Saturday, December 22, 2012
Joan and I were so sorry to hear of Tony's passing.
It was 1979 when I first met Tony, and joined the car pool that he helped form, along with Mike Madalone, John Harrington, Dick Dunfee and Helen; a young woman who worked for a different agency yet in our same building. It was a club of sorts of which I had the privilege to become a member of. We would talk about our lives; our wives, children and the place where we worked away our days and we came to know one-another one half hour at a time. All but one of us worked for the Facilities Development Corporation, a little state agency whose life came to an end in 1995, which in a way reminds me of Tony's first long-term employer -ALCO (American Locomotive) whose life had come to an end twenty years earlier…
The memory that remains fixed in a special file cabinet in my brain was a conversation I had with Tony a few days after one of our car pool commutes. My wife Joan was waiting to pick me up and in the car with her was our young son, Michael, who at the time was going through chemotherapy treatments for leukemia and had a nearly-bald little head.
Mike and John came over to say hi to Joan and our son Michael, yet Tony walked in the opposite direction, over to his car and lit a cigarette. I didn't think anything of it, yet he must have wanted to explain himself when he pulled me aside a few days later…
He said that he couldn't bear to walk over and face Joan…and little Michael; he got too emotional, and wondered if he'd be able to stay composed in the company of this little boy with cancer. This is when I realized that beneath the man's-man exterior was a gentle, compassionate man. That was around thirty years ago…and yet, it's never left me.
One of the last times I saw Tony and June was the day I stopped at his house to pick up some windows - his old windows. Those windows found a new home in the tree house that I built up near our cabin in the Adirondack forest. And I now think about those windows a bit differently - windows that Tony, June, Cindy, and so many others looked out of for decades…now look down upon Kari's Creek and the constant whisper that flow brings to our world.
People who bring meaning to our lives never leave us…the best parts stay and become a part of us, or so I believe.
Tony was a friend and a mentor. He was someone that left a mark on my heart..and I am thankful for having known him.
