As we stood watching the printer spew out the many pages of the obituary story about Oyster Bay-born Marie Colvin, we wondered if we had written too much.
We began the process of seeing what could be eliminated, shortened, and made more concise. Yet, is that what to do with a story of a woman of such distinction? Not really. She deserves a book, not a mention.
Her mother, Rosemary Colvin said on Wednesday night that Marie’s closest friend growing up in her teens was Jerelyn Hanrahan, the artist who just completed her “Pearls of Oyster Bay” that were exhibited at Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Park around Oyster Festival time. “They were two crazy girls,” growing up, said Rosemary. Jerelyn attended St. Dominic’s and Marie attended Oyster Bay High School but somehow they connected.
To go on and do something in this world takes a certain amount of “devil may care.” We’ve seen it in Jerelyn as she worked to create her masterpiece, and we’ve seen it in Marie in how she focused on the story she was going to tell and didn’t dwell on the problems getting it.
Rosemary answered a reporter’s question on how her daughter got that way and Rosemary said, “She was born that way.”
Visiting websites we’ve learned more about Marie. She was helpful to younger journalists and shared her knowledge of how to survive as a journalist – of how to walk on streets where snipers had control. She also wrote her last piece and sent it out into the blog-a-sphere asking anyone who found it to print it – something she said she would never do – but the Internet was being blocked and she couldn’t tell if her story was getting out to the London Sunday Times.
It did get out and was printed by the London Times and is accessible on the Web.
Where are we going with this? We just want to congratulate those people who stand out from the crowd and stay focused on what they want to do. We especially congratulate Ms. Colvin for having chosen such a valiant battle to join – one that helped so many people.
Let’s hope the world comes to its senses soon and makes art – not war. Beloved Enterprise Pilot journalist, the late Renata Maimone once wrote about a town in Poland she visited on holiday that had been the center of warfare so many times, and re-built so many times, the residents just walked away from it. The land, and what was left of it, simply wasn’t worth fighting for one more time.
Hopefully the world will realize the actual cost of war is just total destruction of what they are fighting for and find a better way to come to the end we all strive for – which is peace and not a piece of property.
– DFK
