Eulogy for Friend

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Eulogy for Friend

The last time I saw my friend Kevin, was at his wedding in 1997. He was always a late bloomer, (Kevin had been the last of my friends to date), and we were all delighted to see him married for the first time at 44. After years of delay and false starts, his marriage to Diana gave us all the sense that he was finally on his way.

I remember the first time I saw him, entering my second grade class, gangly even then, all arms and legs and elbows akimbo. Years later, those elbows became sharp weapons as we played basketball for hours on end. Son of an Irish-American father and a mother who was the daughter of a Peruvian diplomat, he immediately taught us to chant, "Long live the Irish-Peruvians!"

Kevin was always quick with words. His wit, as Mercutio said, was "most sharp sauce." He used words to make us laugh or to cut us down to size, and as we entered our high school years he became the powerful giver of names. The nicknames he chose for us – like Z-man, Lulu, Summ-ador, Moinbo, Zip, Pooch, and UD helped to populate our black-and-white world with colorful characters. Even his first car – a sky-blue-pink VW fastback – had a nickname: Jezebel, given in recognition of its shameless unreliability. And Kevin became the most interesting figure of us all after he invented the character of Capt. Quixtus Spoon. Captain Spoon was the central figure in a poem that Kevin wrote, and ultimately Kevin became "Spoon" to us.

Kevin was our resident "author" and all of us were confident that one day he would become a famous writer. He was also our resident activity director, (his earliest forays into directing); he organized our playtime as he became the informal leader of what he dubbed the "LSA" (the Landing Sports A...

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..., it was too unreal to comprehend. His humor, which was often irreverent and edgy, would have found his end both tragic and bizarre, exactly the kind of mix he might have included in one of his stories or screenplays. A random moment, caused by the "conceit of old age," as one of our friends called it, left nine former people, including my friend and his wife, strewn, like so much produce, on the bloody pavement.

Kevin always had a charming child-like sweetness – his fifty years seemed more like a beginning than a middle; and he was certainly not ready to be at the end. While this final journey for Captain Spoon came too soon, Kevin and Diana were living their dream – fulfilling their quest to create stories together. Their story was brief, but a joy to all who knew them.

Life's parade goes on, but the world is a lesser place without Kevin and his love Diana.

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