"......The Original Groovy Chick......"

Here's a thing.

The chances are good that you and the noted author Ken Follett have, at least, one thing in common.

You never knew Neva Dayl.

But, of the two of you, Follett absolutely had her number

And that number was called last week.

Her full name was Neva Dayl Winfrey.

Right from the start, that should clue you that this was no garden variety, run of the mill character from the pages of the continuing adventure that is this life.

And although I had known her for all the cognizant years of my own life, I never bothered to take the time to learn about the unusual name of this most unusual lady.

Today, as we are apt to do when someone passes, I found my curiosity tweaked and, high ho the derry oh , a Googling I did go.

Depending on place of origin, the factoids offered a couple of choices.

In Latin, the word Neva means, literally, snow.

White and pure, seasonal and even festive.

Yeah, I suppose if you stretched the point you could say that was her.

But, turns out, in English and Gaelic communities, it means radiance.

And brightness.

There you go.

Now we're talkin'.

My awareness of the lady came somewhere in the 1950's, my nine or ten.

She was the wife of a co-worker of my father, the two families socially intertwined as a result of that paternal professional camaraderie in that way that seemed so common and natural in the day, so rare and, even, nostalgic now.

Walt and Neva, Ed and Barbara, two couples who were friends and/or co-workers and/or neighbors.

Co-starring the assorted progeny of said couples, three boys, three girls, in total, six de facto cousins.

And, in that zany, quirky way that life has of spinning the wheel, we found ourselves neighbors and friends more than once, together, then separated by the design of corporate needs, then reunited a year or years later, resulting from that same design until time and the inevitable growth of said children resulted in a seemingly final parting of the ways.

Until a few years ago when the wonder of social media brought us back in touch.

Through it all, whatever else could be said about the players in the play, there was one very steady, delightful, eclectic, even eccentric radiant brightness.

Neva Dayl.

Even as a young child, I knew, if only instinctively, that there was something wonderfully different about her. In a period when a lot of mothers stayed safely a notch left or right of June Cleaver, in appearance, manner and presentation, Neva Dayl was part house mother, part home maker and part Earth Mother, at a time when no one really knew what an Earth Mother was.

From long flowing hair to long flowing skirts to moccasins and/or sandals that nudged the line of pre-hippiedom ever so gently but stayed just this side of 1950-60's middle class suburban respectability, Neva was always a source of energy and wit and light.

At the same time, raising a family in a most remarkably conventional fashion, given her remarkable predisposition to the unconventional.

For though I cant tell you how I knew, I knew.

Even at the age of ten.

Fast forward to 2010, give or take.

Having long since traveled down a path that put considerable difference between our respective families, I had managed to stay aware, as many of us often do, of a general "where are they now" kind of history.

Walt had passed away in the 1980's, obviously much too young, of the cancer that delights in playing the insidious villain in so many of our life productions.

The Winfrey kids, our 1950-60 running buddies had gone on to accomplish and marry and reproduce and, in general, live their lives.

And Neva Dayl Winfrey remained Neva Dayl Winfrey.

Never remarried, another one of those "I can't tell you why but I just knew" things, staying true to both the memory of her husband and to the once in a lifetime nature of the life they were able to build and share before he passed.

The temptation to over-romanticize notwithstanding, I always pictured it as a Bobby-Ethel thing. Two people who were meant to be together, separated by one of life's little moments of mean spirited ness, the remaining partner living a full, happy and un-self pitying life, all the while staying married, most certainly emotionally and spiritually, regardless of the impossibility of physically to that one and only, gleefully, even irreverently suggesting that she just wasn't jiggy wit that whole "til death do us part" rap.

And staying true to herself and her family and her friends and her brightness. And her wit. And her loving light.

Thanks to Zuckerberg and his book of Faces, I was able to reconnect with Neva and the kids three or four years ago.

And a more wonderful opportunity for revisiting a treasured tile of my own mosaic there could not have been.

She and I managed to exchange a few emails, a letter here and there, her age and self admitted difficulty with reading due to failing vision making the printed word a challenge, but still she remained interested in hearing from me and my adventures. I sent her a copy of my book "Ely", a memoir detailing a place and time that both Phelps and Winfrey families had shared, a book she shared back was meaningful to her making it, of course, more than that to me.

That was the way she was.

Connected. And involved. And interested.

And interesting.

And tuned in like nobody's business.

The first time we exchanged letters, after I had reconnected with her via Facebook and email, she picked right up where she left off five decades earlier, impressing me with her ability to be with, and for, the person she was with.

"....I was wondering", she wrote, "if you ever found your passion....Walt and I used to talk about you when you were a kid, noting that whatever it was you took on, you seemed to do it so well...at the same time, though, it was as if no one thing was ever enough to satisfy you...."

Don't mind telling you that it was touching beyond touching to learn that not only did she and her husband understand me then, she had held that memory and awareness long enough to understand me now.

The long flowing haired, long flowing skirted, moccasins and/or sandals wearing neighbor lady who nudged the line of pre-hippiedom ever so gently but stayed just this side of 1950-60's middle class suburban respectability while then, and later, always a source of energy and wit and light.

The neighbor lady who, I realize now, must have intuited that the kid across the street who was bouncing from one passion to another was, in his own way, as wack a doodle as she was, who maybe even understood, in a time when no one really understood those things, that that kid, who was fifty years away from discovering that Asperger's was part of the plot, eventually, in fact, would discover that and start to make sense of a lot of things that hadn't made sense for a long, long time.

Hell, maybe we even shared a similar construct of slightly dinged and dented genes.

I'll never really know.

Neva Dayl went on to the next adventure this past weekend.

And I only really know this.

That she and Walt are having a wonderful time.

That I am grateful beyond measure for having had both the chance to know her.

And to find her again.

And that her eclectic life, her eccentric presentation, her "abnormality" made me feel better, and safer, about my own.

And that I need not struggle to try and find the words to describe her.

Ken Follett's got that covered.


“She was unique: there was something abnormal about her, and it was that abnormal something that made her magnetic.” 
                                   ---The Pillars of the Earth


Thank you, Neva Dayl.

For all of it.