Just a Few Random Memories of Adrianna

The X-Files

I thought The X-Files was a spinoff of Sightings, where they dramatized “real” UFO stories, and thus had never watched it since that didn’t interest me.

One day Adrianna, who was about 8 at the time, said “Daddy you have to watch The X-Files!! There’s an agent named Scully who’s a girl AND a doctor AND on one episode she ate a bug!!”

So I started watching it so we could talk about the show together, and then found the news group online (sort of community chat boards in the old internet days dedicated to specific topics) and in the process met a lot of people who remain lifelong friends for over 25 years, including my wife, Cindy, chief among them.

That’s my origin story and I thank her.

Summers at the Lake

She loved the sunshine and beautiful days and just loved our summer trips when she was younger to our cottage in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. All she wanted to do every hour of the day was be at the beach, gathering “pet snails” to take home, make new friends, and run as fast as she could from the sand into the water. I’d be lying on a towel ostensibly reading a book but really just watching her, drinking in her revelry and simple love of life. She’d of course come to “check on me” every 15 minutes or so.

When she wasn’t at the beach she would be taking walks with her great grandma and they both seemed to cherish this time together.

Her Boys

Her two boys, Bryce and Wesley, both born on the same day two years apart, were everything to her. She spent half her time planning meals for them, shopping for the ingredients, and cooking. No sooner was breakfast over then she’d start on lunch. Dinner was the same. She was an adventurous eater who liked stuff as a child that most children didn’t: spicy food, sour pickles, rabbit, lamb, sardines, cactus, you name it. While her oldest son Bryce was a bit pickier, she found a kindred spirit in Wesley, who also would try anything and it was one of their special bonds that they just shared.

She always loved that Bryce was so sensitive and caring, and always wanted to get Bryce a puppy since he really connected with animals and was so good with them.  She knew the apartment, however, was no place to raise a dog. She had a goal of at least renting a house one day with a back yard so her boys could be able to have the puppy they wanted so badly. In the meantime, they’d often go to pet stores so the boys, but Bryce in particular, could interact with the animals.

It’s also why she used to take them to the zoo several times a month, even in the heat of the summer, after packing water bottles and snacks for the afternoon with the animals. She’d save money so they could buy the snacks that you could use to feed the giraffes because she knew how much her boys loved that.

She’d spend months prior to Christmas and their birthday (which luckily were pretty evenly divided among the calendar) to save for special gifts for the boys, ordering a game here or a t-shirt there, accumulating the items slowly, wanting to make sure she’d get them the perfect thoughtful presents.

Her phone and Google Home was always full of alarms and appointment reminders, because she always stayed on top of all the various doctor appointments she had for the boys: checkups, dentist, vision, tutors for school.

One of the last things she did for the boys was take them to the trampoline park for their birthday. She had saved and saved for what she thought would be a month pass for them, but it turns out the amount she had in mind was what it had been a couple years back with a Groupon. When they got to the park, she discovered that she didn’t have enough for a whole month, but only enough to pay for a single day pass. But she made the best of it and she and the boys had one of their best days ever as they said.

Always a Caregiver

Adri was a born caregiver, she always was helping others, even if that meant she sometimes shortchanged herself.

Once when Cindy and I were off on one of her trips she called and left a voicemail the day before we arrived. She wanted to tell us that she had made some chili for dinner and there was some extra, and that she’d like to bring it to us so we could have dinner when we got home from our long trip and not have to worry about that ourselves. We were fine financially, Adri and her family not so much, yet she would still always try to do stuff like this.

My grandmother, Adri’s great grandmother, held a special spot in Adri’s heart. The last couple of years Adri would often say that her great grandmother was her best friend. She’d take the boys to see their GREAT great grandmother whenever she could. One time both nonna and great gram were sick at the same time, holed up at nonna’s house, and Adri, with boys in tow, went over there several times and offered to help prepare meals.

When Bryce was born and she was still in the hospital, she would not stay in her bed to rest. She’d keep getting up to bring me a blanket or to get granny a glass of water, like it was her responsibility to do so even though she’d just given birth a couple hours earlier. G.T. had to finally order her to get back in bed and rest. That lasted about 2 minutes and she was up again.

Early on, before I’d met Cindy, her caregiving extended to trying to set me up with every woman she came in contact with when we were together. When the two of us would go out for lunch at a restaurant, if the server met with Adri’s approval she’d ask her, “Would you like to be friends with my daddy?”

Watching Movies Together

When she was little, we used to watch a lot of movies together at night before bed, her favorites being The Marx Brothers oeuvre… Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera, The Coconuts, and Monkey Business were her favorites. I was proud that she didn’t care if they were black and white. I made a VHS tape that was just full of Marx Brothers movies, and we’d often put that in while she fell asleep at night in her room.

She also loved, as she called it then, "The Creature from the Black Racoon"

Another of her favorites was the old King Kong from the 1930s. The first time we watched it when she was about 4 she was excitedly explaining the plot to me as if I’d never seen it before. I said something like "Yeah, he sure is one giant ape," and she shook her head and told me earnestly in an attempt to education her ignorant father,

“No, daddy. He’s no ape, he’s a very large monkey.”

I stand corrected, Adri.

Musical

Adri loved all music, loved to sing, loved to express herself. I wrote a few songs for her when she was little, and she'd learn them on her own, via osmosis from listening to the tape of CD I gave her. One of my most precious possessions is a video of Adri and me "performing" one of the songs sitting side by side in an incredibly small studio apartment. She has joy on her face which turns slightly melancholy during a somewhat sad part but then brightens again at the chorus, after first calling out a strumming mistake I made on the guitar.

Classic Adrianna.