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| I come to praise Valerie not to bury her. My sister was not down with prescribed social norms. Presented with a choice between the highway or the forest, Val would lace up her boots and go looking for the mountains. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| I hope she forgives me for peaking into some of her writing, but prefacing a stack of poems I found a declaration of sorts, which included these words: "What I want in life is not a lot of material things but experiences." Valerie did not move passively through life, she consumed it. I remember when she was first entering high school and wanted to take all sorts of business classes so that she could move to France and open up a cafe. We laughed until she saved enough money and flew to Paris, where she stayed with an author and his family who she had befriended over the internet. When she came back from France I asked her what she thought of European culture, and she said, its interesting, but I need to learn about American culture. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| And she did- she traveled and met people and she kept on stacking up that experience. Strange area codes from odd parts of the nation were not uncommon on the caller id. We have all run across these kinds of characters in our lives - those that carry with them some energy, some attraction leaves a mark on those that they touch upon. Some people try very hard for this kind of charisma, others just let the power of their personality move them. Val had that kind of grace and authenticity in life - her moves were her own. One of my good friends who came by this weekend said to me, "Looking back at high school, and how much everybody conformed to the status quo, you envy those that made their own way and created something else for themselves." | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| The construction of ethics for Valerie did come through simple osmosis. She read ravenously, wrote prolifically, and was always out searching for more experience. Anyone who has been in the upstairs bathroom will notice three or four open books lying around the floor and the counter. But most of Valerie's education came through relationships. Val would return from writing classes in New York City with a hundred and one stories about the people she would chat up on the train or on the bus or in the street - she loved to talk to people. Every once in a while we would ride around and just talk about her friends and she would gush with affection for them. My sister radiated love. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| This year she had become so confident in herself, in her style, her work, you could see it in the way that she held herself. There was an elegance that was evolving in her that would manifest itself in the tone of her voice and the motion of her eyes. Val did not move passively through life, she chased after it with an intensity. My sister continues: That kind of momentum cannot be slowed down, not even by a Mack truck. We've got mad love for you Val, mad love. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| Timothy Persinko | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| 8/22/2000 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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