Mary was fit and vivacious. She always had a smile for everybody, and was, like me, a natural optimist. Being with her, it was hard not to smile with her. She was a creative thinker, and once embarked on a course of action, she followed it through to the end. She was always willing to give her take on whatever. She was one of the bravest people I have ever known. If you look up the word “undaunted” in the dictionary, it will have Mary’s picture. She was also a Preacher’s kid. Her dad had a church in Chicago.

I met her in Peace Corps, in Swaziland. She was in my training group. I didn’t get to know her very well, in the 10 weeks of training, but I liked her a lot. After we trainees were sworn in to the Peace Corps, and posted to our schools, I would run into Mary in town at the huge market, and out at the PC hostel that I sometimes stayed in, or at the parties at various volunteers schools all over the country every now and then. Or getting a cheeseburger at Swazi Burger.

I was at the hostel one weekend. I had just come from the Peace Corps office, picking up my mail, and turning in forms, and had gotten a note from the Post Office that there was a package there for me. I went to the post office and bought my package out of bondage (paying import duty on it). It was a large box, the size of a case of xerox paper. It was from my buddy Chris, in Baltimore, who had sent me the most amazing care packages twice before. I am not complaining, but people stateside thought I must be really suffering over there in Africa, and would send me things that they imagined I was really missing. Chris had sent me things like pop tarts, Kraft Mac and Cheese, Lucky Charms cereal, M&M’s, Snickers bars, a Playboy magazine, instant pudding, granola bars, all kinds of stuff like that. I mostly hoarded them in a big box in my room out at school, and saved them for days that I felt far away and needed a smile. It was a pretty heavy box. I had lugged it, and my pack all the long road out of town to the hostel, and plopped the box down on the table, and threw my pack on my favorite bed to claim it for the night.

The hostel had a gigantic clawfoot bathtub and a water heater, and had clean, treated water from the municipal supply, and I had been thinking of it the whole way out from town. A hot bath, with clear not-mud-colored water up to my ears, that I could sit in until it turned tepid, and get all the dust and grime out of my skin from the hitch into town. I groaned with pleasure at the thought. I went right in and got the hot water running to fill the tub. As I was standing there in the bathroom, taking off my dusty clothes, someone came walking in the front door.

a voice: Hi Sam! It’s Mary.

Me: How did you know it was me in here, Mary?

Mary: Well, DUH! This gigantic box here on the table has your name on it, and I recognized your backpack. What’s in the box? It doesn’t look like you opened it.

Me: I don’t know what is in it. It is a care package from my friend Chris back stateside.

Mary: What? You didn’t open it right away? I would have.

Me: I am just getting into my bath. I will be out in half an hour. If you can’t stand the suspense, go ahead and open it.

Mary: I think I will do just that. My friends don’t send me care packages.

Finally the tub was full, and I climbed into the hot water and skootched down up to my ears. Wonderful! I drifted in hot water nirvana until the water cooled down, and then got the soap and cleaned me to within an inch of my life. I put on clean clothes… aaaaahhhhhhh… and hung my towel out back on the clothesline, and came back in and cleaned the tub like my momma taught me, and at last went out into the front room, where Mary was sitting at the table.

There was a bag of Pecan Sandies, my favorite store bought cookies, sitting on the table, and I picked it up to have me one. But it was empty. Not one cookie left!

Mary: Um, don’t get mad. I found them in your care package. I didn’t try to eat the whole package. I just started with one, and was reading my mail from home, and before I knew it, there weren’t any more.

I started laughing.

Me: I don’t believe it! You ate a whole package of cookies? My wife told me once why she almost never ate cookies. She said that there is a hidden pipe inside women, that goes from your throat directly down to the outside of your thighs, and when you eat stuff like cookies and cake and ice cream, that is where it goes. Directly. You are probably gonna get a huge butt from eating all my cookies.

Mary: Sorry! I really didn’t mean to eat them all.

Mary wanted to start a frisbee team at her school. She only had the one frisbee she had brought from home, and it was getting scruffy. So she wrote a letter to Wham-o! the company that makes frisbees, and told who she was and where she was teaching, and that she was in the Peace Corps, and there were no frisbees to be bought in Swaziland, and asked them if they could send her a frisbee or two. They responded about two months later when a large box full of frisbees arrived at her school. She immediately gave them to other volunteers and mounted a campaign to get others to raise an Ultimate Frisbee team at their schools to play the one she was starting at her school.

Swazis are not good at team sports. I had tried to get a softball team going at my school, but it had not done well. I couldn’t get the concept of team across to them, and the games we tried to play quickly degenerated into complaining and ball hogging. Ultimate Frisbee went much the same, so I was unsuccessful.

A couple months later, I ran into Mary at the Peace Corps office, and it seemed other volunteers were having the same problems, but her team was ready and eager to play somebody other than each other. So she named a date, and was pulling a team together of volunteers who knew how to play frisbee, to meet at her school, and play against her kids.

The day arrived, and a bunch of volunteers showed up. It really wasn’t a fair contest. I had played on an Ultimate team in college, Jean had been a rugby player in college, Patrick had been on a frisbee team in Madison Wisconsin. We were all about a foot taller than her kids. Worst of all, we were all teachers. Swazi kids are mostly very respectful of teachers, and they were totally daunted by us. We got the first game started, and we killed her team. We were noisy, and grabbed the frisbee out of the air intercepting their throws because we were so much taller. We whooped and hollered at each other and at the kids, and laughed a lot, and basically just ran right over them. They were high school kids, and fit and fast, and Mary had done a good job teaching them, but we teachers just intimidated them completely. The score was like 10 to nothing, and we called the game, and went and sat in the shade and drank some beer and water.

Mary had taken her team aside under a tree, and I could see her talking earnestly to them. They looked pretty dejected. She talked to them for about half an hour, and they mustered again, and wanted a second game. Ok with us.

We started the second game, and it was a rout. Of us! Those kids sped around, no longer intimidated by our teacher status, threw the frisbee between our long legs, outran us, and were laughing and shouting right along with us. They jumped and deked and dived, and ran circles around us. Whatever Mary had said to them, it inspired them, and they beat us 8 to 2. It was comical. We teachers were gasping by the end.

Mary gathered everybody together, and declared that the first game didn’t count because the kids had been afraid of us. So we all trooped to the local little store, and we teachers bought coke and bread for everybody, and had a good time talking with her kids.

I later asked Mary what she had said to the kids to inspire them. She said that she had talked to them about us not being teachers, but just opponents, and they needed to get out there and play like she had taught them. And she would give them each an extra 10 points on the upcoming Biology exam if they beat us. So they did.

I hitched with Mary several times on break between terms to various places in Southern Africa. She had the reputation of being the dream hitch. All you had to do was be standing on the side of the road with Mary and her big blonde hair and great smile, and drivers would cut each other off pulling to the side to pick us up. I once hitched to Durban, South Africa from Swaziland with her, and never once lifted my hand to thumb a ride. We would get out of one ride, and as the car drove away, another car would pull over like magic. It was amazing. She was an intrepid hitching partner.

I walked into the volunteer lounge in the Peace Corps office one day to collect my mail, and found two elderly people, maybe in their 60’s, kicked back on the couch, looking like the only energy they had left was to just go to sleep. They looked like they had been rode hard and put away wet. It kinda worried me how burnt out they looked, so I went over to them and chatted them up, to see if I could help. They turned out to be Mary’s parents, who had flown from Chicago to visit her. She had met them at the airport, and had walked out to the road with them, and proceeded to hitchhike to her school with them. From the way they described it, I was sure that hitchhiking was something that they had never done or even considered before. Then, after not sleeping well from jet lag, that morning they had hitched from her school to the Peace Corps office. They had day packs that looked full. Later that day, they were going to hitchhike to Lesotho, and over the next week, to several other places in southern Africa. I could not even imagine getting my parents to hitch anywhere. Hers were in for the vacation of a lifetime.

I have not heard from Mary in years, but I am sure that wherever she is, there is laughter and joy.

I miss you Mary. You are truly one-of-a-kind.