Sylvia Luppert

Note: Before you read this wonderful email that I received today from Sylvia Luppert, one of my mother's oldest friends, I want you to know that it was much longer than what you see below. In her email, Sylvia included a number of stories, each of which merits its own post, so I removed the paragraphs that contained the stories so that I may turn them into individual posts. Other than that, I have changed nothing.

Sylvia, I cannot thank you enough.

Dear Jake,

I am so very sad to learn of your mother’s death, both for myself and for you and your brother and sisters. She was one of my oldest and dearest friends. Marshall Froker wrote to me after he received your email and he forwarded your email to me.

Linge and I first met when I began attending Antioch College in 1963. We called her Linge, and that is the name I’ve always called her. We lived in the same dorm. She was just starting her second year. I was from Spokane, Washington and felt like a country bumpkin next to her despite her growing up in Columbia, Missouri. Her intelligence, sophistication, and bluntness both frightened me and fascinated me. For reasons which I still do not understand, she took me under her wing. I followed her around like an acolyte. By the time I left Antioch the following spring, we had become fast friends. I suspect that our attendance at Antioch influenced us both throughout our lives. Certainly, my relationship with her was one of the most important in my formative years, and my experience at Antioch is inseparable from my friendship with her. I continue to try to evaluate the events in the world, both major and mundane, with a perspective I first observed in her. In many ways, she taught me to think. She was, of course, a brilliant thinker and one I could only try to emulate but not match. While she was truly a critical thinker she viewed the world and all of us in it with humor and humanity.

Our New York adventure ended and I went back to Washington and she went back to Yellow Springs. She eventually married Bill Curtis and moved to Chicago. In the summer of 1968, I moved to Chicago and in with Linge and Bill. I arrived the same day Martin Luther King was assassinated. She and Bill split up, but I stayed. By then she was an accomplished cook. We were roommates for about a year. She eventually moved to North Carolina where her mother was living, met and married your father and opened a restaurant called "Tijuana Fats." We continued to write to each other.

When you were about four years old, she came to Chicago to spend Christmas with me. It was the only time I met you because she soon got a position at the University of Alexandria, and you know the rest. I do know, and you may not, that you got her through some difficult times when she was first in Egypt. She bragged that you learned Arabic so quickly that she took you everywhere to translate for her. She even took you to the bank so that you, as a little boy, could conduct her banking. She also reported that your charm put her in good standing with the people she met.

I learned through letters of the births of Aziza, Osman, and Sarah. I was frankly flabbergasted by her having so many children. But she indeed loved all of you. She visited me once in Seattle, and I visited her twice in North Carolina. We spoke on the telephone, but not as often as I now wish we had. She always spoke of you and thought she had the brightest and most beautiful children that anyone ever had.

I loved your mother very much. While I suppose we are all unique in our own way, she was by far, unique and wonderful in the world. She was always a clear and deep thinker who I so admired. And she was warm and witty and so much fun to be with. I know my life was enriched by our friendship. Although the loss to you and Aziza, Osman, and Sarah is terrible, I hope you will appreciate your good fortune to be her children. She was fortunate to have you. As rich and interesting as her life was, I know that nothing in the world mattered to her as much as her children. And that, I think, says a lot about her and all of you.

Please convey my condolences to Aziza, Osman, and Sarah. I do hope that we will stay in touch.

Sylvia Luppert