Remembering Gale

Gale was my friend. She loved Starbucks coffee and chocolate. She adored the drama of Flamenco dancing,the brilliant red of maple trees along Sherman Road in October and the Chicago Botanic gardens.

I can’t remember when I first met Gale. It just seems she was always there. Several times a week, a green-eyed girl with tousled hair and freckles would knock on the door of my Willow Avenue bungalow.

“C’mon out and play,” she’d shout through the screen door. When I protested I had homework to do, she made a face. “But Marcy, it’s Saturday,” she protested. Gale didn’t take no for an answer. I’d join her team for a game of Red Rover in Jeannie Quigley’s yard, or an adventure on her swing set. We’d pedal our way to castles where we became exotic princesses. Oh the places we went in our little girl minds.

We poured through books about movie stars. We memorized the lyrics to every song from My Fair Lady, and took turns being Eliza Doolittle. I was Freddie a lot. Funny what you remember. Just days before Gale passed, we belted out all the stanzas from “On the street where you live..”

That was Gale’s magic, She could take you from a bungalow in Joliet to a Hollywood movie set.

When we got to high school, Gale and I both joined the speech team and tried out for plays. She studied art at Southern Illinois University, and I became a French major at a small liberal arts school in Michigan. We parted ways, until I received a phone call from Gale, who had tracked me down via my brother Bruce who still lived in Joliet. My husband’s new job brought me back to Illinois where Gale and I rekindled our friendship, two middle-aged women with tales to tell.

She became Auntie Gale to my three kids,and began to join us for holidays. When she had no money to buy Christmas presents at her favorite thrift store, she gave us the gift of her art therapy skills. One by one, she solemnly led Abby and Aaron and Aster and me into a bedroom, gently analyzing our stick drawings to detect inner secrets.

If kindness were a currency, Gale would have been a millionaire. She called nearly everyone “Angel. “In her final days on this earth, she said angel a lot, thanking the nurses and caregivers at Evanston Rehab. At the nursing home, she had her own refrigerator, often stocked with Chobani yogurt. When I brought her an extra yogurt one night, she said she couldn’t eat it, but insisted that I pass it on to another resident named Isabelle. Because she couldn’t yet write after the radiation had weakened her muscles, she dictated a letter on an envelope that I was to deliver to Isabelle. She closed her note with “I love you.”

At Greenwood Care, the nursing home for people with mental illness where she had lived for nearly a decade, Gale took on the role of house mother. She introduced me to everyone we meet in the elevator or hallway, praising their artistic ability, gift of poetry, or some skill. Every body did something special.

Gale’s resilience was remarkable. I remember pushing her in her wheelchair to Blind Faith cafe, her first excursion after her cancer diagnosis. When I asked if she wanted to use the foot rests, she shook her head.

‘I want to exercise my feet and get stronger,” she said, pointing her toes in her black canvass slip-ons like a ballerina . Once we reached our destination, she removed her knit cap, took delicate ceramic earrings out of her bag and wore them. They perfectly matched the silk red jacket she had received from her sister Katherine. She was striking. Before chemo took her hair, she had once joked she would wear droopy circle earrings like a Masai warrior woman, and paint a tattoo on her scalp.

When life knocked her down, Gale kept getting up again. When almost killed in a hit and run accident, she recovered and learned to walk with a cane. When she was living in Greenwood, she earned her master of arts in gifted education. When she earned her advanced degree, she kept applying for jobs.. “Getting a job as a teacher is turning out to be a herculean task,” she wrote in one of her Christmas letters, “but I keep trying.”

Gale had a great sense of humor that surfaced was in her Christmas letters:

Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukah! Joyous Solstice! Wow! Another Christmas brag letter from Gale. I only write these things because I know how much they annoy people. But irritating people is one of the few joys I have in Life!

Gale and I spent many happy evenings at the Celtic Knot or Tommy Nevins. We would nurse a beer or coffee and then she would spread out the cards and do a Tarot reading for me. Inevitably, she would predict that I would travel, come into money, get a fabulous new job, or meet a handsome “suitor.” I was horrified when she once predicted that one of my friends would die.

Gale, however, was non-plussed. “But Marcy, we all have to die one day.”

Yes, we do Gale. But not your spirit. Not the memory of your kindness, or laugh. Or your art. Whimsical and brilliant and gentle. Like you, dear friend. Like you.
— Delivered at Gale Maureen Tolf’s Celebration of Life, January 19, 2013, Lake Street Baptist Church, Evanston, Illinois