I received some bad news last week, though sadly not unexpected.
In 2004 my then husband and I bought a small hamburger place in Alpine, California. One afternoon, during our down time, I scanned The Alpine Sun the town’s local weekly newspaper, and discovered there was a read and critique group that met once a month. I called the contact number and spoke to a friendly lady, Lillian Fisher, who ran the group and had run it for forty years.
I attended their next meeting and nearly every meeting for the next thirteen years, until I moved to North Carolina. Lillian and her group awakened a desire in me to write and improve my writing. I owe much to her. During that time, I got to know Lillian and we became good friends. I had many a delicious lunch in her kitchen. Lillian was an artist, a writer, and a collector of antiques. I mean, she had a book autographed by Mark Twain!
Lillian was a prolific writer, having written many books to introduce young people to such notable Americans as Emmett Kelly in Here Comes the Clown; Bessie Coleman, a pioneer black-Indian female aviator in Brave Bessie, Flying Free; Kateri Tekawitha, the daughter of a Mohawk chief and an Algonquin Christian mother; and Feathers in the Wind, the story of Olive Oatman, who in 1851 was taken captive by the Apaches. She wrote many, many more books as well as poems that were part of school curricula. For the last few years she’d been working on her memoir about growing up in the Detroit area where her father worked for Henry Ford.
She may have written about Brave Bessie, but this woman was one of the bravest people I’ve known. She would go to the dentist to have a root canal and forego the Novocain. She never had her mouth numbed for any dental work. That’s one brave lady. I need Novocain just to walk into a dentist’s office!
Last week her grandson called to say Lillian, age 93, had lost the final fight. I had talked with her a couple of weeks prior to that and she told me she was content and ready to go the next step if that was what was in store for her.
