YouTube. (It was an 8 mm movie, which I videotaped so the sound you hear is the sound of the people watching the movie)
(Jeri said tonight she felt like making a pumpkin pie)
We were part of a group that eventually became known as the Pinata Group. Five couples who met and married at Newman Hall, who all had kids and lived fairly close to each other. We never had New Year's Eve parties, but wanted the kids (22 of them) involved and so we had New Year's day parties, and always had a pinata for the kids. They lined up, youngest to oldest and the pinatas continued well into their adulthood, with the kids (now adults) still lining up as they did for so many years.
Our families did a lot of camping together. Mike hated paved roads and we went an entire 3 day weekend over Memorial Day one year without seeing another car, visiting ghosts towns. We both decided when we finally got to a road we would get out and kiss it. At the end of one of these tours, we went to a Scottish festival. Mike drove into the parking area first and the guy at the gate told Walt to "follow that car." Walt said he'd been following that car for days.
We spent time camping in Death Valley. One year we were there over Easter and had lamb fondu for dinner, since we couldn't have leg of lamb. That was probably the year that the wind knocked our tent over and we moved the kids to Char and Mike's tent while Walt and I slept in the car. In the morning one of the girls asked Walt why he had knocked his tent over with rocks (he had weighted the tent so it wouldn't blow away).
We did a lot of camping on "Eric's property," some land owned by our friends the Havels. Tim discovered there were huckleberry bushes and we spent a lot of time over several years picking huckleberries. At night, Char slept with her sourdough starter in the tent so she could make sourdough huckleberry pancakes for breakfast in the morning.
When the kids grew up, Char suggested the four of us take a cruise on the river in England and we went on a small boat (8 passengers in two different boats) from London to Oxford. It was such fun that the next year she suggested that we take a normal cruise on the river in Russia. We went on Viking cruises and that started out annual cruises. Russia, China, Ukraine, the Danube. We were going to take a cruise down to the south of France and we were meeting Char and Mike in Paris after they took a cruise in Germany first, but Mike got sick and ended up dying in Germany.
Following Mike's death, we took our only ocean cruise, up the Mediterranean. Viking let Char travel alone.
We haven't seen a lot of each other in recent years. We live 100 miles apart and when we want to visit, we meet at Fentons creamery where we have crab salad sandwiches and malts. In fact, the last time I saw her was in May, when Jeri surprised me by taking me to Fentons, and arranging for Char and the girls to meet us there.
After Ned was in an auto accident and needed to buy a new car, she offered to sell him her Prius for $10.00. He wanted us to all go down and have lunch, but she wasn't feeling well and didn't feel like socializing, so he and Marta went and got the car.
Shortly after that started a bunch of doctor visits which ended up with a diagnosis of cancer. She opted not to have chemo (we had discussed that before. We both agreed that at our age, to go through the discomfort of chemo just to prolong our life was not something either of us wanted to do). But the cancer progressed quickly.
I could tell how she was doing by whether she did Wordle in the morning or not. She has not done Wordle in the last two days and I knew that time was coming to an end.
In the days before her death, she was able to see all her kids (son Tim flew out from Maryland), her grandkids and great grandkids and her death, Jenny tells me, was painless.
She has been such a huge part of my life for most of my life and I am going to have a difficult time learning to live without her.
I loved her, and I never actually told her that until she got sick.
Maybe we'll have clam dip tomorrow.
