Sunday, July 15, 2018, was Alice’s memorial. It was awesome. She would have loved it. Her good friends Jennifer and Roger LaRochelle helped give Alice a great sendoff, full of love and fellowship, by hosting at an outdoor event, with great food and good cheer, too, at their country home up on Tenney Mountain in Hebron, New Hampshire.
I feel the need to explain the photo posted with this blog post. I took it Sunday. It’s the only one I took at the memorial. Jen & Roger’s beautiful property is pastoral and serene with a view of the mountains. Alice loved it there. They have several pigs and sheep and a couple of good old country dogs to boot. They keep the sheep and the pigs down in the lower pasture during the day, but they were readily observable to all of us, both pigs and sheep lying about under the shade of the trees, seeking protection from the ninety degrees plus day that greeted us Sunday afternoon. Alice would have loved the photo. Inappropriate? Yep. Yet, somehow perfectly designed to disrupt the solemnity of the event.
Lined up in perfect order on a flat place out behind the barn was seating for about one hundred people. My recollection is that all the seats were occupied and that there was overflow, folks standing, some under a big tent, some leaning against the barn or standing out in the sun, to pay their respect to Alice as we shared our personal recollections and memories with everyone, remembrances of what made Alice so special to us, offered from the lectern placed at the head of the gathering.
After the event, at exactly 2:30pm, we all yelled in unison: “Alice! Wow! What a ride!!!” That gave me goose bumps. I have chills writing this. Then I looked at Wayne, after our collective cheer, his face was turned up to the sky, eyes focused on a Turkey Vulture that was slowly circling above the gathering. It looked like one could simply reach out and touch it, if one had been so inclined. How eerie.
A small group of us retired to the King home in Rumney. Wayne gave us each a vial of Alice’s remains and we caravanned to an easy access point along the Stinson Brook, the one that snakes down the hill and runs behind their house, full of small eddies and large boulders, a brook that the state of New Hampshire used to stock with trout when Wayne was in the State Senate. We were just little way up the Stinson Mountain Road, gathering at the stream, among the boulders, when Wayne encouraged each of us to only pour about half of our containers into the brook. Lauren, Zach’s partner in life, made a floral reef – a raft of sorts – on which to share her dusty remains of Alice. The other half, if we chose to keep it, Wayne asked us to spread someplace important to us. Alice will ride with me on my ‘walk about’ in September. She always liked Montana. Might just leave her there. Another thought is that I might use her to inoculate the state of Mississippi from continuing down a bigoted path; Alice might infuse enough liberal progressive ash into the mortar to get some Democrats elected in that Trumpian state. Alice would like that, too.
If you see me, just another old man driving around talking to himself on the road, you might think I’m on the phone. But that won’t be it. I’ll be talking to Alice and trying to figure out where she wants to get out.
I was one of many who were invited to share a story or two with the gathering at the memorial service. My remarks follow: “One of my best and dearest friends died on June 30th. It was unexpected. It does not seem real . . . somehow.
On reflection, both of my adult children, Lauren and Colyn, thought that her first name was Aunt; and, her last name was Alice. Not surprising, since they broke bread with Aunt Alice and Uncle Wayne and cousin Zach, nearly every Thanksgiving dinner of their lives, and nearly every New Year’s Eve, spent mostly in Rumney, or, for the past few years at our home in Vermont.
With a heart the size of Texas, Alice’s quick wit and beautifully nimble mind was often accompanied by a razor-sharp tongue . . . in her prime . . . Alice was a vivacious dark haired Armenian beauty who brought joy and laughter to her friends and commitment and support to her many causes.
Mostly, though – I remember her sense of humor . . . and her wonderful comic timing.
Frequently inappropriate . . . but always hilarious and inciteful, she was one of the few people that I know who are funny on paper. Not just funny in the moment . . . but creatively funny with purpose and by design.
Early on, Alice taught us a game that we played every holiday, many here have played it at Alice and Wayne’s home: it’s called Fictionary. Everyone, on their turn, selects a word from an unabridged dictionary, a word that no one playing knows the definition of, and then each of us makes up a definition. Alice’s were always the best. And when Alice was tired of playing, or the game was being taken too seriously, she would make up the most hilarious and outrageous definitions. Often some of the best bathroom humor one will ever hear.
In fact, if we are exceptionally quiet, right now, here in this place, we can probably hear Alice whispering something outrageously funny, of course inappropriate to the gathering, as social commentary, with a little impish grin on her face, leaning into Wayne’s ear and cracking herself up in the process. In another life she could have written material for Jon Stewart or maybe, better, John Oliver.
Here is a vignette of Alice as comic instigator and ringleader. One of things about getting older is that with the passage of time one’s memories get a little hazy. This is both boon and bane. Because, the good memories fuzz up, too. It isn’t just the details that fade . . . the whole time-line gets out of whack . . . so I’ll be as specific as I can be . . . back when the earth cooled . . . there came a time when Steven, who is here with us today, myself, Alice and Wayne were sipping some of Alice’s favorite drink, Russian pepper vodka, always kept in the freezer for such occasions . . . that is, poaching ourselves in the hot tub on a cold winter’s night. At some point – Wayne decides he’s too hot and he wants to go outside and make snow angels – butt naked. But for the evidence, as you soon shall hear, I barely have a memory of doing it. Couldn’t have been the copious amount of Vodka, of course.
A couple of weeks later I show up at the King’s, ready for a scheduled gubernatorial political planning session, and maybe some more vodka; and when I arrived, Steven hands me this manila envelope. Inside there is a neatly folded sheet of paper, with a stark warning written on it, written in letters, of various fonts, neatly cut from different magazines and newspapers, like right out of some Hollywood movie. Inside of the threatening letter there were some photos of a couple of overweight white guys, with rosy red cheeks, you know which cheeks I mean, making snow angels. Did I mention butt naked?
I freaked out. I went completely into political fixer mode. My first worry was that Wayne would never be governor, he might never get back into the state senate. I started pacing back and forth, completely out of sorts, trying to figure out how the heck somebody got that close to get the photos in the first place, who in God’s name took those photos, and how could we dig up some dirt on the perpetrator to silence him – forever. Yes – I had been completely played by Alice and Steven, the photographer. Here’s a hat tip to Steven.
Another memory of Alice’s wonderful comedic talent happened a little further down the time line – Let’s say when the Vikings invaded England– Senator King was the subject of a comedy roast and I was one of a few people selected to present. Alice was keen on presenting, but having one’s spouse roasting at the event just didn’t seem right. I don’t quite remember how it came about, but Alice wrote my presentation, the only time in my political life or my business career that someone else wrote my material.
I walked to the podium and began my best effort to get into Alice’s voice. Boy did she nail it. Right smack in the Senator’s forehead. Line after line of whittling the Senator down to size as only a spouse can do, so effectively. Some of you were there that night in that packed community hall. Now I can fess up. Alice wrote the entire thing.
Besides remembering Alice’s sense of humor – my fondest and most enduring memory is of the time I fell in love with Wayne and Alice as a couple. One of three people at their wedding some three decades ago, on a cold December day, standing on the granite rocks strewn on an island in the middle of a stream, alongside two of Alice’s maids of honor, as best man to Wayne, my brother from another mother, we watched, filled with joy as the two of them said their vows. That stream would become, in time, the brook that ran behind their loving home, designed and built by their love. Because they had spent all their money buying the land they could not afford to take a honeymoon. So, to make up for it, Wayne decorated the flat like some island bordello and cranked the heat way up to affect a tropical heat wave, and we had pesto and French bread and washed it down with wine. We couldn’t wait to get out of there so Wayne and Alice could change into bathing suits and do what newlyweds, do. Wayne called Alice his girlfriend to the last day of her life.
My heart breaks for Wayne and my nephew Zack.
In closing, I count on the fact that Alice saved some of her best comedic material to do five minutes of stand-up for Saint Peter at his pearly gate.
Alice. If you can hear me. You were loved. And you loved unconditionally. You will be missed Alice Vartanian – King. Rest in peace.”
