Jeannette was a force of nature. To outsiders, she could seem like a tsunami. She didn’t waste time. Thoreau said, “You cannot waste time without injuring eternity.” This seemed to be her view. She did not waste time on chit-chat. When she concluded her business, on the phone, she hung up. This habit offended her interlocutors; they thought she was furious. I never saw her furious. Well, she was pretty miffed at the acquaintance who asked “Why would YOU have a Christmas tree?” Otherwise she had the mystic calm of a Quaker. She was a committed Unitarian-Universalist—meaning, as the old joke has it, that she believed in “at most, one god.”
I loved her for giving advice freely. She was patient with her life at Wesleyan University Press, although that life required her every year to educate a new group of clucks, undergraduate workers. The student workers were always misplacing things—letters and typescripts. Everything in the office stopped. Jeannette pressed everyone into searching for that vital, missing thing. Over years, she learned where missing things go. They go RIGHT NEXT to where they are supposed to be.
She gave this to me as a helpful hint, and I gave it to my husband. We have lived by it ever since.
Remember Jeannette as the sweetheart she was, who helped freely and loved fully and brought her formidable brain to every task. I beg you also to remember her as the person who noticed that missing things are RIGHT NEXT to where they are supposed to be.
Annie Dillard
9/2/’11
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