News from North Truro

I called my friend in Rochester late this afternoon as he had been at his parents in Wellfleet last week and went and saw Claudia at her place next to Babes where she spends the summer even though she's leasing the restaurant.Tom dropped a bomb on me telling me that our kitchen mates younger sister had passed away on June 26th at the age of 45.I've been in a funk since then alternating great memories to great sadness.My first summer in North Truro(1977),I was 22 and Mary was 14 but the first time I met her which was me driving a bunch of us home from the Wellfleet Drive-In in my vega wagon with Mary sitting on the shifter right next to me I was fascinated by her.The next couple of summers she turned into a beautiful Irish American lass,brown hair that really lightened in the sun and a sprinkling of freckles.She also had a wise guy type of humor like myself and I had a mini/major crush on her though because of our age difference at the time I resisted.I had a thing with her sister off an on over the summers who was three years older than Mary and worked at Babes with me but Mary enchanted me.When she was 17 I ran into her walking out of Tess in Provincetown one day in 1980 and she raved about it.This was the Roman Polanski version and I went and saw it with her, me for the first time and that summer we hung out together.But it was that summer she started to display very erratic behavior and by the next summer was in a hospital back home in New Hampshire.For the next twenty years she was in and out of treatment for severe Bi-Polar as far as I know and it was in the last years she was out on her own with a job ,living on her own and falling in love,engaged to be married when a few months ago she was found to have a rapidly spreading Cancer.I never knew what was going on because her brother and sister really didn't give much info when she was first diagnosed and seemed not to want to talk about it over the next several years but I thought about her so many times over the years.So hearing of her passing today I feel so much guilt about being helpless to help her and just seeing that beautiful Irish face with the freckles and wishing I could hug her one more time.