There is also a short obit in the local newspaper<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nMarian was, as we say in my family, a hot ticket.<\/p>\n
I met her when I was living in Bethel with Ola O\u2019Dell, who some of you might know, another woman who Got Things Done. <\/p>\n
She was always up to something, had a plan or a scheme, and had something she wanted YOU to be up to also. She would point at you with her, scaly hands with nicely painted nails, and tell you what your part in all of her schemes was going to be.<\/p>\n
I mostly became friends with Marian through her visits to the library. Not only was she a voracious reader (and we liked some of the same books, so she was there with the suggestions, though she was a little less torture-avoidant than I was so I always had to watch it) and sometimes Scrabble player, she always came in to get help with one of her many tech devices. I knew her from her first flip phone, through her first smart phone. I was there when she got a Kindle, an iPad, a second smart phone to replace the first, a second Kindle, and her Apple watch which she would show off to me because she loved that it had a Snoopy watch face; her love of dogs was pure and extremely inclusive. I first met Todd over text (and Zoom) because we were on Marian\u2019s Tech Support Team, trying to support her schemes while quietly not letting her get too into the weeds.<\/p>\n
But she wasn\u2019t all tech gadgets, Marian also loved Vermont and driving around it in her little Miata. She was always planning a ride over this mountain or that gap or that other back road and while I think I only got roped into one of them\u2014feeling all the while like I was on Mister Toad’s Wild Ride in Wind in the Willows<\/em>\u2014she was always going somewhere and doing something and would send me emails and later texts about her trips.<\/p>\nMost importantly, she was all about helping other people. She was a huge accessibility advocate (maybe you didn\u2019t know this but her hearing wasn\u2019t great – I was always slightly hollering when we spoke at the library) and she successfully hassled the library into getting captions for their Zoom book group. She hassled the movie theater into getting live captions for their movies, and one of the things we would do at drop-in time at the library was track down phone numbers for local news stations (and Netflix, do you know how hard it is to find a phone number for Netflix?) so that she could hassle them about the news not having proper captions. She always wanted me to tell people about caption phones, cheaper hearing aids from Costco, and live captions at the movies. She helped so many people in this community get access to the things they deserve. She was always swinging by Veggie Van Go and would leave me a random bag of carrots or apples or a box of water (?) saying \u201cUs single women need to stick together\u201d<\/p>\n
She was part of my day to day life and I will miss her at the library and miss her emails and texts. She texted like a teenager. I\u2019ll read you one of the last texts she sent me which I think gives you a great sense of Marian (I\u2019d just sent her a Halloween card a few weeks previous)<\/p>\n
\nHi J: What a lovely card. And the stamps! I\u2019ve been trying to clean up my house. It\u2019s getting there.[handclap emoji] Did you ever get your kid\u2019s kindle? Do you love it? My replacement kindle is in a coma. Hoping you can bring it up to where it should be. Sorry I missed you again today. I\u2019ve been sleeping a lot, also. Hope you & Jim are fine. [double heart emoji][dog emoji][handclap emoji][thumbs up emoji][warm smile emoji]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Marian was my friend and a force of nature. I will miss her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is a short eulogy that I gave at the memorial service for my longtime friend, Marian. The picture above is the two of us from drop-in time, taken on her iPad, a photo her son sent me when he was cleaning up her tech. There is also a short obit in the local newspaper. […]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[684,683,685,63,430],"class_list":["post-1724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-uncategorized","tag-eulogy","tag-marian","tag-marianlabonte","tag-obit","tag-rip","h-entry","hentry"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1724"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1729,"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1724\/revisions\/1729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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