Review Issue	Summer 1999	© Media Synergy, Inc.

What I did on my summer vacation

By Kathy Sheehan

The story about what I did on my summer vacation is also about who from the East came to visit Bellingham this summer. It's probably best told in pictures.

The first part of my summer vacation didn't turn out to be a vacation at all. I had a plane reservation to Boston June 13 to spend the week between spring quarter and summer quarter visiting my mother. She was recovering from a major surgery in April and was due to undergo another operation around the week of my planned visit.

But her heart gave out and she died in the early morning hours of June 11.

No one really got to say goodbye.

It was suffocatingly hot in the "French" church where the funeral Mass was said, and when we arrived at the Mt. Auburn Cemetery, the clouds gave out and dumped buckets of rain on our grief.

Kathy waiting for the bus "to Alma." Photo by Chuck Dingee

I was going to send this photo to her
for her 78th birthday.

When I got back from Boston, I had to immediately begin teaching a newswriting course at Western Washington University. Beginning journalism students always hear my spiel on writing obituaries; I tell them how Alma and Will are always discussing who's featured in the "Irish Sports Page."

But I didn't have it in me to do the usual talk on obituaries. The students wrote obituaries on each other. Later they wrote some great profiles of living people in the Bellingham area. Check them out!

The students weren't deprived, though.

Gene Seymour, movie and jazz critic for New York Newsday, spent a few days visiting Chuck and me and came in to talk to the journalism class. He told some great stories about interviewing Michael Jordan and lots of movie stars and gave the students tips on taking notes in a darkened movie theater.

Seymour, a former "nightside" colleague of mine at The Philadelphia Daily News, brought his lovely wife, Marie Nahikian, and 9-year-old son Chafin who delighted us with his smiles and good humor.

We all went to Deception Pass one cold foggy day where Seymour did not twist his ankle and I did not twist my knee.

The knee! The knee! Yes, we'll get to that in Part II, to be continued.

Marie, Gene and Chafin at Deception Pass