On a far less cranky note, yesterday morning I attended a memorial service for Roxy Leiserson, who was 95 when she passed away. Among many other things, she was known as an Armenian American matriarch (part of her family survived the Armenian holocaust and sheltered others), a Scrabble fiend (routinely trouncing college visitors in her 90s), a gardener (pots and boxes of zinnias and other brightly colored, multi-petaled flowers decorated the platform), the first female president of my church, a humanist, a passionate and generous supporter of liberal politics, and an excellent cook. She was feisty and intellectual; after she wed the equally strongwilled Avery Leiserson, his daughter knew "that everything would be okay" when Roxy beat him at Scrabble and bridge. After his death, she would comment that rereading a book they had gone through together was like reading two books in one -- the book the author had written, and Avery's commentary on same.

She was a founding or charter member of several Nashville mental health/community/service organizations. One of her favorite birthday gifts was a hole her son Alan had dug for her -- a hole in which to plant something. Another female leader of the congregation and community paid tribute to Roxy's encouragement and support -- both spoken and financial.

These details were among the many anecdotes told by family and friends at the service. One very lively woman -- a Vanderbilt colleague in the 1950s (Marguerite Bozian) -- offered that shopping with Roxy meant spending half an hour in the produce section, as she would examine the construction of a stalk of celery with the same care as one might the seams of a pair of underwear. (I'm not getting the wording right, but the way she said it, the entire church burst out laughing.) She also claimed that Avery might not have been a praying man before he married Roxy, but he sure became one after. It was good to hear about a marriage that good -- another story concerned someone looking at a picture of Avery as a young man and saying, "He was cute!" to which Roxy retorted, "He was cute until the day he died!" (at age 90).

The music was lovely: the prelude was a sparkling arrangement of "The Ash Grove," there was "It had to be you" as a meditation piece, and the closing hymn was Grace Lewis McLaren's "Touch the Earth, Reach the Sky," which includes these words:

May we see where we can give,
for this is what it means to live.