Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 7, 1994 TAG: 9406090002
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By PEGGY DAVIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In a bizarre way, it is fitting that he died on the ninth floor of Roanoke Memorial Hospital just as Victory Stadium was lit on a Friday night with the sounds and sights of Festival in the Park fireworks, considering that for so many years he had created his own Friday fireworks on this page. He also chose the Friday that my cleaning ladies do for our cottage what I could never do: get it clean and tidy enough.
These are not light thoughts, but fit appropriately with his personal fastidiousness and skill at power and light in placing words on the page.
Good comes with death. The often-described release from pain and suffering is but the first consequence. Then there is the comfort from the ritual and the gathering that brings children and stepchildren together for the first time in more than 20 years of being a blended family. Until now, distance or a 10-day-old son or work schedules or other unavoidable conflict had limited the assembly.
On this occasion, children and spouses and their children introduced themselves with chuckles remembering the last time they had seen one another. Then they shared a remembrance of father or stepfather, depending on their branch of the family. Also included were the 10 nieces and nephews, their mates and children plus my sister and his and their husbands.
The cousins came also, his from a distance to return to the village of their youth and mine who were mostly from North Carolina, the state of his youth. And here were the friends who had known him many more years than I: some from childhood and ``the big field,'' or Reynolds High School in Winston-Salem; another from Chicago who knew him in the Army and at The Johns Hopkins University; another from their Army service in Burma; two more from New York who had been at the Hopkins, too. Talking together, remembering, is a great healer.
In life, his charm and wit entertained friends at the big table at Dee's in Fincastle. The circle was ever-changing, from the judge to the mechanic to the electrician to the parole officers to the commonwealth's attorney to the carpenters to the deputy sheriff to the dear friend who was retired (but who ran the town, the bank, the cemetery and, for a while, the rescue squad) to the owner of the club building where the family gathered to receive friends after the memorial service. The ladies who run Dee's waited on him and pampered him, just as the nurses had on the ninth floor during the painful last days.
He especially liked our new minister, who demonstrated gifts of insight beyond our expectations. He appreciated our friends who have beautiful vegetable gardens and brought us fresh produce in summer and perfectly canned foods in winter. My wonderful Sarah who raised me brought ``light'' rolls she had made with her own 90-something hands.
His artist friends and church friends and music friends and literary friends and town friends and book friends and fellow professor friends and publishing friends and the many former students from Washington & Lee who became close friends formed a tapestry of individuals who broke all boundaries of clique or club, race, gender or economic standing.
This last severe illness started in Bath County, where the wonderful small hospital took care of him while the kind folks at the Homestead took care of me. He was so close to his doctor of almost 20 years that they enjoyed chatting more on current affairs than the symptoms and creeping illness that were stealing his life; and all his new doctors, including the chiropractor, who are the ages of our children or younger had tried so hard to ease the pain and find a solution to his heart disease.
He appreciated and respected my childhood friends, golf friends and political friends. Many became his close friends too. One called to tell me that ``they couldn't put Pax in a bottle because the cork wouldn't fit.''
His heart had a special place for all his newspaper friends. The early ones from Winston-Salem include a reporter for Time magazine and a retired columnist for The New York Times. Others are in Richmond, Norfolk, Lexington and all across the country. But it is the gang on this newspaper, who worked with him through the years on the book page, for a while on the Friday night copy desk and most recently on this Commentary page, that rated the rank of very special.
To all these folks and others too, I say thank you. I know you loved him, and I did too.
Peggy Davis was married to the late Paxton Davis, former book editor and then columnist for this newspaper.
by CNB