Jamie Could Improvise

We (Hap & Nan Kindem) met Jamie where Paul also met Jamie for the first time in Queretaro, Mexico, at Brian and Cinthia’s wedding. At the wedding reception Hap danced with Jamie while Paul was dancing with Nan. Before Paul rescued her from her future father-in-law’s wild gyrations, Jamie had already improvised and was dancing back in time with a baby boomer.

On a family skiing trip to West Virginia, Jamie and Paul rode with us through increasingly dense snow for five and one half hours with our 100 pound labradoodle, Mulligan, resting his head, and frequently half his body, on Jamie’s lap in the back seat. Crowded by a large dog in a confined space, Jamie improvised and never complained, helping to keep everybody, including the dog, happy.

When Jamie moved to Durham, NC, to be with Paul she improvised. She adapted to Southern Culture at the same time that she encouraged her family to follow her from further North and South. She gave up her sales job in New York and eventually found work at an exceptional company, SAS in Cary, NC. If the various positions she held throughout her successful, if all too short, career were not always perfect, she improvised and made them better. She made everyone around her better, her family as well as her co-workers. She was a problem solver at work and at home. She could make bosom buddies of strangers and strange bedfellows. Her instrument was her personality, which always played beautiful music and could resolve almost any problem and perfectly fit almost any occasion or situation. We miss seeing that phenomenal instrument and hearing that exquisite tune greatly. We are all trying to make up for the absence of Jamie in our lives, but we are also following Jamie’s lead. We are improvising as best we can.

– Hap & Nancy Kindem