Time can be so very short.  It seems like it was just yesterday that I was a student at Proctor.  My memories of that place are strong because it was there that I felt accepted for who I was and understood.   That feeling was given not just from the faculty at the school, but also from those that worked behind the scenes to make it all work smoothly.

Yesterday I went to a memorial service for Mary and Roger Pellerin who were tragically killed in a fire on the 20th.  The service was up at Proctor and the place was packed.   Their son Joe set the tone by saying that he was horribly unprepared,  for how can anybody be ready or prepared  to lose their parents in a fire.  Who indeed.

I remember Mary from my days at Proctor fondly.  And if I remember correctly,  her desk was just in the entrance of the development office ,  up on the second floor off the rotunda in Maxwell Savage. I had classes at one time or another either with Donny Gentile in the class to  the left or with Tom Eslick in the class room on the right.   And in Mary’s office there was a coffee pot and I would snag a cup of coffee there instead of getting one at the Doot’s Den.   And so I came to know Mary and got her to type up some papers for me because we had typewriters back then and I could not spell correctly, nor consistently and I would not see all the typos and you got points off for bad spelling,  and so for a couple of bucks, and a bit of a heads up…… she would type and fix my papers for me.  And the lesson in that was to work smarter and not harder, especially on things that you know you are no good at.

The other interaction I had with her was during senior project.   Proctor was pretty smart in that you have a bunch of kids about to graduate and their parents have just spent a ton of money getting the kid to the finish line and the time between spring break and graduation is short.. we marched on May 23d.   And so if you have a carrot to dangle in front of a bunch of exuberant adolescents,  namely ….if-your-grades-are-in-good-standing…. and you can propose a project, you can skip the end of your senior classes, do something that will absorb you in what you like to do and give a presentation of what you have been doing … and not get busted for blowing off classes and floating down the river drinking beer… you can do what you want to do and actually graduate.

I don’t know how I came up with it, but I had found the supply closet at the top of the rotunda and in it was a huge amount of old photos what had been stored there and mostly forgotten . I had also been on Green Key which was a program where, as a student,  you would meet with prospective students and their families and give them a tour of the campus. That also got me free coffee and I then knew all the folks in the admissions office too, which I think shared the same space  as the development office then.   So I came up with the idea of looking at all the old pictures and figuring out who was in them and then I went and found some of the oldest living graduates at the time and had tea with one or two of them and wrote down their stories.  I learned about the history of the school, why people had chosen to come and some about the town of Andover.  Mary was a transplant but had lived in Andover a while and so knew most of the old-timers in town and was able to figure out who lots of the folks were or how I could track them down.   Mary was also  somehow was assigned to keep me out of trouble and focused while I was digging in the closet.  And it must have worked because I made it to graduation without getting the boot.

I don’t know exactly why she signed my yearbook the way she did.  I know she loved music and perhaps in her ever-so-direct way she was telling me go just go out and do what you love.  Another of life’s lessons.

There were many times I would be driving though Andover and wonder how she was doing.  I regret not taking it one step further and following up on the small still voice that said.. go see what Mary is up to..  I should have followed up and gone to see her.  At least once over the past 30 years.  Was my life so very busy that I could not have taken the time?    Another lesson.

At the service yesterday her son spoke elegantly of his parents, of their devotion to one another, to the family and to the community.   They lived a life that touched literally hundreds of individuals with positive interactions.  Life is so very short and though we will all see one another on the other side, it is in this life that we should remember to reach out to one another.

Mary and Roger Pellerin certainly knew and lived that lesson.