Wednesday, December 27, 2023
A great spirit, a creative and artistic force, an incredible achiever, a wonderful person. Someone who lived life to the fullest and beyond. My memories of my cousin Jim date back to when I was seven years old and he took me on his paper route, or when, also around that time, the two of us went on a long hike in the Hollow in Rensselaer and he taught me the names of things we saw. I remember when he was a teenager he made a sculpture of a deer’s head out of snow on the side of a tree on Ninth Street that everyone came out of the house in the winter to marvel at. At 16 years old he redesigned and redid the interior of our Grandmother Mae Barrett’s basement apartment at 1024 Second Street so efficiently that a small piece of paneling was the only unused piece. There was a collective dropping of jaws by everyone in the family when they saw what a fabulous job he had done. Years later he lived there while studying architecture at RPI, and I used to visit him and watch as he assembled a model of a house he was designing, listening to him talk about art, music, politics and whatever else. The truth is, when in his presence I was spellbound. To me he knew so much and had such far-reaching talents, able to play guitar and piano, to fly airplanes, to sail boats, to design buildings, to be a loving, decent human being unlike any other. He was a traveler’s traveler. He could talk about anything. He had a superb sense of humor. He did things 99% of the population would never dare, like (many times) drive cross-country, live on his boat, be in an L.A. band, build boats, hand-glide, have a laptop computer before everyone else, and on and on. Every moment I was with him was for me extremely special. Hearing the news of his passing absolutely knocked me to the floor. I’m saddened beyond words. The world has lost someone truly remarkable. My cousin Jim, six years older than me, a man I looked up to and admired and respected and felt inspired by all through my life, since I was a little kid right up till now and certainly into the future. He will be sorely missed by all of us, but he will surely live on inside of us in our memories and how we live our lives, especially, like the explorer and artist and musician and craftsman and mariner and birdman and builder himself, in our striving for the adventure that’s out there and being the person we each work and hope to be. Farewell, my favorite cousin – you went too soon. --- Eddie D.
