Debbie

A friend of mine, Debbie Vaughan, died recently, and her funeral was on the twentyfifth. It was a quite well attended funeral, for she was a great wife to Cliff, a mother of seven, a grandmother, and part of the People of Praise, which is why I got the chance to know her. I met her in 2003.

Debbie was a reader, and, of course, she immediately asked me about books I liked, and I really like To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis, so I told her about it. Debbie not only read it, she bought extra copies so that she could loan them out. She had at least one reading group and a women's group read it- I don't think many of the women in the Shreveport branch escaped. I know she read Bellwether, and probably Passage as well.

Indeed, even after she died, someone mentioned the book while honoring her. It is still being read because of her.

You may think this isn't such a grand thing, but I was going through a divorce and the book had played a small but revealing role in that relationship. You will find To Say Nothing of the Dog in the science fiction section, but a rather large portion of it takes place in Victorian England and there is a bit of romance; my ex-wife liked Victorian romances. I had read things she had said were particularly good; I knew she would like the book. I recommended the book to her. I even tried reading it aloud to her. She then told me was jealous of the book. I enjoyed it enough to read it multiple times, which meant my attention was on it and not her.

So, Debbie's unreserved joy in sharing this book meant a lot to me. There was a lot more, of course. I have spent quite a few holidays at the Vaughan house, and her efforts to make sure there was something I would actually eat as I changed my diet were heroic, but let me not turn this into the sort of post that requires heroic fortitude on the part of the reader.

Thank you, Debbie.