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Hey Bob! Look who has come visiting. So many friends and family members . . . and they’ve come to celebrate your active and joyful life and remember their special moments with you.

But first, I want to remember with you, those days when, before all these folks came into our lives and it was — just us. You remember . . . we were students at Columbia University in New York City. One day in early fall we met casually and took a table in the cafeteria of International House to have coffee and a cigarette and to watch Fidel Castro give a lengthy television speech at the United Nations. We talked and talked, not paying much attention to the speech, and when it was over, we left as a couple.

We didn’t know it at the time, but from that day on, our friendship would deepen. We went to the Gateway Bar on Broadway with Tony and Margy and called ourselves the Gateway Four, we socialized with Malind, Lila and Rohit from India, and Hiro from Japan; we sat in a car along the river and watched the signs blinking along the New Jersey skyline and on the George Washington Bridge. We drove to my parents' house through a snow storm with no windshield wipers, we went to Broadway shows and sat in the last row so high up we could barely see the stage. It didn’t matter.

When I finished my courses, we told our parents that we were going to get married. And when they began to plan elaborate wedding ceremonies, we — just us — and Tony and Margy — went to Paterson, New Jersey and were married by Judge Alfano. Oh my! That didn’t go over so well with the in-laws, did it? So we left town in that French Peugeot of which you were so proud. Remember that car? We drove cross-country to Berkeley, California with our belongings on the roof. We found an apartment that had a view of the Oakland Bay Bridge and I taught in Oakland and you opened a real estate office in Hayward. I came to love California but was so homesick for the East Coast.

So when Washington called you to the New Frontier of John F. Kennedy, we moved East and brought along our first family member, our aloof but animated gray kitty. We settled first in Virginia and then in Maryland to accommodate your reentrance into the real estate world. Politics and government service were always on your mind, but we needed money to live and knew that we would shortly have a family to support.

And we did. Over the years, we were surrounded by our growing family of three children, our spirited dogs, big and little, and two grandchildren. Yet we never stopped being Bob and Adrienne, just the two of us — as we were on your last day, alone in the house together, when your body failed you, but left me your spirit. We celebrated together 50 years and I am now the guardian of our special memories.

Others may know you, but not like I do when it was just us . . . the two of us . . . together.

Eulogy for my husband

Joel Robert Cannon

January 14, 1935 - May 2, 2012

Painting: Chez Mouquin, 1905, William J. Glackens. Oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago. Wikimedia Commons

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