She walked into my honors English class with her cute little turned-up nose, shiny almost-black brown hair, a perfect size 10 figure -- and a purple doubleknit pantsuit with western lapels.
I looked across the room, repressed a shudder and hired myself to do her makeover. (Who knows what I was wearing? Not me. Thank goodness!)
Anyway, the result was an unmitigated success. The "Glamour don't" duckling turned into a swan who had to beat the boys back with a stick. She was my first college roommate, the friend with whom I discovered the Society for Creative Anachronism, my traveling companion on SCA trips all over Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska and Arkansas, maid of honor at my wedding. Time and distance eventually wore our friendship thin, but she is always in my heart -- and especially so right now. Patty passed away on March 26, 2008 -- an impossible 11 years ago. She was stubborn and disliked "doctoring" as much as I do -- which allowed cancer to have an unbreakable foothold by the time it was discovered.
But this is not a column about cancer. This is a column about Laverne and Shirley, Ethel and Lucy, Thelma and Louise, inseparable friends who conquered our little piece of the world. It was a good time like no other I have ever or will ever experience.
I had grown up in the small town in Kansas where the community college was located -- a town so small the population would have filled just HALF of Bud Walton Arena. But it was cosmopolitan compared to her hometown -- which even we considered backwater. Her father worked on diesel engines, her family heated with wood, and I imagine going to college was a newfangled concept. But Patty read voraciously and probably had an IQ closer to 200 than 100. She just needed some ... polishing. Not that I had seen the world either, mind you. My big claim to fame was that I had been born somewhere else and moved to Kansas!
Most of what I remember about her all these years later comes in freeze-frame photos: Our first SCA event in a park in Kansas City and the massive sunburns we both had. Both of us bundled up in coats and blankets, driving my AMC Concord in the snow to an SCA event at the Shire of Thousand Hills in Kirksville, Mo. Staking out a few square feet of floor in a friend's hotel room to be present at the very first Calontir Crown Tournament ... in the snow ... this time in Lincoln, Neb. Finding her bridesmaid's dress for $19.99 at the JCPenney outlet store in Kansas City. Her beaming face at my wedding. Visiting her and her boyfriend in Wichita, Kan., and going to a "hot tub club" -- a brief and weird phenomenon of the 1980s where one rented a themed hot tub "room" by the hour. (No, not for THAT!) And the silent, lonely drive to Wichita many years later, hoping I would be able to see her before she passed away.
I did get there in time to hang out with her, and although she never opened her eyes, I believe she knew I was there. Other friends came and petted her and told her how much she was admired for her talent in costuming, and I believe she knew that too -- because I believe I saw her preen. She might have been the only person I've ever known with an ego just as big and just as fragile as mine!
I remember one very serious lesson Patty taught me, too, and it makes me a better person. It was the day after she'd been gone on vacation, and I beat her home from school and work. I was trying to get the house cleaned up, and I swear that her clothes -- dirty and clean -- were piled everywhere. By the time she walked in the door, I was frothing at the mouth, and I met her yelling. When I paused for breath, she looked at me, burst into tears, and sobbed: "I got fired today." The moral of that story isn't just a meme on Facebook: "Every person is carrying his own burden. Be kind. Always."
We sing a song in the SCA that says as long as stories are told about him, a warrior never truly dies. Patty lives in conversations with friends who knew her, in her battered but unbroken cloak -- an enduring garment we made on my grandmother's treadle sewing machine a lifetime ago but which only last month sheltered me from the cold at an SCA event -- and now in these words shared with you. The quickest way to know her is this: There was a cartoon back in the day showing Garfield looking at Nermel -- remember Nermel? -- and saying, "I hate cute." I was Garfield. She was Nermel. And I miss her, in spite of her "cute."
Becca Martin-Brown is an award-winning columnist and Features editor for the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. This column originally ran in 2018. Email her at bmartin@nwadg.com or follow her on Twitter @nwabecca.
NAN Profiles on 03/31/2019