Click on the arrows below to open each topic
While attending summer school at the University of Virginia, Linda was staying in her brother Gary’s basement apartment (who was pre-med and in Europe). Paul was walking to work as an orderly at the University hospital. She called out jokingly, “Hello, are you intern of the year?”, and he replied, “No, just a lowly orderly”.
She thought Paul said “a LONELY orderly”, and the misheard remark brought their lives together.
Their first kiss was in the softball field off Hydraulic Road in Charlottesville after an incredible thunderstorm. Huddling in the dugout, the ferocious lightning barely stopped. The rain hadn’t, but chortling with the storm’s ions and wind, they galloped to the pitcher’s mound and embraced, water coursing down their faces, a childlike joy in their hearts.
When they first met, Linda could not boil water without burning it, but quickly outmatched Paul’s cooking skills, which consisted of omelets, apple pancakes, and (yes, in those early years) steak. Back in their apartment-nest, they had cocoa.
With Gary’s 442 Oldsmobile they explored Albemarle County and the nearby mountains, falling deeply and effortlessly in love. She tested out how fast the 442 could go. It went very fast! Linda was an excellent student, but years later it became known she neglected and flunked her two summer school courses in lieu of her whirlwind romance.
Linda then hiked the Appalachian Trail with Paul for 100 miles over two weeks, from her childhood’s Peaks of Otter to Humpback Rocks, with only one sleeping bag for them both: no ground pad or tent; no cook stove, boiling dry beans, split peas, and oatmeal on twig fires. The symbolism of setting out with nothing from her childhood home with an unknown but beloved person, into a new life and world did not become evident until decades later.
When her parents found out halfway through the trek where Linda was and with an as-yet unknown and menacing figure, her mother lied about having a serious illness so they could get her home to send her to (their words) a “home for incorrigible girls”.
Being independent and rebellious against the strictures of the times and her traditional parents, Linda stuck with her husband-to-be. She persevered and had the daring to bring him home to meet her parents, hoping they would sense their budding love and compatibility.
At this first meeting, a potential “boyfriend” non-Jewish hippie with long hair who had some sort of grip on their daughter, seeing him in moccasins, her mother gave a pair of Gary’s old riding boots, and remained reserved but polite. Afterwards, though, her father (the Judge) told Linda if he ever came back Frank would “take a knife and a gun” to him, and her mother swore she would put poison in the food she “served”.
Linda took a photography class, and was quite good at it, with the portrait of her to-be life companion and partner visually explaining why her parents freaked out.
Linda was not rebellious in terms of ferocity, being rude, or hellraising. She just took up with a no-shoes long haired gentile Irish drop-out hippy with no prospects and it seemed less morals. She was respectful to and of her parents, even when they railed against her choices or about their lifestyle… She just insisted on her relatively moderate choices, loved them, and kept coming home. They said some hurtful things, and some did hurt Linda. But no one doubted they loved her and were in it for the long haul and no matter what. How blessed.
Although the near-disastrous cross-country trip the next summer nearly undid it all.
This apparent implacable hostility was by most criteria and standards of the day quite reasonable and lasted until (just until) marriage three years later. Admission to medical school made the situation acceptable, Linda’s lover transformed in her mother’s eyes from “Charles Manson” to an eccentric “Linus Pauling” type. Sitting in her small 1950’s style kitchen on his first visit back, she warmed a nice dinner. As she handed it to Paul, she announced wryly, “Don’t worry. It’s not poisoned”.
And after that, she remained all-in with her support and acceptance for the next thirty years.
Maybe they hoped her dreams and hopes would collapse and they’d be there to catch her, where they originally failed at “saving her from him”. Maybe…
Or maybe they went to Plan B, keep up the pressure to simply moderate their excesses and craziness. Outlast them…
Grandma did not give up entirely, though, and once went out and scraped off an “I Love Everybody” sticker on their VW bumper. Some things still were just too much.
CAUTIONARY ADVISEMENT: This website intends to celebrate Linda’s life, to memorialize her accomplishments and her most elevated self. The Eulogy, the Timeline, and the Themes pages attempt to do that in the best way possible. Additional detail and personal reflections can enrich appreciation of what Linda accomplished yet may feel irrelevant or even controversial to others. To keep the primary focus on what matters most, additional detail is reserved for these Read More pages linked from the Timeline.
Please respect these additional subjective and in-depth accounts as intended to illustrate deeper and perhaps the most admirable aspects of Linda’s humanity, and as part of her partner’s bereavement and healing process. Sections with especially subjective first-person and personal recollections are identified with a note saying: Her Partner’s Personal Perspectives.
