Monday the 1st for April.
Winter entangles chilly tentacles around my Land of Aus home. A damp mist fills the air. The herd of deer that wander my valley are near by, making a lot of noise. Seasonal migration of birds offers a lot of noisy fathered friends vying for food and attention. We have had a lot of rain in the past weeks, the ground is soggy.
I woke feeling fine. Being Easter Monday, I have nowhere to go and nothing to do. Everything is closed. If I am super ambitious today (and it aint started yet) I'll give my dog kennels a good cleaning.
So I wake, wrap in a "granny blanket" and start my day by checking my mail...
At my age I am kinda getting used to those "out of the blue" communications that bear the bad, sad news of a ol' Compadre's passing on to The Big Beyond... today is one of those days...
Ode to Mary Pat Lawlor...
Mary Pat, known to all as M.P., first noisily walked into my life in the late 1980. She arrived in Solomons Islands as a Peace Corps Vol, was posted to the magical and mythical land of Gizo, and forever became a member of The Universal Family.
MP was noisy, brash, frantic, fun, vivacious and genuine.
I have so, so many MP tales...
We were diving buddies, drinking buddies, dancing partners, and friends.
We worked together on a couple Peace Corps training programs. We did the Verehue and Mondo programs, both of which were big, intense programs that saw 30+ new PCVs get introduced to what would be the best (or worse) 2yrs of their lives. Training programs lasted 4months or more. MP and I worked hard and had a lot for on both of these. We did two programs back to back. Basically a year of each of our lives dedicated to helping these new, would be Volunteers, prepare for the greatest 2years of their lives.
MP was very Irish. Her folks both emigrated from the Emerald Island, and as such, my very Irish buddy, Pat Purcell, and MP were a proper pair. Their sense of unruly humour, their slang and innuendo were very similar. They could team up and make you laugh stupidly at nothing for hours.
I was an experienced diver when Pat and MP showed up in Gizo. As they did their diving course I was a stand-by. In those days any chance to blow bubbles was good, so as Pat and MP did their training dives with the instructor, I tagged along.
One such dive, I almost drowned...
The exercise of that dive was to be in 10feet of water, dive down, take your gear off, surface, then duck-dive down to put your gear.
We were off lovely Olosana Island. A nice sandy bottomed reef, warm water, a gentle current...
When attempting to leave your SCUBA gear on the bottom of the ocean, leave it behind, aiming to return to retrieve... well, a bit of fore thought is required... neither Pat or MP used much fore thought...
Neither Pat nor MP were fore thoughtful enough to leave their gear in such a state as to be easy to retrieve. The exercise demanded you dive down, put all your Gera on, and surface... Both my diving buddies made several attempts. They'd dive down, start grasping at their gear, run out of air, and resurface. Time and again.
I had vented my buoyancy device and was lying on the sandy bottom watching the antics. It was hilarious... MP (who was a great swimmer) was getting very angry at herself... I could see her frustration. Pat was a long, loose boned guy and was getting in MPs way. Knees and elbows kicking and staring up the bottom. I was lying there laughing, and laughing...
Laughing through a scuba regulator is possible. I have laughed, spit and puked through my regulator. What's so hard about laughing one might ask... If you dont regulate your deep in-breaths, between convulsive laughs, you suck water. And I did.
I still have a comedic image in my head of Pat and MP that day.
So, on this drizzly Monday morning in Queensland, I think of MP... and Pat, and Ken, and Ron, and Paul... and many more of my old Gizo tribal family who have now passed on...
Adios, fare thee well, and of course...
More later
Smiles through tears...
